I have been reading a lot of news articles about how our entire population is suffering from anxiety due to COVID. Everyone is talking about how Anxiety is disproportionately affecting our young adults. It is a real problem. So let’s try and tackle this problem in today’s meditation session.
Let’s start with what causes anxiety. We live in a fast pace world. People have way too many balls in the air so stress, in general, is at an elevated level in our society. When COVID came about, additional stressors came into our lives. A lot of people lost their jobs. People who were displaced from employment were the people who were least likely to have a financial safety net of their own. They for the most part became dependent upon the social safety net. That had its own added challenge. A lot of the systems we have in place as a safety net were not designed to intake everyone at once (unemployment reporting systems in most states went down in the initial days of COVID). Then came the social distancing and shutdown of societies. Human beings are social animals. We are not programmed to be confined – and let’s face it; no matter what we call it, it was confinement. No social interaction, even when you can go out for necessities, no looking at someone’s face – I mean how do you judge facial expressions with a mask on?
The lack of social interactions especially hit the younger generation hard. Their go-to source for stress reduction was hanging out with friends and that was taken away abruptly without any notice. So-called health experts did not realize what negative effects their action would have on this group of the population that was least affected by COVID but is most affected by mental health crisis resulting from COVID lockdowns. A recent National Institute of Health concluded that almost 20% of young adults are suffering from anxiety. That is a very high number.
Now that we have figured out what it is that causing this epidemic of the mental health crisis, I think it may be a blessing in disguise. Two things are happening; 1) mental health is no longer a taboo subject – even Michelle Obama is openly talking about the mild depression she is going through; 2) people are taking actions to take their mental health in order and these actions will hopefully have long term positive outcome.
So how do we address the anxiety that flares up any time of the day with no warning? Anxiety comes because we provide inappropriate attention to a subject. What is inappropriate attention you might ask? It simply means we are exaggerating a problem we may be facing or blowing out of proportion the negative impacts of that problem and so forth. This actually happened recently. A friend’s son called me in panic. He had recently received a full-time job and his employer asked for a drug test. He went for the drug test and they took his social security number and date of birth. When he was leaving the facility, he noticed that they had a piece of paper with all his personal information in plain sight for everyone to see. He could not say anything but as soon as he went home he told his parents he was worried about his personal information being out there. They asked him to call me. Anyway, we started to talk and his anxiety was flaring up. So we went about breaking it down. And this is very important to get rid of anxiety. People who are going through anxiety episodes tend to talk about generality and how everything is going to be bad or worse. After talking it through, I asked him what the worst-case scenario? Another useful technic is when you know the worst-case scenario, it defines the problem and you can begin to address the problem. So he said the worst case is someone can steal his identity. So I asked him to put a freeze on his credit report with all three credit bureau. As soon as he completed this step, his anxiety disappeared because now he knew his problem was solved. The point here is that if we break down the problem and begin to work on it, it reduces or eliminates anxiety.
This is what I call short term solution. Longer-term, we must learn how not to let our outer problems disturb our inner peace. This is where meditation comes in. If we have a meditation practice that allows us to find our peaceful selves, it can become our go-to solution.