Discover more from Depresh Mode
Actual Practical Things You Can Do For Your Mental Health During covid
As opposed to the regular course of endless screaming
Important Typing Laziness Update
I’m going to start using the word “covid” in lower case instead of all-caps (unless starting a sentence). It is an acronym, I get that, for COrona VIrus Disease but I think that’s lazy acronym work and the Washington Post goes with “covid” now so I will too. Who can be bothered with the shift button? There’s a pandemic going on.
Covid has me continually terrified and sad. No longer hopeless, mind you, because a vaccine is coming and I will get that biz into my arms the moment it’s my turn. You should too. Science is real. But shit man covid has messed with my mind in so many ways. I’m also experimenting with cutting way back on comma usage, thus committing AP style crimes.
THINGS YOU CAN TRY THAT MIGHT HELP DURING covid
Well, then, (,,,) what do we do about all this? I have some ideas. They’re not my ideas, they’re from my therapist, who heard about them in a training. These are five aspects for self-care during the pandemic. Things you can think about during all this (gestures toward life as it is right now) to try to do every day. And I mean try, and if you can’t nail them all every day, that’s fine, because my god, of course.
A lot of these can be done by taking like three minutes out of your day. And you have three minutes.
1) Connection- Call someone just to say hi and check in (maybe text first because the neutral call is rare these days and your friend may panic). Write someone a letter by hand. Or a postcard (“Greetings From Inside My House Still!”) It’s about forming a human connection and remembering other people are good for you because we are an interdependent species.
2) Creativity/Beauty- Draw something. Linger on an art book. Listen to beautiful music with your eyes closed and hear what the bass line does. Write a very short poem about how you’re doing that day. Make it rhyme if you want because that is a thing called fun. Comes down to: make something that didn’t exist before or deeply soak in a piece of beauty from your world.
3) Productivity- This isn’t about working harder, it’s about finding ways to carry out a task that has a beginning, middle, and end. It’s about the initiating and the completion to remind yourself that you can and do accomplish things. Maybe it’s just doing the dishes or cleaning a bathroom. Arranging your books. Doing laundry all the way through the laundry being put away. The point is to be aware of the beginning, middle, and end.
4) Embodiment- You are a whole human body. You are not merely a head floating around the world encased in your own thoughts. Dance to a song all the way through. Brisk walk. Slow walk. Move the parts of you that can be moved to remember that you have parts beyond your noisy mind.
5) Novelty- Just anything that is new in your life. Go for a walk somewhere you’ve never gone. Watch a movie without knowing anything about it in advance. Buy something at the store you’ve never tasted, especially weird fruit if you shop somewhere with weird fruit.
This list is pretty simple and I think that’s on purpose. Something you can keep in mind or print out and have on hand to move yourself out of tendencies and patterns that might go to some ugly places.
I’ve been trying this for a few days and I think it helps. If nothing else, it’s a reminder that you are an agent of change in yourself and in your world. You can make things happen. You’re driving this truck.
By the way, my therapist is the same one I had in my book.
News That Makes Perfect Sense
Americans’ mental health is in roughest shape in 20 years.
“The latest weakening in positive ratings, from a Nov. 5-19 poll, are undoubtedly influenced by the coronavirus pandemic, which continues to profoundly disrupt people's lives, but may also reflect views of the election and the state of race relations, both of which were on Americans' minds this year,” Gallup wrote of the poll’s findings.
I’m not saying the Forbes website design harms our collective mental health, but it sure doesn’t help. Oof.
Well, At Least Capitalism Still Works
The New York Times (or NEYOT, using the COVID acronym model) reports on the boom in teletherapy and uses an illustration of a person lying on a subway bench with, I guess, Sigmund Freud to represent a therapy session.
The idea of lying down in therapy is a thing I’ve never heard of actually happening outside New Yorker cartoons. For one thing, you can’t see each other.
The article paints a pretty rosy picture of a boom on the business side as new distance practices spring up. The virus is terrible but capitalism loves it! Weird how capitalism so often thrives in disasters. Disquieting.
It will be interesting to see how those businesses do when the virus fades and the PTSD from the virus shows up hot and heavy.
I also wonder about the experience of people who saw their therapist in meatspace as opposed to those who have always only been distant. I find teletherapy okay, and certainly better than nothing, but I much prefer being in the same room. Part of it is the dissonance. My brain just feels like there’s something inherently fake when my therapist exists inside a two-dimensional screen while I’m a 3-d guy in a 3-d world.
I’m curious to know about your experiences with teletherapy. Comment them!
Carefully Worded Podcast Update
I get messages all the time who miss the podcast I was doing, The Hilarious World of Depression. The show under that specific name ended because the company where I worked was unable to financially support it.
And the messages are touching but hard to respond to because I want to make absolutely sure I don’t say the wrong thing. There have been lawyers and negotiations involved so it’s a bit delicate.
I will say that I very much intend to have a podcast in the future, focused on the mental health issues I covered before and during the old show. And make many more episodes per year than I did at the old place. Like over 40 episodes per year. There are multiple companies who want to help produce the new show. I’m still in the process of gathering all the necessary information to make a selection. This is a complex process that I had hoped would have ended long ago but it has not so I’m reluctant to offer a timeline.
I want nothing more to be back on the digital air, talking to guests, talking to audiences, and trying to make the world better. I have every reason to believe that will happen.
Here are my dogs:
I have also recently started writing it as "covid." I'm tired of giving this virus the importance of a capital letter, let alone 5 of them and a dash AND a number.
First of all John, I have a therapy *cat* not therapy dog, so I am not an idiot. Secondly, I find the teletherapy to be just as good as meatspace therapy. By now I've seen my therapist more over Zoom and I am much less likely to feel guilt the entire time because I'm probably going to go to the bar right after.