Tune-in to Cochrane Now 91.5 FM radio on Monday, December 14th for Dr. Pat’s tips and strategies to help people cope with the stress of the pandemic during the holiday season as Albertans enter another lockdown period.

You can listen to the interview on the hour and half-hour between 6AM and 9AM and at 10AM, 11AM and 12PM.

Tune-in to the interview and share any questions or comments with Dr. Pat below.

You can read the article “Coping with stress continued, another check-in with local psychologist“, written by Candace Davies on the Cochrane Now website.

Interview Transcript

The thing that I focus on the most with clients in helping them deal with a situation like this is to focus the most on what you have the most control over. And what you have the most control over in a situation like this are your actions, your activities, and your behaviors. So I usually suggest scheduling as much as possible each day a certain number of activities in different valued areas of your life–areas like work or education or learning activities or activities with relationship interaction. These days, this might be virtual or by email or text.

Also, some activities should be devoted to personal growth, hobbies and interests and exercise, and also a certain number of activities devoted to leisure and relaxing. Some of these leisure activities could be social, but others could be individual. And if you’ve got those activities going on regularly and you can get focused on them, a lot of the stress associated with the problems will be less likely to be something you’re preoccupied with when you have that goal that you’re focused on.

There will be times during the day when you will necessarily have some adverse events including those having to do with the pandemic. Perhaps you’re going to have some challenging emotions at times like anxiety, frustration, anger, sadness and some negative thoughts related to those. Just accept that that’s going to happen and normalize these thoughts and emotions. But then don’t let that detract from you getting back to doing those activities. They can coexist. It’s very normal to have those emotions and to be thinking about dealing with problems and dealing with the pandemic by taking precautions.

But have in mind the idea that my focus is going to be to not let that detract from me getting back to those activities in those valued areas of my life that I have scheduled like work and education and learning and relationship activities, interests and hobbies and exercise and leisure activities. Normalizing and accepting those emotions and allowing yourself to feel them is the key thing to do. I use these terms in my business–Primary and secondary discomfort. The primary discomfort will be when you have some of these emotions that are somewhat bothersome.

If you accept those and allow yourself to feel them and not try to suppress them or deny them, then you can get back to getting on with your day and the activities in the different valued areas. And those emotions often will kind of run their course naturally. Secondary discomfort, on the other hand, is additional, unnecessary, excessive emotion that we have on top of the primary discomfort. And that often happens because we do not allow ourselves to feel those emotions or we get down on ourselves for feeling them or we try to resist them, or if we have some difficult thoughts to try to suppress those.

And then it kind of becomes like the phrase–that what you resist persists. So it can kind of build on itself to an excessive degree if you don’t allow yourself to feel those emotions. So we have these emotions built into us through evolution for good reasons, and they serve a function. Anxiety which you mentioned is an emotion we have that is designed to alert us to genuine challenges and concerns and dangers that allows us to deal with those more effectively. So for that emotion and other emotions accepting them is the way to go.

But then get back to focusing on doing those activities that can bring you fulfillment and purpose. A lot of times these emotions, they get kind of a bad rap in the way they’re discussed, and it’s easy for people to jump to the conclusion that I shouldn’t have these emotions. Now, these emotions can get overwhelming or out of hand. Yes, we need to bring them back to a more manageable level. But having emotions per say is normal and part of life.

And accepting that is the key thing to do. I think it’s going to be a little bit easier to accept these going forward for this next stretch given that at least we have a bit of a light at the end of the tunnel with vaccines on the horizon in the hopefully not too distant future. I used to do marathons and when I got to the 20 mile point of the 26 mile plus race it’s like, OK, I’m in the home stretch, I can make it.

But I think we’re kind of at that point now with the pandemic. But there are still some miles to go.