today we're going to be talking about covet anxiety
and one technique you can try if you're experiencing excessive anxiety about covid
hi everyone in today's video we're going to be talking about covid related anxiety and one tip or
one technique and tool that you can use if you're finding that you're experiencing excessive or
difficult control anxiety around covid but before i get into that just a couple of disclaimers to go
over i'm a registered psychologist in the province of british columbia canada and this video is for
informational purposes only it is not intended as a substitute or replacement for advice from your
doctor or mental health professional now with those things out of the way let's start talking
about covet anxiety now one of the things that the covet pandemic has done is that it's really
disrupted our sense of safety and security in the world how do we evaluate what's safe now because
people are dangerous uh shopping is dangerous being around groups of people are dangerous
sniffles and cold symptoms are dangerous uh the covet pandemic has really disrupted our
sense of safety and security and has led to what we used to view as being perfectly safe
now being highly dangerous and highly risky and that's one of the things that's happened
is that our understanding of risk and threat has been skewed by the pandemic and what can happen
with excessive anxiety around kovid is that we can tend to overestimate the risk or the danger
associated with kovid and this has led to a lot of anxiety for people a lot of anxiety about not just
getting kovid but also transmitting kovid to other people and so i've seen both of these happen where
i've seen people are really afraid for themselves uh that they might experience or they might
contract kovid but also real concerns about transmitting kovid to a loved one
and inadvertently making other people sick so the question is how do we manage how do we manage
this anxiety if if we're experiencing excessive difficult to control anxiety about covet what can
we do about it and so what i'm going to be talking about in today's video is one cognitive tool that
can help with this covet anxiety and it relates to something called probability estimations and
really what probability estimations are is they help us develop a better understanding
of the actual risk and allows us to evaluate or determine to what extent our perception of risk is
reasonable or real and to what extent our perception of risk is dangerous or excessive
now the key thing i want to point out here is that this is not to say that kovitch should be
taken lightly this is not to say that people shouldn't be anxious or shouldn't be concerned
about contracting kovid shouldn't be concerned about spreading it to other people so this isn't
about saying you shouldn't be anxious about kovitt but really what we're talking about in this video
is more about excessive anxiety and how to determine uh if you're experiencing
excessive or unreasonable levels of anxiety and if you are what you might be able to do
about it so i had a really good example uh of some this type of covet anxiety that we're
talking about with a client that i was working with a few months ago and this client was really
anxious and afraid to go to his workplace despite the fact that he had had his first vaccine shot
and his real concern was that he was going to go to the office he was going to be in the office
and that he was going to contract covet and bring it home and infect his children so we started
talking about his anxiety and we talked we started talking about probability estimates and how
he can try to be thinking about the risk or trying to determine whether or not his perception of risk
was accurate so with probability estimates there's a few steps and the first step is to determine
the actual fear that the person is worried about what is it that you're actually afraid is going to
happen now in the case of my client he started out by saying well his his big concern was that he was
going to contract kovit at work at the office and bring it home and that his children would get it
but then i asked them the question okay well are you concerned that your children will
get covet and have relatively mild symptoms or be relatively asymptomatic and
and they clarify no that wasn't his concern his concern was that his children were going to get
really sick or die if he were to go to the workplace contract covid and bring it home
so that's the first step in probability estimates is to determine and clarify what exactly the
actual fear is so once you have that fear once you know exactly what it is that you're afraid of
i always like to ask people okay what's the likelihood give me a prediction of the
percentage likelihood that this feared outcome this terrible outcome would actually take
place and i always ask for a very conservative estimate give me the most conservative estimate
you can give in my client's case he predicted that there was a five percent chance that if he
were to go to the office he would contract covet bring it home his children would get sick and
they'd get really sick and potentially die so that was his prediction that was his um
probability estimate of the likelihood that this could happen
so once we have that probability estimate once we have that prediction the next step
is to think about all of the events and all of the things that would need to take place
for that feared outcome to happen and for each of these steps to think about the individual
percentages that each of these steps uh the likelihood of each of these steps and when i talk
with my clients about this i always ask them with these individual percentages to be very liberal
in terms of uh determining what their percentage is so um if they're thinking it could be anywhere
from 10 to 20 always tell them lean on the side of being more liberal in other words
uh the likelihood of this happening is more likely than not so if it's 10 to 20 let's pick 20
so i got my client to think about all of the steps that would need to happen for that feared
outcome to occur so one thing that would happen is that he'd have to be at work in his office
and that someone would come into his office and start talking to him
and so at his office they have rules about you know try to limit interactions with other people
as much as possible unless you need to for work um but he said he's got a pretty chatty
office or a few chatty office mates and so he estimated that it was a 75
chance that uh a coworker would come into his office and start talking to him and so
the next step the next thing that would have to happen is that the person uh would not be wearing
a mask or would not be physically distant or would stay in the office for a really long time and be
talking at my client and not pick up on my clients discomfort about how long this conversation was
going or how close the person was to my client so my client's prediction of that happening was
about 15 so the office has rules but you know there's a few people that might break those rules
