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Stay Calm and flatten the curve

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Table of Contents: Wellness

Focus on Here & Now

MINDFULNESS What COVID-19 Can Teach Us About Mindfulness The power of presence in the face of uncertainty.
Excerpts:
Planning mindfully for the future by staying in the present moment
"Helps you to make good decisions now to better prepare for future uncertainties. If your mind begins catastrophizing about your uncertain future, bring it back to the present, to what you are doing in the moment, to your breath, and to your thoughtful planning."
Shifting your attention from “me to we” will help you immeasurably.
If you are healthy and relatively secure, focus on what you can do for others to relieve not just their imagined dread, but their very real hardships. This might mean bringing food and essentials to leave outside the door of sick, elderly, or immune-compromised neighbors or calling people to connect during this time of social isolation.

App for that

Popular meditation apps Calm and Headspace have both released free digital offerings to help the public cope with anxiety and panic. Calm has created an online hub with content including sleep stories, meditations, music and mindful movement. They also plan to livestream anxiety-reducing meditations.

RAIN to Recognize, Allow, Investigate, and Nurture

READ: “Our calm is contagious”

Interview Excerpt:

Tara Brach:

Yes, I use the acronym because It’s an easy-to-remember handle if you’re getting caught in fear. It stands for recognize, allow, investigate, nurture. [SS: You can listen to a guided RAIN meditation here.]

First, just recognize, “Okay, I’m feeling fear.” Mentally whisper it, and that helps right away.

Then allow it. Just let it be there, don’t try to run away or fix it or control it or judge it.

Then investigate it. Begin to come into the body and just feel where the fear is in the body. Find out how it feels and breathe with it, with a gentle quality of attention.

And then nurture. You might just put your hand on your heart and offer a kind or soothing message to yourself. You can say to the fear, “Thank you for trying to protect me; it’s okay.” I sometimes will say to myself, “It’s okay, sweetheart.”

Sigal Samuel: I’m curious about the “recognize” part, this idea that when you can name a fear, it loses some of its power over you. What is it about that mental notation that changes the activity in the brain?

Tara Brach: When we’re in fight-flight-freeze mode, our limbic system has basically hijacked us, and we lose contact with our prefrontal cortex, the most recently evolved part of our brain, which has to do with executive functioning and making good decisions. When we name what’s going on, we start to activate the prefrontal cortex. Mindfulness reconnects us with that.