Quarantine Life is straining our ability to cope & testing our reserves of patience. Mindfulness can help immediately.
Besides tending to the day to day physical challenges of confinement with partners and children in close quarters, managing the flare ups in our relationships can be especially hard when we’re struggling to cope ourselves. The emotional burden of grappling with the uncertainty of the future can feel overwhelming at times and test our resolves of patience. That burden can also easily add pressure to the pre-existing tensions in our relationships.
Mindfulness practice can not only ease some of the relationship distress you might be feeling, but it can also help you understand how your own anxiety could be fueling it.
No amount of tips and suggestions are going to provide much meaningful help until we accept that some degree of anxiety, uncertainty, loss and ambivalence are givens during this period of tremendous psychological bewilderment. Accepting that these complex feelings will be undercurrents of everyday life can ease your expectations when you are struggling —both for yourself and others.
This is a collective predicament that we are all in, and everyone is struggling to cope with this situation in their own way —-which can be challenging when you’re living with others. Some of us will stay in a hyper-vigilant mode— scouring the headlines everyday and over-sanitize. Others of us are prone to self soothe by numbing out or self indulging. Others may retreat into solitude or depression. These are essentially reactive coping mechanisms. However, where we all actually possess some agency is the way we can begin to relate to ourselves more consciously. If you have noticed the way you’ve been coping isn’t helpful and putting a strain on your relationships, mindfulness can help you explore your internal experience and your negative emotions in a different way.
No matter how much structure you give yourself or much you’re trying to make the best of the situation, there are going to be times that you might feel agitated, lonely and isolated, exhausted from too much news, stressed, irritable, or angry. And that’s when you’re most vulnerable to defaulting to impulsive coping behaviors or getting hooked into conflict.
You can begin mindfulness as a daily practice to work with your emotional reactivity. If you meditate, that’s a huge plus because it will strengthen this work in profound ways, but if the thought of meditation sounds too daunting, you can start here.
Mindfulness is the practice of bringing compassionate attention to your thoughts, feelings and the sensations in your body—into the present moment. Why does it work? When you make a commitment to gently observing and labeling what is in your immediate field of internal experience, the space you create can help you unhook yourself from the stories and negative emotions that have the potential to hijack your mind and your behaviors.
Tara Brach, the renowned therapist and meditation teacher uses a beautiful, accessible model called RAIN practice.
R: Recognize what’s coming up for you on those three planes. What’s going on with me?
A: Allow and accept your thoughts and feelings to be there without judging them or resisting them.
I: Inquire with compassion. Investigate and identify so you can begin to get clarity on what’s happening internally. For example: What are the emotions I’m feeling? What’s the story I’m telling myself--about myself? About my partner or my kids? About our marriage? About the future? About my life?
N: Nurture: This step invites us to figure what might help us self soothe, calm down and discern what right action may be needed.
RAIN helps because we’re inviting in the experience with curiosity and kindness, as opposed to pushing it away. It’s a dialogue with ourselves that can soften the intensity of the negative emotions or stories we’re telling ourselves to the point where we can get to the heart of the matter and learn to tolerate and tend to our inner discomfort before acting out. We often forget that our feeling states are impermanent even if they have great intensity in the moment.
Notice how your negativity bias may prime you to overreact. All of us have a negativity bias. It’s an evolutionary mechanism designed to protect us and alert our brains to stressors and threats. However if it becomes the dominant lens through which you see the world—it can start to distort and filter things negatively, especially towards your intimate relationships.
For example, after reading the headlines for an hour, you might feel especially irritable, and anxious and your negativity bias will be scanning for something to get upset about. You might look at the dirty dishes in the sink and freak out at your partner.
Criticism is insidious because we may not make the connection right away. While we may know that we’re feeling on edge, we may not immediately name the powerlessness or anger we feel at the external situation which is beyond our control. So instead we’ll expend the energy in creating conflict or becoming critical. Emotional reactivity can expend stress-related energy.
However, and this is a big caveat, if the emotional reactivity and the conflict is a function of a misunderstanding, a crossed boundary, a grievance, or a violation of some kind, then it can be an alarm bell that needs to be addressed and responded to. The critical skill here is to learn how to discern what the difference is and to know what right action to take.
In that situation, mindfulness can help us get clarity on what needs immediate attention. It can not only help us calm down when we feel triggered, but it can bring the quality of curiosity and perspective taking that can aid us in finding strategies to resolve legitimate issues. With practice, we can hold ourselves and our relationships with more tenderness, flexibility and awareness by noticing what’s arising before it erupts into unnecessary reactivity or creates deeper rifts in loneliness and isolation.