It started about two weeks ago, and now you can’t escape it.
What began with hushes and whispers -- the occasional ominous news article or TV sound
byte -- has now escalated to full-blown panic about the global pandemic that’s swept the
globe, and it’s crept into every facet of life.
You can’t hug anyone without worrying that he or she might be a carrier.
And overseas, the situafotion is even worse.
Police are out in the streets, pressing people on what they’re doing and where they’re
going.
While you couldn’t even stand within three feet of your roommates anyway for fear of
catching this, one day you wake up, and they’re all gone -- back home with their families
to ride out the duration of the mandatory quarantine.
It would’ve been nice having them around, even if you couldn’t touch at least you’d
have someone to talk to.
But what do you do to cope now that you’re on your own and have to deal with this situation
all by yourself?
It’s tempting to grab your phone, lay in bed and scroll through Instagram or Facebook
all day, but the mental overload those will inevitably cause might make the situation
worse, so in between FaceTime calls with your family and in the silence of your now deserted
house, you’re going to need some other strategies.
The first thing that’s recommended is to stay calm.
As you come to terms with the totality of this dire situation, your fight or flight
stress response is going to kick in -- and likely at full blast, so it can be helpful
to recognize the weird sensations you’re feeling as being connected ot that natural
process.
One of the first telltale signs is that your skin might start to feel cooler and even go
pale as blood is being sent to its extremities -- like your arms, legs.
But it could also be rerouted to your shoulders, brain, eyes, ears and nose.
The eyes, ears and nose might seem strange to add to the mix, but it’s just our bodies’
ways of making sure our sense of smell, taste and hearing are all heightened.
This mechanism also pulls blood away from the skin, which would decrease bleeding from
possible cuts and scrapes.
Which makes sense, in the event that this apocalyptic reality gets so weird that you’re
running from your life from a possessed creature, you don’t want to be slowed down by a scraped
knee.
Next, you’ll be able to recognize your body’s increased stress response by immediate sweating,
which is your body’s way of preparing itself for any major actions you might need to take,
so you might feel like you desperately need to drink some water.
Yup.
Science says this is because the gastrointestinal juices -- delightful -- and saliva production
both go down as blood flow to your digestive system is decreased.
So, say you do start to feel that onslaught of panic and recognize that they’re fight
or flight symptoms, what should you do?
We all passively breathe, but now you’re going to have to go a step beyond and channel
that hippie dippy yoga teacher you’ve always found to be extremely pretentious.
You’d always poked fun at her, but what she was teaching during that class will serve
you well.
You recall she stressed the importance of being intentional about your breathing.
First, you’ve got to find a spot where it’s quiet and make your spine all nice and straight.
You could do this sitting at a dining room chair or anywhere else.
It’s best to then fill your abdomen up like a balloon on the inhale, feeling it move into
your rib cage and then upper chest and then letting it out slowly on the exhale, contracting
your ab muscles as you do.
And don’t worry, you’ve got abs under there matter how many bags of Doritos from
your emergency food supply you’ve already torn into.
Experts suggest doing this strategic breathing for five minutes for its soothing effects
to take over your panicked nervous system.
But if you are going to have a freak-out moment -- experts say sometimes the best thing you
can do is to just let yourself feel it.
Give yourself a “worry window.”
This window could just be 15 to 30 minutes during the morning or afternoon -- any time
that’s time set aside for you to scream, pace, yell into the void or into your pillow.
This mechanism of coping looks different for everyone, so you’ve got to find what works
for you.
However, one thing that’s not recommended is doing this right before you go to sleep
because it could wreak havoc on your sleep schedule.
If you’re the journaling type, you could also write down all your worries without putting
any pressure on yourself to fix them.
Putting the mess that’s most likely going through your head at the moment to paper will
be therapeutic in and of itself.
Another thing to be knowledgeable of is that chronically lonely people -- and you’re
going to be getting very lonely during this time -- have higher blood pressure, are more
susceptible to infections and in the long run are even more likely to develop Alzheimer’s
disease and dementia.
You might also eventually feel that your attention, logic and verbal reasoning skills are being
compromised during your time of severe aloneness.
Have you ever gone out after spending a whole weekend alone playing video games and found
that you’ve almost forgotten how to talk?
Why these happen is a bit unclear, but what is known is that because of the cascade of
stress hormones and, thus, inflammation that you’ll be experiencing, social isolation
could equal an extreme immune response.
But that therapeutic breathing we explained earlier will certainly help.
Something else to help you move through this is to become extremely mentally disciplined,
harnessing all your focus on your inner world because suddenly there’s not as much mental
stimulation from the outside world.
The author, Emily Dickinson is one example of a historical figure who showed that this
could not only be done, but be used as a way to enhance one’s creativity and help him
or her to hone their craft.
Dickinson’s name goes hand-in-hand with a reclusive lifestyle.
She spent years living alone in her house in Massachusetts, and it’s not known exactly
why.
