COVID Lock-downs Driving You Crazy? Coping Mindsets that Help.
Isolated. Confined. Extreme Environments.
Stay home. Stay 6 feet apart. Wear a mask properly. Wash you hands frequently. We know the precautions the experts advise us to take.
Yet even in Qatar, where most people have followed government guidelines, people have let their guard down. During my venture to the mall this week, I saw some people, including shop employees, ignoring these rules.
Afterward, I returned to my one bedroom apartment. Took off my "outside shoes" at the door. Sprayed them with disinfectant. Washed my hands. Sterilized my mask. Shed my clothes and took a long shower. Then, I put my clothes in the washer. Then, returned to my purchases. Sprayed them with disinfectant. Then washed my hands again. I've been doing this since March 10 when Qatar University switched to distance learning.
Some days, I want to skip a step. But, I don't. For me, pandemic fatigue has not set in. My will to survive this world event is greater than any short term relief I might experience from the isolation, monotony, and boredom.
The question I am exploring in this post is this: Why do some people do well even in the pandemic environment, and other people struggle? Why do some people closely adhere to precautions, while others show impatience or contempt for them?
Pandemic Fatigue
Parents lie awake, their minds racing with thoughts of how to balance work with their newfound role as home-schoolers. Frontline health workers are bone tired, their nerves frayed by endless shifts and constant encounters with the virus and its victims. Senior citizens have grown weary of isolation. Unemployed workers fret over jobs lost, benefits that are running out, rent payments that are overdue. Minority communities continue to shoulder the disproportionate burden of the contagion’s impact, which in recent weeks has killed an average of about 1,000 people a day.
It continues:
The metaphor of a marathon doesn’t capture the wearisome, confounding, terrifying and yet somehow dull and drab nature of this ordeal for many Americans, who have watched leaders fumble the pandemic response from the start. Marathons have a defined conclusion, but 2020 feels like an endless slog — uphill, in mud. Id.
The feelings are reflected in opinion polling:
Recent opinion polls hint at the deepening despair. A Gallup survey in mid-July showed 73 percent of adults viewed the pandemic as growing worse — the highest level of pessimism recorded since Gallup began tracking that assessment in early April. Another Gallup Poll, published Aug. 4, found only 13 percent of adults are satisfied with the way things are going overall in the country, the lowest in nine years.
A July Kaiser Family Foundation poll echoed that, finding that a majority of adults think the worst is yet to come. Fifty-three percent said the crisis has harmed their mental health. Id.
Michelle Obama admitted feeling some low-grade depression in the midst of the pandemic.
Attributes of People who can Cope with this Type of Stress
So why do some people cope with the social and physical isolation better?
Research conducted on "ICE" environments may offer some insight. ICE is short for isolated, confined, and extreme environments. Researches looked at 73 studies conducted in vary stressful environments. Those environments included researchers over-wintering in Antarctica stations; nurses working shifts; sailors on submarines; mountain climbers; troops on military deployment in the Arctic or in Afghanistan; troops in elite military training; and patients in hospital isolation.
These environments shared these features: "isolation, confined or restricted space and movement; persistent danger; and austere, harsh living conditions."
Adaptability Defined
In Individual Differences in Adaptability to Isolated, Confined, and Extreme Environments, 89-6 Medicine and Human Performance (June 2018), researchers Paul T. Bartone, Gerald P. Krueger, & Jocelyn V. Bartone sought to identify the attributes that helped people adapt to these challenging environments. First, they defined adaptability as " the capacity to make appropriate responses to changed or changing situations; the ability to modify or adjust one's behavior in meeting different circumstances or different people." Another definition included "the ability and willingness to anticipate the need for change, to prepare for that change, and to implement changes in a timely and effective manner in response to the surrounding environment."
Clearly, the pandemic has required people around the world to show adaptability.
Attributes of Adaptability
The researchers identified the following attributes of people showing high levels of adaptability:
- Intelligence or cognitive ability
- Emotional stability
- Showing low levels of neuroticism, depression, anxiety, and inter-personal problems
- An achievement or mastery orientation when associated with
- Self-esteem
- Confidence in one's abilities
- Low anxiety
- Conscientiousness when associated with
- Achievement striving
- Competence
- Self-discipline
- Openness
- To varied experiences of life
- To people of different cultural backgrounds
- To communication
- Optimism, including
- A positive personal outlook
- Thinking positive thoughts
- Making a positive reappraisal of performance as adaptive coping
- Hardiness when associated with
- Sense of purpose
- Meaning
- Engagement in work and life
- Striving for personal competence
- Belief that the person has the skills and resources to get things done
- Cognitive flexibility
- The tendency to see change ans variety as interesting and valuable
- Seeing change as an opportunity to learn and grow
- Tolerance for ambiguity.