so what would be the next thing that would happen well the person would have to be infected
with covid but asymptomatic i mean presumably the person's not showing up to the workplace
uh openly symptomatic with covid symptoms like coughing or having difficulty breathing or fever
um so the person would have to be asymptomatic but they would have to be infected with covid
and so my client estimated that this was five percent the next thing that would have to happen
is this co-worker's talking to my client uh and the co-worker is shedding covet virus and that
my client would have to inhale or breathe in some of that covet virus and so my client's estimate
was that this was an 80 percent likelihood that would happen if the cl if the co-worker was there
if the co-worker was infected uh and they were breathing in the office my client there's an 80
chance my client would breathe in the cofit virus then the next thing that would have to happen is
that my client would have to become infected with covet now for this estimate we actually had some
data to go by and the research that shows that after one uh shot of the vaccine that a person
has about 80 percent protection 80 likelihood that if they're exposed to covet uh that they won't
get infected and so my client had had his shot a number of weeks earlier and so uh his likelihood
the probability that he would become infected in this scenario he was able to determine would be 20
so the next thing that would have to happen is that my client would have to go home and infect
his children with covid and so he predicted that if all these steps were to happen it would be a
hundred percent likelihood that he would infect his children with covet that there was no chance
that if he got it if he was infected with it there was no probability that he wouldn't be
passing it on to his children and so again we're going with very liberal estimates so i'm i don't
argue with the clients this isn't about trying to determine whether or not these probabilities are
reasonable or excessive it's just i want the client to be as liberal as possible so if he
believed if he felt that it was 100 likelihood then all then that's fine 100 likelihood it is
and so then the last thing that would have to happen is that his children would have to become
extremely sick or die or have long-term effects of getting covet from their dad
and so his prediction of this happening is that it would be a five percent likelihood
that that would occur again not arguing the probabilities or what the statistics say
that's how we felt so it's a five percent likelihood
so now we have this list we have this list of all of the things that would have to happen
and probabilities of each of those steps happening now the key point to understand is that every
single one of those things must happen in order for the feared outcome to occur so for example
if the co-worker doesn't happen to have covet or isn't infected with covid the feared outcome
isn't going to happen if the co-worker doesn't enter my client's office the feared outcome isn't
going to happen if my client doesn't inhale the covet virus the feared outcome will not happen so
every single one of those steps must take place in order for that catastrophic feared outcome to
occur and so the way to calculate the percentage is to multiply all of these percentages together
to determine what the cumulative percentage or the actual likelihood would be and in this case
with my client the cumulative percentage of all of these things happening
was point zero zero four five of one percent or less than 1 in 20 000.
so um that's the cumulative percentage that's cumulative likelihood and so what we do then is
then compare what this cumulative percentage is to what the predicted percentage was so remember
my client predicted that the likelihood of him going to work getting infected and coming home and
bringing that infection home to his children and making them really sicker than potentially dying
he predicted that it was a 5 chance which is 1 in 20 but when we looked at these cumulative
percentages the actual percentage of based on his prediction of all of these things happening
was point zero zero four five of one percent which is less than one in twenty thousand
and so what this means is that my client was overestimating the likelihood
of the bad thing happening by over a thousand times so he was viewing more threat than was
actually there he was overestimating the threat by over a thousand and so by doing this probability
estimate what he's able to recognize is that his fear was excessive so um at a 1 in 20 chance
a 95 or a 5 chance of him bringing cove at home and making his children really sick or them dying
that's a really dangerous risk and that and then in that scenario it makes a lot of sense
for my client to be avoiding the office because
a 1 in 20 chance is that's a fair likelihood that it could happen but at a less than 1 in 20 000
chance then it doesn't seem to make as much sense for my client to be avoiding
the office because it's not nearly as dangerous as he anticipated or thought it actually was
and so by doing this probability estimate what you can do is to get a sense of whether or not
your fears are reasonable and in the case of my client he was able to recognize that his
fears weren't reasonable reasonable his fears about covet were excessive or disproportionate
to what was actually going on now this is only the first step so once he was able to recognize that
then he felt a little bit less anxious he saw a little bit less fear or
threat associated with going to work and that allowed him to then engage in exposure exposure
to the office and so we were able to get him to start slowly working his way back into
going to the office and what he found was that as he was going to the office more he was getting
less and less anxious about going to the office but interestingly enough he also recognized
that a lot of his predictions about what was going to happen if he was at the office weren't really
coming true either so co-workers weren't stopping by his office a lot unmasked ignoring physical
distancing rules talking at him um there weren't uh outbreaks at work there weren't a lot of people
who were coming to work who were getting tested or testing positive for covet so he was able to
to start returning to work because he'd done these probability estimates and by going to
work and doing exposure his anxiety gradually went down and so within a month or two he was feeling
a lot less anxious about coven and was feeling a lot more comfortable at the office so this is
how you can use probability estimates to determine whether or not your level of anxiety about kovid
is reasonable or realistic or if it's excessive or disproportionate and if it's disproportionate
what you can then do is maybe start engaging in some of those activities that you might be
avoiding because you perceive that they're more risky or more dangerous than they actually are
so i hope that makes sense i would love to hear your thoughts and ideas about this so please leave
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