Gabbie blogs on coping with a pandemic, when you already live with anxiety
Gabbie Hill is a student from Lincoln. Here she blogs for ITV News Central in Mental Health Awareness Week, about how she struggled at the start of lockdown, when her normal coping strategies were taken away. And then how she found comfort in the little things in life.
When traces of the severity of COVID-19 were starting to emerge, I was living in Norwich where I study English Literature at the University of East Anglia.
I remember meeting my mental health mentor for our weekly meeting at our usual local coffee shop. We sat opposite each other and discussed how I was getting on with my final year dissertation.
My anxiety had made it difficult to write and so we were trying to find strategies to help me, since on one day I had gone to four different places to try and work with little success.
When the conversation inevitably turned to discussing a virus that was starting to take over the news, my mentor asked me how I felt about it.
The problem with my anxiety, I find, is that I often do not know where it is coming from or what is causing it. It is not always something you can put your finger on and declare with confidence, “here is the reason I am anxious, and here is where I feel it”.
What was different about COVID-19 and the panic surrounding it, for me, was that the source of worry was clear.
Although the virus is invisible, the world around me recognised it: it was in the news, it was on social media, it was sneaking its way into emails from the university and became part of the daily small talk along with the weather.
My mentor lucidly summed it up as, “people are suddenly living in your world where anxiety and uncertainty are around every day”. And she was right. As a result, I felt relatively well prepared, mentally and emotionally, to deal with the worry of COVID-19 since most of my days are spent trying to navigate anxiety anyway.
Although I am relatively familiar with the feelings of anxiety, I can very easily lose control of them when I cannot follow my daily routines and habits that I have found to be helpful over the years.
Often for people who persistently find themselves struggling with their mental health, their structure and “back-up” plans are fundamental to helping maintain stability.
I have slowly learnt what to look out for when my mental health is getting worse and have a handful of techniques I can do, or changes I can make, that help me.
Some of these are maintaining a consistent sleep schedule, reducing my caffeine intake, going on a drive in my car, sticking to meetings and going into university for my contact hours, as well as simply just leaving the house to feel connected with the world.
This has taken me years to develop and a lot of work with the help of therapists, friends, and my mental health mentor more recently.
However in lockdown many of these things were no longer an option. I was not able to work in the library or a café, my seminars were cancelled, and I could not drive in my car to distract me.
For myself, and I am sure for others, suddenly realising your safety net is no longer a viable option is scary.
Returning to the little pleasures in life, though, can be refreshing and surprising. Some of the things I have been doing and enjoying is looking after my houseplants, finding new words (I am a bit of a logophile), doing quizzes over Zoom with friends, drawing horribly but painting colourfully, playing boardgames, and I also taught myself (from YouTube, of course) how to shuffle cards.
One of the better things, I think, that has come out of quarantine is seeing people nurture their own spaces.
Whether it is their bodies, their minds, their bedrooms, their gardens, whatever they surround themselves with, material or not, it is important.
So often we live outside of ourselves and strive for new places and experiences beyond what is familiar and stable. To do these things is wonderful and exciting, certainly.
But since I have had to acknowledge just how debilitating and intrusive my anxiety and depression can be, I have had to spend a great deal of time and energy just trying to find out what my version of familiar and stable is.
This perhaps is something others might take for granted on a day-to-day basis. But now that everyone is finding themselves increasingly more stressed, it is encouraging to see how people have been making the most of their surroundings, where possible, and creating or improving spaces that are enriching and comforting for themselves.
I also think quarantine has made it even more important to check on those around you, whether they are friends, family, or strangers.
I was worried to go to the shops when social-distancing measures were first implemented because I wrongly assumed this would make people more hostile. I fretted that showing kindness to others would be thrown out of the window.
I am glad these worries were unfounded, and that if anything I have seen people make more of an effort to be friendly and compassionate to others in recent months. People still smile as you pass with a two-metre distance, acts of kindness and generosity (whether big or small) abound, and Spring has come around once more in spite of it all.