I lost my head the other day. I reached out my hand to greet someone and he reciprocated. We shook hands, our eyes locking in fear as we did so. Oops.
I also went in person to the grocery store recently and forgot to coat myself in hand sanitizer the second I got back to my car. As I pulled out into the street I remembered the hand sanitizer spray in my purse and gave my hands a good spritz.
In that same vein, last week I walked into a drugstore without my facemask on. There was no one else in the store but the clerk. He looked at me in surprise and I realized my gaff. I pulled my T-shirt up over my nose and apologized.
"Sometimes I forget about the world," I told him.
"That's OK," he responded.
I've written in this space before about coronavirus fatigue. I think there's also work-from-home burnout. And just general ennui. Every day is the same.
A friend recently lamented that she hadn't taken the past six months to better herself. "You'd think with all this extra time we'd all be doing yoga every day and hiking all the mountains. It's kind of like retirement, in a way. But I haven't stepped up."
I nodded in agreement.
Earlier in the pandemic I committed to bettering my health, taking better care of myself, protecting myself from all germs. With all this time at home, surely I could control my environment and myself, eat better and exercise more.
I'd read about this way of eating that can improve the immune system, clear the brain fog and make my microbiome — my gut "bugs" — happy. All I had to do was stop eating gluten, dairy, alcohol and certain foods that trigger inflammation.
I followed it to the letter for more than two months. I lost weight. A visit to my doctor showed improvements in cholesterol, blood sugars and other measures of health. I felt ... better.
And I rewarded myself by going back to some of my old behaviors. Surely it couldn't hurt to eat a gluten bomb, er ... bagel. Have some pizza for dinner. Enjoy a beer or two. I let myself off the hook. Bad idea.
I recently had another doctor's appointment. My cholesterol had jumped back up and in fact was higher than before.
"What happened?" my doctor said. "I'm concerned. Do we need to put you on a medicine to take care of this or can you do it yourself?
"I can do it," I said. Because clearly I can. So why haven't I been more diligent?
There is something about being isolated at home. No one can see me, really. My dog loves to share my gluten and dairy missteps with me. She doesn't care if my pants don't fit.
“Trying to adhere to anything extra is always a challenge,” says psychologist Carisa Parrish in a recent article for Hopkins Medicine. “You can add extra steps to your routine for a few days, but sustained behavior change is hard. Especially when no one around you is sick, and you just don’t feel like wearing a mask or saying no to things you like to do. But the fact is, the precautions work.”
Practice, she says, makes for continued success.
I've shared lists like this before, but I need a personal reminder and recommitment to my own health. I also have unlimited space to share since my column is online only this week (thanks, coronavirus, for making it harder on businesses to thrive and buy newspaper advertising ... but I digress).
“With everything people are facing now, sometimes the best strategy is to just do the little things you need to do to survive,” said Kaye Hermanson, UC Davis Health clinical psychologist in the Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, in a recent article about coping with coronavirus fatigue.
“When we feel like there is so much we can’t do, we have to shift our focus to what we can do.”
Some of her suggestions to remind for both of us (you and me, reader) to refocus:
- Take it day by day, or moment by moment: “Don’t look too far down the road,” she said. “Realize you will have good days and bad days, or good moments and bad moments. Realize these things can come in waves. It’s OK to say, ‘Right now, it’s bad.’ Just hang in there and ask, ‘What can I do to help feel better, or less bad?’”
- Be compassionate with yourself: Don’t expect perfection and don’t wallow in mistakes or missed chances. “Nobody prepared us for this,” Hermanson said. “There wasn’t a class in high school called How to Get Through a Pandemic. We’re all making this is up as we go along.”
- Be creative about finding things to look forward to: It could be a walk (when the smoke clears), or finding repeats of a TV series you love, or, as in Hermanson’s case, gathering a group of friends for a Zoom trivia night. “We write down our answers then show them. There’s a certain amount of honesty involved,” she said. “We have to remember the purpose is to have fun, not to win.”
- Find reasons to laugh: “There is a healthy physical reaction to laughing,” Hermanson said. “If nothing else works, put on your favorite comedy.”
- Exercise: “It’s still the No. 1 best thing we can do for coping,” she said. “It releases endorphins and gets some of the adrenaline out when the frustration builds up. Just go for a walk, if you can. If the smoke is bad, exercise indoors. Pull up a yoga or workout video. It helps so much.”
- Look back, but carefully: “Don’t think all the way back to last summer and those weeks you spent at the lake,” Hermanson said. “But think about the past few months. We’ve really come a good distance. If you had told me in March what we were about to go through, it would have felt overwhelming. But think about how far we’ve come. Look at all the things we’ve managed. Look at how resilient we’re becoming.”
It's OK to give yourself some slack for however you're feeling, because there's no one right way to cope with this massive and unexpected lifestyle change we're living through.
As for me, I need to tap into a little more self-discipline. But I'm not going to beat myself up about my lack thereof in the recent past.
I've shared some other peoples' wisdom here, but I'd love to hear how you're coping. Comment below or drop me an email at michelle.karas@pikespeaknewspapers.com.
Thanks for reading.
Editor of the four Pikes Peak Newspapers weeklies, Michelle Karas has called the Pikes Peak region home for more than five years.
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