Pandemic Fatigue Fix

Self-Care moves you into a brighter moment. Image by John Hain from Pixabay

Are you or someone you know struggling more in the last 45 days?

What I am seeing is the following:

• Fatigue

• Insomnia

• Increased anxiety

• Increased maladaptive emotional coping tools: alcohol, cannabinoids, sugar, binging on Netflix, to name a few…

We are exhausted from the pandemic. This makes sense, there are messages:

• Hope and disaster

• Relief and don’t change your behavior

• Grief and longing, as well as excitement

• Plus, we still don’t know the rules. Sigh…

A year ago, I wrote a blog on the importance of self-care to keep our immune systems functioning. If you are experiencing pandemic fatigue, I would encourage you to focus on self-care again. This time it will help your brain and body to have the energy to process the enormous changes that are about to come and find a stable platform to stand on.

Rather than focusing on what we’re doing wrong and then punishing ourselves for it, let’s do a 30-day experiment as a community, or with our family, friends, or clients, to see if we can each do a small compassionate act of self-care and see if we can have more energy and mental clarity as we move into May?

Here is a worksheet to help you commit to the 30-day challenge and track your progress.

In the next year, we’re going to create a new world together. I want us each to change what Kristen Neff has found in her research. After the pandemic, I want her to find that we are more self-compassionate and that we prioritize self-care because we understand that self-care is not self-indulgence. It is the one thing in the research that leads to better physical and mental health, less implicit bias, more connections to community, and more bandwidth to deal with change.  

“I found in my research that the biggest reason people aren't more self-compassionate is that they are afraid they’ll become self-indulgent. They believe self-criticism is what keeps them in line. Most people have gotten it wrong because our culture says being hard on yourself is the way to be.”

- Kristen Neff (Self-Compassion.org)

We created a form for you to let us know what activity you're experimenting with for the Challenge, and to rate your beginning energy level or "power supply". If you’d like, you can check back through the form weekly to track your progress. This form is completely anonymous, but will give us a generalized picture of the community-wide experiment that we can then share back with you.