Pandemic Anxiety - 3 Techniques to Find Some Relief

Whether you’re an essential worker, or have joined the ranks of the unemployed, or are lucky enough to be working remotely, the threat out there is real and the body feels it – and it’s coming in from all sides (virus threat, rent/mortgage and food worries, close proximity to family or roommates 24/7, uncertainty about the future, knowledge that US political leadership is incapable of anything but chaos…the list is endless...). Because of these real threats many of us are experiencing high levels of overwhelming anxiety.

For most of my life I have had PTSD, and so am very familiar with many of the symptoms that result from the nervous system being overwhelmed (heart palpitations, panic, sensations of terror, powerlessness, inability to concentrate, shortness of breath, muscle tension, racing thoughts, intrusive images and/or thoughts, a sense of intense isolation, etc.), which eventually leads to shut-down and the body going into "freeze" (numbness, sense of things not being real, etc.).

So I’ve posted three simple practices below (along with some helpful videos) that I’ve used with success to help switch my nervous system from the grip of being in fight or flight (the sympathetic nervous system), to homeostasis and a calmer state of being (the parasympathetic nervous system).

2:1 Breath

This is very simple. It consists of exhaling at twice the duration as the inhalation. So, you inhale slowly through your nose, gently, for a certain count (make sure the count is comfortable) and then exhale slowly through your mouth (gently pursed lips) for double that count.

Let’s say you gently inhale through the nose for three counts (1 – 2 – 3), then you will exhale slowly through gently pursed lips for 6 counts (1 – 2 – 3 – 4 – 5 – 6). Continue this for several minutes and you will probably begin to feel calmer. I have also found that it is more effective when I also relax my shoulders as I’m releasing the breath.

The reason this works is that the breathing technique activates both the sympathetic nervous system and the parasympathetic system. The sympathetic helps the body gear up for physical activity and fight/flight response. The parasympathetic nervous system does the opposite. It prepares the body for rest, sleep, digestion. Inhalation emphasizes sympathetic activity (exercise/stress response) and exhalation stimulates the parasympathetic activity (the relaxation, rest, and digestion branch). This breath ratio emphasizes parasympathetic activity over sympathetic.

Here is a good video on the 2:1 Technique

Heartmath:

This is another simple process that you can do, not just when you are feeling anxious and overwhelmed, but any time during the day for clarity of mind and relaxation. It was developed by the folks at the Heartmath Institute. They found that heart electrical signals have a significant effect on brain function. Their thesis is that during stress, when the heart rhythm pattern becomes erratic, “a corresponding pattern of neural signals traveling from the heart to the brain inhibits higher cognitive functions. This limits our ability to think clearly, remember, learn, reason, and make effective decisions.” (https://www.heartmath.com/science/ )

One: shift your focus to the area of your heart. This could be the center of your chest or the actual area of where your heart is located – whatever feels comfortable and right to you.

Two: imagine your inhalation and exhalation is moving in and out through the area of your heart. So, you take a breath into the area of your heart, then you exhale through the area of your heart.

Three: breathe slowly and deeply. In through the heart area, out through the heart area.

Four: once you have established an easy rhythm of breathing through the heart area, imagine something or someone or some place that you love, or that gives you joy, or comfort, or a sense of peace.

Five, continue to breathe through the heart area while you re-experience that love, joy, comfort, or peace.

Instructional video for Heartmath

Humor

The third technique doesn't work quite as well when you're nervous system is already overwhelmed, but it's a great way to find relief when the symptoms of anxiety are just starting to build: Laughter.  The laughter - like crying or shaking - helps discharge the sensation of being overwhelmed.

For me, this means dark humor.  Enjoy.

How the World was Made 5

Two more prose poems

from the manuscript

How the World was Made.

The first prose poem (Once there was Spirit...) 

comes from a time when I helped feed the homeless in center city Philadelphia, in the Eighties. 

This was around the time the Reagan Administration tossed many people who suffered from mental illness out of state institutions and onto the street. This was also the beginning of the current era where the poor, those living on the margins of the economy, became demonized.

The myth that spread like wild-fire during that time was that those on welfare were reaping in huge profits from the state. "Welfare Queens" was the term. This conscious misrepresentation was originally spread by Republicans, but it eventually was used by the neoliberal Democrats. 

