How to Overcome the Impact of Lockdown

3:00 What is “cabin fever” or “going stir crazy”?

6:05 The loss of comfort and control in our lives

11:54 Why people panic bought toilet paper and hand sanitizer

16:21 What is “cabin fever” or “going stir crazy”

19:10 Tips on dealing with isolation, lockdown, or shelter in place

22:18 Why members of the Church Of Christ are more mentally prepared

28:40 Spiritual guidance

[Lead In]

Martin: The entire world has been in some form of lockdown or social isolation for the past 7-8 months. What started as a couple of weeks at home has now become a challenging mental adjustment to a seemingly unending life under quarantine and social distancing. This is our new normal. And despite some parts of the world starting to open up, the fear, anxiety, and worry of COVID-19, along with the mental impact of staying at home, linger. So how do we get through it?

Let’s have a Heart And Soul conversation.

[Show open]

Martin: Hello everyone, hope you’re all doing ok and are safe at home. Today, I’d like to discuss the impact living in lockdown has had on our mental health. For this, I was able to interview Dr. Darwin Buyson. Dr. Buyson is a clinical psychologist, and we had him last year on a panel discussion about Body Image. For this topic, we discussed the reasons why people struggle with staying at home, what cabin fever is, and what we can do to help ourselves navigate the uncertainty of living in quarantine during a pandemic. Afterwards minister of the gospel, Bro. Donald Pinnock, will join us to expand on what Dr. Darwin and I discussed. 

[Music Transition]

Darwin: The more anxious you become, the more you feel you need to worry. And you end up worrying, thinking, checking, reassuring yourself that everything will be okay. When actually, it’s not okay. The situation is unpredictable, but we keep doing things to escalate our anxiety. And anxiety is the driver of irrational behavior.

[Music Transition]

Darwin: Hi, my name is Dr. Darwin Buyson and I’m calling in from Notting Hill London.

Martin: Hi, Dr. Darwin. Real quick can you just tell us in what field of medicine did you study and are practicing in currently?

Darwin: So I am a qualified clinical psychologist and I work in the field of psychosis. So I work with people who are having a first episode of psychosis.

Martin: Right. And can you tell us a little bit more about, in layman’s terms, what is psychosis? And how does that relate to the everyday life of people?

Darwin: So the main features of psychosis, which is a very serious mental health problem, is people who suffer from what we call delusional beliefs or believing things that aren’t necessarily true, driven by fear. Which is actually quite relevant today.

Martin: Right. Unfortunately, the fear of what’s happening right now and kind of making people question what’s happening around them, affecting them mentally, it’s affecting not just those who have psychosis but the whole world. Can you talk about just the general mental effects of being isolated at home can have on somebody? Are you seeing anything there in the UK where they’re growing concerns that the longer we’re in isolation, the more people are going to get this “ cabin fever”? Start getting a little stir crazy?

Darwin: Oh, yes yes. I think for the first couple of weeks people were, they were taking in their stride. It was all quite new. And people just got on with things and tried to do their best to adapt to this change. It’s that kind of emergency change, we can deal with this. But the longer it goes on, the more realization people have that this is not something that’s just going to end soon. We don’t know what’s going to happen. There’s a lot of uncertainty around.

Martin: Right.

Darwin: And human beings just don’t cope well with uncertainty. Our whole lives are designed to reduce uncertainty. Our nine to five working schedules, our shifts, our eating at particular times, going to bed at particular times. We like predictability. Now we’re in a situation where there is no predictability or there’s very little predictability. And all the frameworks that were there to provide some predictability are now gone. So people are not working or working from home. So that’s a huge struggle for people to implement their own kind of schedules or timetables.

Martin: Right, right. Because they’re not used to living life that way.

Darwin: No, it’s usually done for us.

Martin: Right, right. Can you speak a little bit about that? I’ve been reading articles and someone just talked about how we’ve just been so comfortable. But because we’ve become such creatures of comfort, where nothing really would prevent us from doing whatever we want. To now not being able to do anything really, outside of just getting essential goods. Can you talk a little bit about that? How maybe— is there some truth to that, that we were a little bit too comfortable? That because everything was done for us, not only our schedule, but just anything that we need—the convenience of anything and everything was out there and now most of that is gone.

Darwin: Yes, absolutely. I think that, to varying degrees, this kind of comfort gave us a sense of control.

Martin: Right.

Darwin: And again, it’s on the same lines as predictability. The feeling of being in control is quite reassuring. We were comfortable with knowing that we can do what we want when we want. But now this uncertainty has kind of thrown that idea of being in control out the window. And that’s causing a lot of fear, a lot of anxiety in people. And when we don’t know or when we’re not in control the usual first, first thing is we need to know. We need to find out what’s going on here.

Martin: Right.

Darwin: We need to get some feeling of certainty back. You see that in the behavior of people that you know, they’re constantly checking the news, they’re constantly checking social media, they need to know. Trying to grasp something that they can hold on to. But the reality is, no one really knows.

Martin: Right. I actually spoke to another doctor in California. He’s a GP (General Practitioner) and I asked him well, we don’t know when this is going to end. We don’t know how soon it’s going to get better, if it’s going to get better anytime soon. What have you been saying to your patients and he said, he tried to be honest with them. That the sooner we accept that we’re in a bad situation, the more we can move forward with that understanding that we can’t control that we’re in a bad situation. We just have to accept that it’s a bad situation and try and move forward.

Darwin: Absolutely. I couldn’t agree more with that. And that’s something, that concept of acceptance is very difficult. Because usually we’re now conditioned that if we don’t like something, we just do something about it. We change it. We don’t like being uncertain we’ll change. We don’t like the job that we’re in, we’ll find a new one. We don’t have (many choices) now.

Martin: Right. It’s like you don’t want to stay at home, I’ll just go out. Oh, you don’t like where you went there, I’ll go somewhere else next time. And now you don’t have (many) of those options.

Darwin: You don’t have (many) those options. So, it highlights or emphasizes what was probably already true is that we have very little control over our day to day life and how fragile our control is.

Martin: Right, right.

Darwin: But we’re so not used to accepting that.

Martin: Why do you think that is? Now that we’re all—we don’t have a choice, we have to accept that we have to be on lock down, what is that mental barrier? That is the kind of—I’m sure it’s different for everybody, but in general terms. Why is it hard for us to accept that right now is not a good situation, and that we don’t know when it’s going to get better.

Darwin: I think from a psychological perspective, I think what drives people to find it difficult to accept is because it’s easier to give yourself the idea that you can do something about it. And I’ll elaborate on that. For example, if we’re scared, we tend to worry. Yeah, worry, in that sense is a behavior. We’re scared, we worry. And we think when we ask people, why do they worry? A lot of them answer well, because I want to be prepared.

Martin: Right.

Darwin: I want to know what I might need to do if what I’m worrying about happens, if the worst case scenario happens. That’s reasonable, but the unintended consequences by worrying about the worst case scenario, you make yourself feel anxious.

Martin: Right

Darwin: The more a