Coping Strategies
In addition, the researchers looked at coping strategies as adaptive or maladaptive. Task-oriented and emotion-focused coping strategies were adaptive. Maintaining control over one's emotion was adaptive. Social withdrawal or avoidant coping strategies were maladaptive.
Past Experiences with Difficult Environments
The researchers also found that a person's past experiences made a difference. It helped that people had positive family backgrounds and parental relationships. It helped if they could transfer knowledge from one domain to the new domain. On the other hand, past traumas seemed to make people less adaptive.
Sleep and Diet
Even something like getting enough sleep and eatig mor fruits and vegetables contributed to adaptability. Endurance exercising (but not weight lifting) made a difference. Enhancing the serotonin, vagas nerve, and immune systems may also play a role in helping us adapt to changing environments.
How Might a Growth Mindset Help?
In an article in the New York Times called Feel Like You're Going Out of your Mind? Consider Your Mindset (Aug. 13, 2020), author Alina Tugend interviewed Caroline Dweck the author of “Mindset: The New Psychology of Success.” I teach this topic to my Legal Writing students to help them foster resiliency as we learn a difficult skill in their second language. Tugend asked Dweck to talk about mindset in the context of COVID isolation. Dweck declined to be that specific, but had some more general recommendations to help develop a more resilient growth mind-set?
- Beware of assuming that because something doesn’t come easily, you won’t ever be good at it and then quit. Focus on the process — what you’re learning — rather than the final product.
- Just trying the same thing over and over isn’t enough. When you run up against a brick wall, you have to come up with new strategies, skills and input from others to figure out the right approach.
- Be aware of what triggers you from a growth to a fixed mind-set — when you feel vulnerable? Anxious? Stressed? When those emotions surface, don’t get annoyed with yourself; just try to bring yourself back to a growth mind-set.
Interestingly, the ICE researchers circled the same topic in their examination of the attribute of "achievement/mastery." Poor self-esteem, self-doubt, and anxiety over failure predicted low adaptability. Persons with a strong drive to achieve who still had persistent anxiety about failing (what they called the Type A personality) tended to be less adaptable to new situations.
Final Thoughts
As I review some of the resources on this topic, I am happy to see that by genetic propensity, family background, or professional training as a mediator, I have the attributes that help make me more adaptable to new circumstances. After all, I did make a life changing move to the Arab Gulf at the age of 61. I am planning to retire in a foreign country.
What I can do to make this extended time of social isolation less traumatic includes exercising more, eating nutritious food, creating more structure in my day, contacting friends and family though video chats, learning new skills (guitar and Spanish), journaling, meditating, and remembering why I am taking all these precautions. These times require patience, persistence, vigilance, acceptance, creativity, and understanding.
They also require grace. As I look at the attributes that bolster adaptability, I know many people are not as lucky as I am in having those attributes. Perhaps that explains the guy at the mall who won't wear a mask. Or, the employees in a shop that are not keeping physically distant from each other or me. Perhaps it explains the pool parties, motorcycle rallies, and other high-risk mass events.
Other Resources
Here are some other resources I've collected about coping strategies and mental health during the pandemic:
- Kendra Cherry, How to Cope with Quarantine Fatigue, VeryWellMind Blog (March 18, 2020), https://www.verywellmind.com/protect-your-mental-health-during-quarantine-4799766.
- Coping with Stress, Center for Disease Control and Prevention (2019), https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/daily-life-coping/managing-stress-anxiety.html.
- Emma Grey Ellis, What Coronavirus Isolation Could do to Your Mind (and Body), Wired (March 25, 2020), https://www.wired.com/story/coronavirus-covid-19-isolation-psychology/.
- Isolation and Anxiety: Strategies to Cope During COVID-19, Australian Academy of Science, https://www.science.org.au/curious/people-medicine/isolation-and-anxiety-strategies-cope-during-covid-19 (last visited Aug. 13, 2020).
- Sara Lindberg, How to Cope with Quarantine Fatigue, VeryWellMind Blog (May 15, 2020), https://www.verywellmind.com/how-to-cope-with-quarantine-fatigue-4844181.
- Robin Wright, How Loneliness From Coronavirus Isolation Takes its Own Toll, The New Yorker (March 23, 2020), https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/how-loneliness-from-coronavirus-isolation-takes-its-own-toll.
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