Dealing with uncertainty in an uncertain time

dealing with uncertainty

Embrace uncertainty. Some of the most beautiful chapters in our lives won’t have a title until much later.~ Bob Goff, founder of the non-profit, Love Does.

Amidst the spread of COVID-19, we are all coping as best we can and dealing with uncertainty in an uncertain time. The scholastic world has quickly turned to online learning platforms, even for the people that have never done this before or even wanted to. I certainly share the fear and anxiety of our increased uncertainty. Thankfully, I have learned a few ways over the years to calm myself down when anxiety starts to get the upper hand.

9 ways to stay sane when normal life is overturned

As everyone pivots to the new normal of isolation, social distancing and other pandemic precautions, self-care, and mental discipline are ever more important. Here are some steps you can take to help yourself:

  1. Let go by noticing that this situation is not in your control.
  2. Notice that uncertainty is a fact of life, and you have dealt with uncertainty before, small and large. You managed somehow.
  3. Stay positive and envision the best outcome for yourself, i.e., you don’t get sick, you get only a mild version of the sickness, etc.
  4. Stop fear from running your life by paying attention and naming the emotions originating in the limbic system. Naming any emotion helps quiet it down.
  5. Use your prefrontal cortex to determine whether the fear is rational or irrational. Adam Kucharski, a mathematician at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine notes contagion can apply to ideas, rumors, and even financial crises, not only the physical form. If you are catastrophizing by rerunning scenes from the movie Contagion in your head, it may be that the irrational is getting the upper hand.
  6. Think hard about what you know and what you don’t know. Control what you can control. Take the recommended precautions, keep washing your hands, practice social distancing, and stay away from large-scale human gatherings.
  7. Be aware that everyone else is suffering from the same fear, anxiety, and uncertainty that you are. Have compassion for yourself and others.
  8. Use whatever tools you have available:
    • Try a media diet, limiting time spent on news feeds, Twitter, Facebook, or any other online source to an hour or less a day, or three sessions of 10-15 minutes. It’s not changing so fast you have to read every push.
    • Any spiritual practice, whether meditation, yoga, virtual services, walking outside, reading poetry or other inspirational texts.
    • Take at least three deep breaths and activate your parasympathetic system.
    • Find something new to engage your mind. Pick up that old guitar and find some YouTube instruction
    • Biking is my personal favorite since it provides exercise and social distance.
    • Especially if you are dealing with both kids unexpectedly at home needing to be schooled in addition to your own students and classes. No one is going to be spending the amount of time outside of school on schoolwork that would normally be spent on it.
    • Humor can lighten the darkest times.
  9. Have a contingency plan in place. If you get sick and can’t teach online, what happens? Is there anyone that can take over for you? If not, what needs to be conveyed to the administration about this? You won’t be the only one with the problem, and school governance has been busy putting strategic contingency plans in place. Find out what they are before you need them, and help put your mind at rest.

Reduce anxiety by using available resources

The uncertainty about the mortality rate of this virus and the fears around what this will mean to finish the semester are intense and at times overwhelming. Every single way that teaching is normally done is now suddenly obsolete. What’s a professor to do?

There are now a huge number of available resources about going online quickly particularly if you are without experience in that arena. Use whatever source material is most beneficial for your situation; it may be that your administrators have even given you some specific helpful guidance around using your own institution’s online learning management platform. If you are still feeling really scared about this aspect of the situation, here is a lovely piece by Rebecca Barrett-Fox, “Please do a bad job of putting your courses online.”

(https://anygoodthing.com/2020/03/12/please-do-a-bad-job-of-putting-your-courses-online/)

Conclusion

Obviously, most of us have never lived through a pandemic. The closest I came to such a thing was a brief high school fright associated with spreading mononucleosis. That seems so benign now, doesn’t it? Amid a real pandemic, it’s important not to panic about either your health or an increased workload. Do your best to take care of yourself, and you will also help everyone around you.

As you learn how to deal with such a high level of uncertainty, notice your ability to manage anxiety and ambiguity is a skill you can use all your life in many situations. That may be the silver lining we all need. As the British said throughout World War II, “Stay calm and carry on.”

If you want to read another of my posts on dealing with uncertainty, this one in terms of career planning, check this out: Living with change and uncertainty, planning for future anyway.

 

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