Your Mental Health and the quarantine

The current pandemic is taking up a lot of space cognitively and emotionally in your head. Even if you are unaware that your brain is attending to this situation and worrying about it, it is. This is natural given the enormity of it all. This will also impact how much energy you have, how much you are able to focus and motivate yourself to get things done.

This is not a sign of your laziness or some flaw in your character. To some extent, most of us are operating in survival mode right now. So please, cut yourself a little slack. Practice some self-compassion.

Berating yourself or being hard on yourself will not help you achieve what you want. You are simply more likely to feel worse about yourself. And sometimes when we feel worse about ourselves, we get into what the recovery world calls ‘the fuck its.’ This is a mindset where you have decided you are already screwed so you might as well give up, do that unhealthy thing you’ve been avoiding, etc.

Self-compassion is not about pity or laziness, it is about holding space for the fact that you might be struggling right now. It is about understanding why you are struggling and looking for ways to get the support you need.

And on a side note, this struggle that we are all sharing in right now. This is how folks with mental illness feel most days, this is the struggle they often face being in survival mode. So just as I have asked you to practice some self-compassion, please practice compassion towards others once we get on the other side of this crisis.

Let’s continue to stay safe and take care of each other.