Second quarter

Here we are, already a quarter of the way through the year 2020. A time that would normally be spent looking forward to brighter days ahead has us instead in the middle of a global pandemic. This leaves my health anxiety all over the place.

About a year ago, I had first reached out to a counselor to talk through my feelings around health related anxiety. I actually spoke to two different counselors since the first one switched jobs after a few sessions. The counseling was quite helpful, at least with the first person I saw. The counselor I saw after her left me with mixed feelings. I only had one session with her, where she told me that she felt like I already had a good understanding of the underlying reasons for my anxiety, and seemed to be able to work through it quite well with all the tools I had implemented. I mentioned that the fact that we were getting into summer helped with that, since a many of my recent triggers had happened during the fall and winter. Summer also helped with us being out of the flu season and regularly swimming which does wonders for my physical and mental health. She suggested that I focus on the fact that it was still summer and not think about fall just yet. I didn't go back to her, so I am not sure what her suggestion would have been next. Maybe she was right after all that I had some sort of a handle on it.

When we were getting into September, I made a mental note to "extend" summer in my mind, and then set myself small targets (getting through November, getting up to the holidays, getting through the holidays, and so on). I also made a few changes in my lifestyle, diet and childcare plans, all of which I feel were for the better. We are now in April when things should have eased up, but instead the tensions are dialed all the way up.

So how do I reconcile all of this? I know I cannot continue to live in high anxiety mode all year long. I also know that during this crisis in the world, almost everyone else is living in this state of worry that I have been in all along (many much more severe than me). The awareness that there is a connection between our thoughts, feelings and behaviors motivates me to work on my mental state. The knowledge that stress suppresses our immune systems (not that we need yet another reason to say "No" to stress) is relevant as well. What I found helpful is to draw a mental line between things we can control and things we cannot control.

I would like to spend less time worrying about others' social distancing, for example. We have detailed discussions with our friends and family and it looks like we are mostly on the same page. I would like to be aware of the latest guidance and news about the pandemic. But I also want to unplug from it and work on what we can do. I want to focus on ways to improve our home life and how we take care of the kids, the time we spend with them, and improve upon our strategy of how we work. These are all no-brainers, yeah. But I have a few specific ideas on how to do them.

I have a pit in my stomach feeling that just a few weeks ago, in my post on pandemic planning, I had written about the advice regarding masks and was also worried about the effect of the virus on children, and now both of these issues are coming up again. It is such a worrisome time that to an extent, we have to accept the worrying as inevitable.

Day by day is how we plan to go on. Some of my goals at the moment:

- focus on work and pick up the pace of learning, get a few tasks checked off
- focus on reading to my toddler and teaching him to speak and express himself
- focus on some sort of learning activities for my daughter who is eager and willing to learn
- spend time on online grocery shopping and trying to get a delivery window if possible
- get into a better schedule of swapping shifts with my husband so we make the most of our most productive hours of the day
- pick up something new to read
- figure out the media gallery in my WordPress site

With that, I'll go off to do my daily yoga - an evening session today as I begin Yoga with Adriene's Nurture series for the month of April.