This way of looking at the world is now forty years old, but I feel as if this lack of compassion, this fierce vengeful rage against those who are different, this myopic vision of society as consisting only of individuals competing against each other, is beginning to crumble.

Once there was Spirit...

1.

For a year of Tuesday nights, I took coffee and sandwiches made by Catholic school kids – peanut butter and jelly, baloney and mustard – down back alleys, into the subways around center city Philadelphia, hunting for the homeless. 

I worked alongside a group of nuns who ran a shelter for mentally ill homeless women; and, oddly enough, a Common Pleas Court judge who made her rounds with long, red-lacquered fingernails, heavy mascara, clacking bracelets, dangly earrings, and the clip-clop of her high heels echoing off dark city walls. I swear she knew everyone on the street by name.

2.

Around one of the South Broad Street stations near city hall, I’d usually run into a six-foot, skinny guy, black plastic bags tied around his feet. He usually had several people in tow (Why they followed him around, I never found out). His eyes were constantly moving, without focus. Every time he saw me, he’d shout: “You know me! You know me!” The first time it happened, I went along with it: “Sure, I know you!” Later that night, when I surfaced onto Broad Street, I told the Judge about him.

She knew him – no surprise there – said his name was John, used to be a volunteer, just like me, and had been badly beaten on one of his rounds near the library. He recovered physically, but something deep inside him had unraveled, drifted away (her words). 

3.

Once there was spirit, inseparable from the body, woven into every cell, spread across each cell wall, the pancreas, the lungs, all the intricate hand bones, the tongue, the heart. “You know me?” That man’s spirit had risen, prematurely, up, past the night clouds, past the stars, in a futile search for a safe hiding place.

After a year, I quit. I feared ending up like John: spirit gone. It can happen whether you’re lost on the street or not. Everywhere I go I carry a bag full of change – for anyone on the street who asks. I’ve seen the people who hurry past the bodies lying in doorways, and I know their spirits have become untethered, too; fleeing the earth, desperately following the spirits of those who just asked them for change; up, up, across the stars, hungry – ravenous – for a safe place to hide.

(Previously published in Blazevox)

***********

This second prose-poem is from here in Santa Fe. I used to live on a street that was a pathway for night people (mostly those suffering from opioid addiction) between Railyard Park and the trees and brush along the mostly dry Santa Fe river, where they could sleep, hide. 

Like the demonization of the poor, there has been, with the "war on drugs," the demonization of those addicted to opioids. The solution for the last forty years has been incarceration. What kind of society punishes those that are already clearly suffering? 

Like the vengeful attitude toward the poor and the marginalized, this archaic attitude toward addiction is also beginning to crumble.

More Ghosts

Junkies are ghosts moving down the street while I sleep. Sometimes they leave things: a wadded-up Burger King wrapper wedged into a wall crack, a smiley face made of cigarette butts in the gutter. Once, a syringe inside an empty plastic water bottle.

Everything is rising, they say in my dream. Everything is rising; green wheels, blue wheels, red wheels; whirling pinpoints of desire, rising. When I hear them, I think: is it really only about survival – is that all? They say: My brain is red, the aperture of hunger. I devoured the moon once. I will rise up and devour it again. Right now, some of them are eating Fritos, one by one by one, in the dry wash at the end of the street.

The clothes of these ghosts are scattered here and there, stuffed into plastic bags, hidden in crevices of rock – to ground them, to keep them from flying up into the sky. They say: There is no body. All is spirit, flying up. There is no body.

What is shame? There’s a white cross on a hill overlooking this town. They say, I won’t do it again, and a shriveled eye sails up, up, into the sky. They say, I promise I won’t do it again, and a lone tooth rises like a tiny balloon, into the blue. Their skin becomes transparent; their stomach dissolves; their heart yearns to be pure spirit, a holy spirit. Please don’t make me do it again.

(Previously published in Anti-Heroin Chic)

*************

There is more and more evidence, from neurobiological research, that shows addiction is a direct result of early trauma. More on this can be found in the writings of Gabor Maté. An insightful interview can be found here:

trauma underlying the stigma of addiction

There are plenty of interviews with Maté

on Youtube. The one below is pretty good. Start it at 5:50, to cut right to the chase. 

  Other prose-poems from the manuscript can be found here:

How the World was Made 1

How the World was Made 2

How the World was Made 3

How the World was Made 4