Coronavirus Anxiety: 4 Meditation Tools to Help You Stay Sane Amidst the Chaos

And you don’t even have to meditate to make use of them.

“When the crowded Vietnamese refugee boats met with storms or pirates, if everyone panicked, all would be lost. But if even one person on the boat remained calm and centered, it was enough. It showed the way for everyone to survive.”

— Thich Nhat Hanh

With COVID-19 at the forefront of everyone’s mind, our collective anxiety levels are extremely high. Amidst the constant noise from the media, reliable information is hard to find and people don’t know what to think. There’s a palpable energy of negativity and stress in the air.

Should we be really worried or is this being overblown?

Here in New York, people are driving crazier than usual and many grocery stores are emptied out. As a musician, I have no idea how I will make money while things are shut down. I even had a lady at the grocery store murmur “get the fuck out of my way” to me as she went for one of the last hand soaps on the shelf.

Meditating and quieting the mind will help, and I highly recommend trying it since you’re stuck at home anyways. But the truth is that you don’t even have to; even without meditating you can still benefit from some of its core concepts.

So to everyone who is feeling anxious and insecure — especially to angry soap lady if you happen to read this — here are four meditation concepts and tools that I’ve been using to stay sane during this difficult time.

**At the bottom of this article, I have included a list of links to free meditation resources (articles, podcasts, and guided meditations) that have come out in response to the COVID-19 pandemic**

The Wisdom of Insecurity

“When we understand the truth of uncertainty and relax, we become free.”

-Jack Kornfield

A global crisis like this COVID-19 pandemic reminds us of how insecure we are. We are vulnerable creatures on a planet and so many things can kill us. Disaster escalates so quickly and there’s so much that we don’t know. Even though we’re in the midst of a crisis, it feels like no one is really in charge.

Life is delicate, and we see just how little it takes to make things completely fall apart. Facing this fact can fill us with existential-level anxiety.

In normal life, we don’t feel this way because we put scenarios like a global pandemic out of our minds. We fool ourselves into feeling more secure than we actually are. Even though we watch horrible things on the news, we learn to not let it burden us too much. And if we’re lucky, we can go years without having to personally deal with death.

But if we are honest with ourselves, the possibility is always there. We can get in a deadly car accident any time we drive. We are always one phone call away from life-changing news. And a random virus can disrupt the entire world as it reminds us that nature, not us, is the boss.

I think part of the reason that this coronavirus is causing so much stress is that it brings these realities to the forefront of people’s minds. We become terrifyingly aware of how insecure we are in this life — of how much we rely on things outside of our control.

It fills us with anxiety to be this unsure about the future.

What to do:

Embrace your insecurity. It’s always there, and it’s not going away. Learn to be friends with it and you will suffer less.

Being insecure is not a problem, it’s the truth of the situation. When you avoid honestly looking at the uncertainty of life, it finds ways to mess with your mind anyways. It’s an anxious force that is there to protect you, and it doesn’t like being ignored. Instead of rejecting this type of anxiety, we should allow it and thank it. In more religious terms, you can bow to it and give it the respect it deserves.

The fuel for this type of anxiety comes from an honest place — you should be uncertain about life. But with mindfulness, we view this anxiety from a distance without getting caught up in it.

Insecurity is one of those fundamental facts of life that we just have to accept. And when we do, we can become at ease with it — at ease with reality.

Interdependence

“When eating a fruit, think of the person who planted the tree”

-Vietnamese proverb

Although horrible things can happen in a time of crisis, it also brings out the good in people. Fear and anxiety drive some towards selfishness and hoarding — who knows why people went crazy buying all the toilet paper.

But we also feel that a crisis brings us together. There’s a sense of shared humanity that we all connect to when things shut down like this. As a freelance musician, I’ve lost almost all my work for at least a month and it’s terrifying. But I’ve also witnessed an amazing coming together of the music community. People are sharing information and raising money to help us all survive.

So how can the concept of interdependence help us in a crisis?

In a crisis, we must admit how much we depend on each other. From your local community on up to the federal government, we depend on the whole system to survive.

People from all walks of life need to do their job to keep the system going. Farmers grow food, and trucks deliver that food. Banks allow money to flow so businesses can sell you that food. Government agencies make sure our water is clean. Scientists give us the data that help us survive and medical experts keep us alive if we get sick.

