How To Be Resilient In These Tough Corona Times?

You can spend minutes, hours, days, weeks, or even months over-analyzing a situation; trying to put the pieces together, justifying what could’ve, would’ve happened… or you can just leave the pieces on the floor and move the fuck on.

— Tupac Shakur

You cannot rewind the clock to the pre-Corona times.

Coronavirus is here looking into our fearful eyes and waiting to pounce on us. It is stealthily waiting at every nook and corner of any place you go. Anybody you meet could be a potential carrier.

If that was all that is happening, it would have been OK, but, hurricanes, famine, cholera, locusts, earthquakes and any natural calamity keeps on popping in the news. Along with that, we are suffering from either fear or personal losses or loss of our beloved celebrities.

As far as we know, the light at the end of the tunnel doesn’t seem to be in our sight.

With so much to deal with and so less to fight with, it is easy to drown into the desolateness that this time has been bestowing upon us. My heart goes to everybody out there who is suffering from fear or an actual loss.

Let’s learn how we can be resilient in these tough times:

Radical Acceptance

Acceptance is one of the hardest lessons life teaches us.

The faster we learn to do it, the easier it is. The problem with us is that we try to make sense of what is happening because we think if we understood why this happened, we would be able to accept it. But, then, what happens is that we keep running after the answer and it keeps on eluding us whilst deluding us to the fact that we won’t be able to overcome this.

What we need to do is stop and breathe. Just breathe and know that we are living and are alive to fight another day, no matter what happens. Our knees may feel weak, we may find that the strength is just flowing out of our body, we may feel that there is no point to living, but as long as your heart beats and you breathe, there is still a reason. The reason of existence is to just be there. If you show up at your life every single day, it is enough.

Because you breathe, you exist. Don’t lose what you have for what you have lost. Don’t lose your mental peace because of all the rising Corona cases. Don’t lose the will to live because of the person you have lost (not easy, unfortunately). Don’t lose, learn to live, yet another day. The best thing about the future is that it comes one day at a time. So, take it one day at a time. Don’t try to make sense of what happened, even if you could find heads and tails of why that thing happened, it won’t change a thing.

Accept that suffering is a part of life and adversity doesn’t discriminate. As long as you accept, you shall exist.

Good Attention

The biggest reason of human suffering today is the negativity bias, we have.

You may have noticed that a thousand good things may happen in a day but you will still be sad about the one bad thing that happened that day. Don’t blame yourself for this that you are negative. No, you are not. This is how you, me and everybody has evolved. Because in ancient times, if there was a cheetah on the left and the most beautiful flower on the right, our attention had to be given to the cheetah and run for our dear life.

What has happened today in this world is that everything feels like a threat, from the honking horns to the dinging bells, they alarm us i.e. they threaten us of something. So, we are always and always agitated, the sense of peace and calm just gets pulverized by the noise of this world.

Add to that, debilitating loss or anxiety that ensues from a pandemic, our brain now perceives a threat and makes us focus on negatives 24x7 with no way out. At those times we think that we don’t have the RIGHT to be happy. So, when we drown into this dark abyss of negativity, the single point to survive is to look for something positive. It would be fine if it would have been easy but shifting your focus from negative to positive is a humungous task.

So, start small. Right from the air you breathe, the water you drink, the food you eat, be thankful for that. These are the benefits you are enjoying that other people may yearn for. When the negativity bell goes off, shut it down with the hammer of positivity, remember the positives in your life, say them aloud to drone out the negative thoughts going in your mind.

Attune yourself to the good in your life.

Harm or Help

Fear-driven, grief-driven actions are not the right ones to take, we know it.

But, still we do because our rational compass goes haywire in times of fear and grief. We know that if we do this we will feed into our pain or fear, but still, an invisible thread keeps us controlling like a puppet and makes us do it.

That invisible thread is our emotions and one thing to remember about emotions is that they don’t own us, we own them. They are part of us, but not us. So, it is not that the fact that you are angry, the truth is that you are feeling angry. There is a difference between both when you create a disconnect between you and emotions, you are able to save some of your rationality.

Use that rationality to as yourself, just this one question, “Does my action harms or helps me?” This is the universal thing to ask yourself whenever in doubt, whether it is to go through old photos, or the latest Coronavirus stats, or that last glass of wine you are yearning for, ask yourself this.

This question I have asked myself many times and it has saved me more times than I wish to count.

And now, I wish with all my heart, it saves you many times more than it has saved me.

All I ask of you now is to give it a go. But, in case, that is not enough, I leave you with an affirmation:

I am alive. I have the right to be happy. I focus on the good. I always choose to help myself.

Repeat it to yourself, every day you wake up and every time you feel the negativity approaching you.