Some speculate that it could’ve been because of depression or agoraphobia.
Regardless, she often wrote about how her solitude only helped catapult her soul and
mind, and she’s one of the most lauded writers of our time.
So who knows, this forced isolation might turn out to be the best opportunity you’ve
ever had to let your creative side shine and get started on that epic nine part sci fi
space opera spanning thousands of galaxies and millions of years.
Or you could dabble in poetry.
Your call.
Another great way to maintain your sanity is to make sure you stick to a routine -- meaning
it’d be wisest to wake up at pretty much the same time every day and exercise, journal,
write, sing, hum, or read at the same time each day.
At the same time, there is something to be said for changing your routine up in an effort
to keep your mind sharp.
You might have to change your routine a little bit for the sake of waking up your brain cells,
keeping your mind sharp and coaxing your brain into thinking more creatively, even if whatever
change you make to your routine is just temporary.
Even a small change will encourage your brain’s neuroplasticity -- a fancy way of describing
how well your brain handles change and its ability to reorganize itself when it forms
new connections.
Neuroplasticity has the added benefit of allowing nerve cells to compensate in case of injury
and disease.
Lastly, slightly changing your habits will also force your brain to pay attention to
what you're doing more carefully.
In harnessing all your energy on making sure your mental state is in check and focusing
inward, you could connect back with the Earth in some way.
You could go out for a walk around your neighborhood and sit by a tree or a lake, just make sure
you maintain the recommended distance from other people doing the same thing.
You could take a wipe, sanitize a bench seat and lie down while just feeling the sun, focusing
on its warmth on your skin.
Maybe it’ll conjure up memories of that relaxing cruise you went on a few years ago
before they were floating petri dishes of disease.
Connecting back to nature seemed to work for former British Marine John Slater, who would
voluntarily venture out to a cave on the west coast of Scotland and stay there for up to
four months, seeking an existence so different than what he’d known in his youth, where
he eventually “lost interest in learning how to kill a man using only my thumbs.'”
During these retreats, he’d get out of the cave for just a bit, then rush back as the
tide started to roll in.
Legend has it that he’d sleep with rats crawling all over him, but he remained undisturbed.
In regards to his isolation, he was quoted saying: “There is also a cathedral-like
silence which helps me think.
I’m addicted to harmony... restfulness.
You realize the planet’s breathing, that the same energy moving these stones is moving
your heart.”
Though it seems Slater couldn’t avoid the mental imbalance that all that solitude inevitably
has on a person, because he reportedly wanted to one day impart to the rest of the world
his mystical insights and deep, cave-born wisdom on the world through a hand puppet
friend he’d made and named Muddy the Frog.
Slater isn’t the only person recorded who was curious as to what would happen if they
remained socially isolated.
On March 2, 1956, explorers Josie Laures and Antoine Senni emerged from their caves in
Nice, France they’d voluntarily isolated themselves in -- 88 days for Josie and Senni
was in his for 126.
One of the main effects, noted in The Atlantic article published in 2015, was a complete
disorientation when it came to the passage of time.
It seems to be that the passage of time while in these caves was completely and utterly
warped.
For example, Senni would allegedly sleep for 30 hours at a time and would wake up thinking
he’d just had a short nap.
But the primary reason for these wacky sleep patterns was because of the absence of sunlight
or clocks, which would regulate their sleep cycles, so make sure to take down those blackout
curtains and allow your body’s internal clock to continue operating normally.
Something else we can gather from Laures and Senni’s cave experiment was the importance
of keeping mentally occupied and distracted.
Laures coped by beginning the experiment with reading, but then eventually lost the desire
to.
So now’s the time to dive into that book you never quite got around to finishing.
But if your desire to read begins to taper off, you could listen to music, which was
Laures next move.
And then she kept her hands busy by knitting.
She was quoted saying “I knitted, and knitted some more, and looked forward to the time
when I would finally see the sun.”
So even if your interest in one hobby starts to decline, and it’s likely it will, make
sure you have something new to change over to.
In order to keep your body in the best shape possible during this strange time and season
in your life, you’re going to have to keep moving.
Even if you’ve never worked out a day in your life, now’s the time to get the blood
pumping by moving your limbs.
Experts say exercise can relieve pain in your knees, shoulders, and the other extremities
that can get quite bad when you’re mostly sitting around all day.
You don’t need a fancy yoga mat -- you sure as heck didn’t buy one before the stores
started shutting down.
But you can still work out right where you are.
Try some slow and steady yoga moves, mountain climbers or jogging in place.
There you have it.
Let’s hope you don’t ever find yourselves in a situation where your friends desert you
during a crisis.
But we hope these tips on how to keep your brains in the best shape and how to hopefully
get out of the situation if you were involuntarily cut off from human contact are helpful.
Now go check out how The Infographics Show’s least important writer dealt with their own
brand of isolation in Life Inside Quarantine CHALLENGE!