Mental Health During a Pandemic: Build Positive Emotional States
Image of sunrise over hills Photo by Jordan Wozniak on Unsplash
How can you become more resilient during a crisis?
As I write this post, we are all grappling with many unknowns, ongoing health and financial stressors, and the general disruption that has occurred to everyone. This can easily lead to challenging emotions including anxiety and sadness.
Our brains are wired to pay attention to the negative things going on around us and gloss over positive experiences. This serves us well from an evolutionary perspective: paying attention to what is potentially dangerous helps us survive. Right now, for many people, there is a lot of negativity to focus on.
The challenge of this is that it keeps us in an overwhelmed and exhausted state and diminishes our ability to be creative and problem solve, tools that are very helpful right now. It can become harder and harder to cope with what’s actually going on around us when our nervous systems are constantly engaged and we feel like we are always struggling. Not to mention, because we are wired to focus on the negative, it’s easy to miss out on the good that still exists in the world.
Build positive emotional states
A major premise of working with trauma or any kind of challenging experience is that before you can really work with anything difficult, you need to build capacity to stay grounded and calm, to access a positive emotional state. This is intuitive if you think about it. Before you do something that makes you uncomfortable, you might find yourself taking a deep breath to calm yourself. If we take this a step further, in order to navigate the current crisis we’re living in, to become resilient and thrive, we need to take some time to find a grounded place and access feelings like calm, joy, and happiness.
How to build positive emotional resources
There are plenty of things happening right now that will activate neural networks in your brain related to painful experiences. It isn’t hard to activate the part of your brain that can feel anxious or sad or disappointed.
You can, however, also activate neural networks in your brain that help you feel joy, contentment, spaciousness, peace or happiness. You can then spend some time savoring these experiences to build and strengthen them. You can make these neural networks more robust and easier to access.
Take a moment to bring your attention to something that feels positive for you. It could be bringing up an image of a place that is peaceful for you, or bringing to mind someone very special to you whom you feel at ease or happy around. You could also bring up a happy memory from your past.
The next thing is to savor this experience and stay with it for a bit. You can engage your neural networks by using your imagination. If you’re choosing a peaceful place or someone special or a happy memory, use your imagination and your mind’s eye to explore a bit. What’s it feel like to be in this image? How does it register with your senses? Where do you feel it in your body? As you do this, take a few deep breaths to anchor this experience in and reinforce it.
Check in with yourself. What do you notice? Taking some time to focus on positive experiences, images and memories can help create shifts that build resilience. This can move you into a better headspace for facing what’s going on in your life.
What will building positive emotional states do for you?
Focusing on building positive emotional states isn’t about pretending things aren’t challenging right now. They are. It’s about creating some space and building resilience so that you can be more effective at handling what’s going on around you. Just as there are neural networks built around negative experiences that can serve to protect you, there are neural networks that can build resilience as well. The more resilient you feel, the better able you’ll be to effectively face what life is throwing your way.