How to Heal The Anxiety Pandemic and Nurture Our Mental Recovery
To heal from the pandemic anxiety, we need to nurture the green shoots of our mental recovery. Drastic changes to living conditions, social distancing and travel restrictions impacted our mental and personal freedom, our economic stability but the News is constantly bleeding what seems to sell newspapers and TV programmes- 95% of all news in the next 24 hours is bad news. Is it time for the old “if it bleeds, it leads” to be left out of newsrooms and replaced with a greater emphasis on exercising more compassion and empathy? It is time to look into the severity of the actual implications of an outdated phrase.
No study has yet examined the presence of psychiatric symptoms in the UK population under similar conditions. In this article we look at the role of mainstream media pouring a constant stream of unsettling news while doctors and surgeons in central London hospitals are burned out. Many health and social support workers are left with no choice but to neglect their own lives, their families and relationships.
How Bad News creates Anxiety and affects Mental Recovery
Just as the Covid pandemic appeared to be moving into the ‘rear-view mirror’, News programmes are telling us it is on the increase again as darkness enshrouds us with its winter cloak. I just treated a lawyer who said, ‘I have had enough’ and ‘I can’t take any more bad news’. Many individuals and families now remain stuck in a state of low to high-level anxiety.
So, let’s look at how we got here. For two years preceding the pandemic, the UK suffered three years of Brexit-stress; ‘are we in, are we out, what are the implications, what is the truth, what can we believe’? Driven more by emotional response than logic – because nobody, not even MPs, understood the full picture – this state of uncertainty became all pervasive. The style of our media-driven political debate is to put a point for, then a point against, in rapid succession like a massive game of mental ping-pong.
It paints a huge backdrop of indecision, misinformation and national divisiveness, setting families, neighbours and communities against each other. Indeed, we may even see the split up of Great Britain as a nation down the line as a direct consequence which really worries us as a United Kingdom.
British businesses are really stressed struggling to work with all the new additional import and export regulations, escalating prices and added bureaucracy. One client reported that they are having to get an Irish Vat number to continue to export to Europe; no one really seems to know what to do and we are muddling our way forward. We have become massively unsettled as a country not knowing exactly where we are going or how this will all turn out.
Shortly after we began addressing the Brexit transition, the Covid pandemic started and progressed at a shocking pace that took everyone aback. Perhaps only the senior wartime generation had ever experienced anything like lockdown and loss of freedom of movement. We adjusted quickly and some even liked working at home, not commuting, wasting time and money stuck on overcrowded trains or motorways. For some, that novelty wore off and was replaced by a sense of claustrophobia and fear even crossing the street to avoid walking on the same pavement as another.
Huge fear and wariness set-in, especially with older and more vulnerable people. If others got too close, serious aggression and abuse could follow. We are fortunate now that this appears to be receding, though one of my clients, who moved to New Zealand in August, has been in lockdown since and is really suffering mental instability having jumped out of the ‘frying-pan into the fire’ going right back through the whole process again.
A constant stream of unsettling news now pours forth from the media; shortages of fuel, lorries, drivers, abattoirs, hospitality, food for Christmas – probably back to toilet rolls again at some point. More unsettlement, more short termism and more stress and anxiety. It is a wonder we are all still standing. Indeed, a recent survey report said that one in five adults has suffered depression in the last year and greatly increased anxiety.
Who needs Healing and how to nurture Mental Recovery
Recently, I have been treating doctors and surgeons in central London hospitals as they are feeling just burned out. They gave and gave last year – as did so many health and social support workers – often neglecting their own lives, their families and relationships. Tired, exhausted and with little left in reserve, they have reached out for healing. Energy healing has a wonderful, calming effect deep down right to our core. One senior consultant commented on how it helps him to reset, restore deep down and to see perspective again; they report that healing allows them to do their job again without an ‘eternal sense of dread that is never-ending’.
Healing works at the same energy level as at our fundamental resonance. Most people that come from healing are already tuned into complimentary medicine and see great value in acupuncture, osteopathy, chiropractic, or homeopathy. These all are in effect energy treatments of one sort or another. When our energy levels – mental, emotional, physical, chemical – are all at a low from so much long-term stress, there can exist a state of unmoveable anxiety. Then we just operate between one level of stress and another, more often medium to high level.
This releases huge amounts of the cortisol stress hormone that has a massive disruption to our health and well-being at all levels. So, what is the role of healing? It may be a gift, (I dislike that word) or a talent, as some people genuinely have ‘the gift of touch’. Literally thousands of people I have treated appreciate this gentle, deeply penetrating form of healing that goes down through the many layers of our life piercing the emotional armour with which we clad ourselves to get through the stresses of these long-lasting anxiety pandemics.
As the forest fire of the pandemic dies down, we can see the green shoots of growth and benefits emerging. The fog really is lifting but we can’t see it moving into the darker months. We are still facing a challenge and will have to work our way through it, but it will be nothing as bad as it has been.
Many good things are and have happened. A pause in the environmental onslaught of pollution and carbon fuel frenzy has shone a powerful light on the ticking clock of global warming, allowing it to manifest much more clearly as an issue through the hazy smog of our frantic lives. We now know much more that we must act now and Princes, governments and the people are thinking and acting in the direction of healing our planet.
We all need to become healers in this sense and take responsibility for our actions; and to look after our own health and those around us. These green shoots of our mental recovery must become the growth of a new forest of well-being and for us to look at our lives, build up our health immunity and take care of our environment.
This is an opportunity for us to turn poisons into medicine, ill-health into good health at an individual, family and planet level. I am confident we can do it, as mankind has immense creativity and resourcefulness given the right intentions and will to act.