We all need each other. It’s scary to admit that you are nothing close to self-sufficient, but it’s true. And meditation is about being honest. Plus it feels good to acknowledge the connection you have with other humans. Embrace it and do your small part to make this crisis as positive as possible.

Avoiding Anger and Embracing Fear

“When fear arises, anger and aversion function as strategies to help us feel safe, to declare our strength and security. In fact, we actually feel insecure and vulnerable, but we cover this fear and vulnerability with anger and aggression.”

-Jack Kornfield

Too often our bodies and minds will automatically turn away from fear and anxiety. It’s like we turn into little kids who are afraid to look under the bed for the monster. Until we find the courage to look, the monster is terrifying.

When we ignore emotions, they fester and become harder to deal with. They find other ways to disturb us and give us a constant simmer of stress and anxiety. When difficult emotions can’t have their say, they mess with our minds from below awareness.

They might cause us to get angry at loved ones and to snap at strangers. Our decisions become irrational and stubborn. We start relationship fights over nothing just to get the energy out.

What to do:

Embrace and accept the fear before it turns into anger. And if it’s already anger, deep breaths can create a spacious mind in which anger can arise and pass away peacefully.

With the more spacious mind that deep breathing gives us, we can be less afraid of embracing our difficult emotions — we know that one emotion can’t be the whole picture. When we are lost, our mind shrinks. It’s like a small cup and anger feels like a tablespoon of salt that dominates everything. But a spacious mind is like a giant lake in which the same salt content barely disturbs us.

Mindfulness also allows us to understand the causes of emotions. We can curiously study the mind from a detached and metacognitive place.

And once we understand we can let go. This is the opposite of just getting rid of emotions; it means we understand that thoughts and emotions are like little life forces that deserve our attention. Fear and anxiety exist to protect us, and we should give them the space to arise and have their say.

So give them attention in a loving way and you will avoid causing damage with your difficult emotions. Or at least you will cause less damage.

Reframing

There’s no doubt that COVID-19 is a largely negative event, and during a crisis, it’s easy to only notice the negatives. Because evolution prioritizes survival — and not happiness — our brains are hardwired to have a negative bias. We notice bad things much more easily than good things.

We see the chaos and death that COVID-19 is causing. We see how selfish some people can become. And we’re beginning to understand how greed and incompetence have left many countries unprepared for a pandemic. The situation sucks, it’s true.

But even the most awful situations contain positive elements.

What to do:

Consciously focus on the positive aspects of this outbreak. This is a skill in meditation known as reframing. With mindfulness, we can notice positive and negative things at the same time and decide which ones to focus on.

And there is plenty of positive things to notice. Difficult times have a way of bringing out the best in people. Sure it brings out the worst in some, but we can never have all good without bad.

In a crisis like this, we can personally and collectively fall back on our truly important values. Families and communities can come together and forget the shallow things that divide us and instead confirm the deep values that we all share.

Notice how people are putting aside their petty differences and connecting. Perhaps it takes a religious-esque leap of faith, but I do believe that good is more powerful than evil — positivity than negativity. Evil and negativity spread quickly (and can be temporarily effective), but they burn out quickly. Good values — like the selfless acts of kindness you see during this crisis — inspire others to choose good as well.

Last week, I got so caught up in watching the media and worrying about finances that I almost forgot about my meditation practice. It’s a weird irony that I always seem to abandon meditation when I need it the most. My fianceé and I were having stupid fights and taking the stress out on each other. But then we remembered to reconnect with these meditation themes and tools. They reminded us to find quiet time each day to settle back and reflect — to find equanimity with the situation.

Meditating helps quiet the mind, but you don’t technically need it. Just take a quiet walk by yourself while taking deep breaths. Listen to some of the amazing teachers in the links below and reflect on these themes. Let yourself feel the complicated mess of emotions that it is to be a human, and remember you share that with everyone.

Links

• Ten Percent Happier Coronavirus Sanity Guide
• The Tim Ferris Show with guest Jack Kornfield — How to Find Peace Amidst COVID-19, How to Cultivate Calm in Chaos
• Jack Kornfield: Calm, Clarity, Compassion
• ANTI-CORONAVIRUS MEDITATION: PAYING ATTENTION TO YOUR HANDS
• Audio: Compassion in the Time of Coronavirus