Each week, we’ll be bringing you the best advice from the WH team’s podcast, Going for Goal. The show is focused on helping you achieve the health and happiness goals that matter to you. Each week Senior Editor Roisín Dervish-O'Kane interviews leading experts about their secrets to success. This week's tip is taken fromEpisode 17: How To Deal With Lockdown Disappointment.
Head here to listen and download on your device.
Almost one month into lockdown and everyone, from the leader of Her Majesty’s opposition to your parents, has the same question: how does all this play out?
Speaking on the BBC’s Today programme, Sir Keir Starmer said that the nation was ‘anxious’ about the lockdown, what it means for their livelihoods - and that people needed ‘hope and light at the end of the tunnel’.
The data bears out his first point: a University of Oxford study found that a fifth of primary school-age children are too scared to leave their homes because of Covid-19; eating disorder charity BEAT have received a 30% uptick in requests for support, leading them to launch an emergency appeal for support.
And all this comes before we’ve really began to see how we cope with something as anathema to human health and flourishing as social distancing, in the longer term.
But, as epidemiologists and data scientists try to model the outcome of the pandemic, and policymakers spell out how it will specifically affect our individual lives, many of us are doing our own projections into the future.
'Keep Your Focus on Short Skylines'
If worst-case scenarios are playing, on repeat, in your mind, then take it from one of the UK’s foremost psychotherapists: you’ll want to stage an psychological intervention.
That’s Julia Samuel MBE, author of bestseller Grief Works: Stories of Life, Death and Surviving and most recently, This Too Shall Pass: Stories of Change, Crisis and Hopeful Beginnings (both published by Penguin Life).
She came on this week’s Going for Goal podcast to explain how we can all manage our emotions during these extraordinary and profoundly unsettling times.
For anyone struggling with Covid catastrophising - that is, projecting into an unknown future and dwelling on worst-case scenarios - she recommends bringing your focus right back to the here and now.
‘Keep your focus on short skylines, today and the next few days because if you put it to the future you can drive yourself mad with incredibly colourful scenarios and stories that are catastrophic,' she explains. 'When the truth is that none of us know [what is going to happen].'
One Mind Trick to Stop Covid Catastrophising
Of course, this is one of those things that’s relatively simple to say and an awful lot harder to achieve. And, if eerily true-to-life renderings of your imagined worst case scenario refuse to stop invading your mind, Julia has a technique you can use to intervene.
‘Have the image of a television screen and on it really visualise the catastrophe that you have imagined,’ she explains.
‘And then you take a breath; you switch the channel and you put an image of a safe place, a happy place - your favourite mountain or beach or walk or whatever.’
‘Then, you take another breath and then move your attention to what you’re doing,’ Julia continues. ‘The more you do that, the more you strengthen your ability to stop terrifying yourself and forecasting into the unknown.’
Give it a try. And remember, while keeping informed matters - so does being kind to mind. Go gently on yourselves, team.
Not yet listening to Going for Goal? You're missing out.
- New episodes drops every Thursday
- Listen to Going for Goal now, whatever your device
- Nail your health, fitness and wellness goals
- Advice you can action from leading scientists, doctors and wellness experts
- We help real listeners smash the goals they really care about
- Email womenshealth@womenshealthmag.co.uk to tell us what you want to achieve
Cut through the noise and get practical, expert advice, home workouts, easy nutrition and more direct to your inbox. Sign up to the WOMEN'S HEALTH NEWSLETTER .
As Women’s Health Senior Editor Roisín reports on healthcare and the booming culture around wellness - and hosts the weekly WH podcast, Going for Goal. Named the PPA’s Writer of the Year in 2018, her journalism entertains readers - and empowers them with the tools to perform - and feel - at their best.
