Column: Dealing with anxiety during a pandemic

At my annual physical, I told the nurse practitioner who is my primary care provider that I was doing surprisingly well dealing with my anxiety during the pandemic.

She didn’t bat an eye. She’d heard it from other patients, and theorized that people like me are more used to dealing with fear and uncertainty that others.

Or as a man interviewed on National Public Radio on this very topic said, “I feel like I’ve been preparing for this my whole life.”

Well, I’ve been an anxious person my whole life. I think it’s a learned behavior; my mother was also anxious. For this reason, I have always believed it can be unlearned. To a certain extent.

So I have practiced meditation, yoga and mindfulness. I spent quite a few years reading about Eastern religions and philosophies like Zen Buddhism and the Tao. I’ve undergone therapy. At times, I’ve taken medication. I walk every day.

One thing I’ve known for a long time is that anxious people are good in a crisis. We are anxious about the future. We worry about things that may never happen. But when a loved one falls ill we are able to think clearly. We’ve gone over various horrible scenarios in our heads a million times.

I can wake up at 3 a.m. thinking of a situation I have to deal with at work and come up with 15 worst-case scenarios.

However, when my dog, Martha, threw up the other night and then pitched herself into a panic attack, I remained calm. When soothing music and the Thunder Shirt didn’t work, I said to my husband, Paul, “Let’s put her in the car and drive.” This had worked in the past and it did this time too.

At the outset of the pandemic, I had some very dark thoughts. It was mega-worst-case scenario time. Paul and I were going to get sick. We’d have to quarantine. How would we take care of Martha and the cats? Suppose this pandemic never ended? What if it led to civil unrest?

But I know how to take care of this particular demon. A worst-case scenario is just that. So stop your racing mind and think, what is the best-case scenario? And how about the likely scenario? Hopefully, we will get through this without getting sick. That also happens to be the likely scenario, since Paul and I wear masks in public, maintain a safe distance from others and keep our hands clean.

I remind myself of an old saying that I encountered in my spiritual readings, “If you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras.” I know I’m not the only one who sneezes and thinks, “Oh, no, it’s the Covid!” But it’s much more likely I sneeze because I’m allergic to grass and dust (horses) than because of the coronavirus, which despite widespread community transmission in Maine is still a zebra if you are following the CDC protocols.

Living in such a stressful period involving a pandemic, a tumultuous presidential election, racial unrest and economic distress is definitely anxiety producing for all of us. When “life happens” at the same time, it can feel overwhelming. We had to let our ailing, 14-year-old chocolate lab, Aquinnah, go just before the pandemic broke loose in Maine. A loved one was diagnosed with cancer in the summer. I’m an essential worker—a school librarian. School is safe because everyone is following the rules. But following the rules comes at the price of social isolation, even if there are some 300 people in my building at any one time.

I have found that I have little energy to worry in my usual way—about what might happen. I am too busy dealing with the everyday realities. My mind is so overwhelmed with the way we live now that it sometimes refuses to speculate on the future.

Some anxious people might be doing better than expected in the pandemic because of what a recent article in The Guardian called “lockdown relief.” During the shutdown, I did feel life had slowed down considerably, and that was a good thing. Even now that I am back at work, the feeling persists. I go to work, shop for groceries and go home. On the weekends I try to do a day trip with Paul on one day and grocery shop and take a walk on the other. There is plenty of down time. It helps.

As the article says, “More time with pets and loved ones, home cooking, and not having to deal with the overstimulation of life in the outside world have led to a greater sense of general well-being.”

Recently I was talking to a colleague who’d had a rough day of it with technology glitches. “Luckily, the kids are so good,” she said. Then she added, “I wonder if this will continue when things are back to normal?”

Let’s hope that whatever lessons we have learned about dealing with uncertainty, facing life’s challenges gracefully and keeping calm in the middle of a crisis stay with us. If they can see us through this, they can see us through anything.