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What you may not yet know about the famous pandemic fatigue
Psychology
Covid-19 and emotions have something in common: they are invisible and highly contagious
Spring, summer, autumn, and winter. Every year we live and assume the arrival of the different seasons of the year because we have grown with it. It is something that we do not think is different even if we have a preference for a specific station. Thus, when the season that we least like arrives we usually welcome it with more or less complaint, but in the end we always say to ourselves “it’s what there is and it will pass!” and we try to continue our life normally. Something similar happens with the pandemic, according to the psychologist and doctor in Neuroscience, Ana Asensio, because these circumstances of limitación, riesgo for health, of confinement, curfew or economic problems We don’t like them and we also welcome them with more or less complaint. But, unlike what happens with the seasons (whose beginning and end dates we know), what happens to us with the pandemic is that our brain has begun to believe that this will not end. And that, added to fatigue, is what generates that pandemic fatigue and that depressive attitude that we are observing both in the environment and in ourselves.
This feeling is a normal state, as revealed by the creator of the project ‘Lives in positive’, since we are in a non-expansive contractive moment, despite our resistance to contraction that manifests itself through our expectations, our illusions, our desire for change, our desire to start, our desire to make plans, the desire to have good news or the desire to feel alive as before.
Installed in the “Mine is worse!”
Many people are going through some of the most difficult times of their lives. Whatever you speak to, it gives the feeling that anyone has their own particular misfortune or, if they are not experiencing it in the first person, they know of several cases of other close people who are having a worse time than ever. We seem installed in the “Well, come on than me!” Or in the “mine is worse” and, although it may be disheartening to think that there is a tendency to indulge in bad What is happening? The psychologist explains that it is a logical behavior if we take into account the harsh context in which we are living. “We come from a difficult, unprecedented year, in which we have experienced many changes, many restrictions, many penalties and a lot of uncertainty. And all this accumulates stress in our body and leaves the emotions altered, “he reveals.
I Accept what there is, to surrender healthily and open up to all changes is his proposal to redirect us in this context. It is the moment, as Asensio proposes, to Live the present and not make medium-term plans, to have the open mind and open up to new possibilities instead of seeking the inertia of wanting to go back to the usual, of help with tools and strategies to maintain the Mental balance instead of fighting against circumstances and emotions; and from becoming owners of our attitude instead of punishing and lamenting ourselves.
For this, the expert invites you to train your thoughts and attitude, orienting them towards three paths: self care, hope and patience; at the same time that he proposes to lower the alert and stop venturing what the new disaster that the future holds will be, because that will only feed the restlessness and fatigue. «It is important to settle in the thought that, although we do not know when, this will happen. And in the meantime we must appreciate that we are taking advantage of these moments to unite more with ours, even virtually, to rest from social life, to be more in contact with ourselves and to rethink things in our lives that were pending. And those are gifts of life that nobody will take away from us, “he argues.
In addition, the creator of the project ‘Positive Lives’ recalls that, as a social species that we are, we we spread much of what happens to the next door and what the majority does. That is why he proposes to face pandemic fatigue taking as a mantra the belief of the “This too shall pass”. On the one hand, he recommends investing in oneself, in your well-being and your health and, on the other, he advises to recover energy with music, beautiful memories, movement and inner peace.
The contagion effect in the work environment
The role of leadership in business has become complicated and challenging due to the dreaded emotional contagion. According to José García Altares, a psychologist at TherapyChat, it is impossible not to communicate emotions and, furthermore, not to spread them. “If our goal is not to transmit to our team our own pandemic fatigue by continuing to telework, we must recognize the emotions that the pandemic causes us and work to reduce the external expression of that emotion to avoid that contagion.”
Some of the guidelines that can be applied in the work environment are: identifying and labeling emotions, observing and defining those emotions (naming them, marking their intensity and analyzing what body sensations it produces or what body language we develop with them and what side effects causes us and our environment), prepare an emotion diary (explaining what motivates us to feel that emotion, what it communicates to others and what it communicates to myself) and work on the emotion (a good strategy can be the opposite action , that is, act in the opposite way to your emotional impulses if the emotion is not effective).