Students and the Fear of Returning to School.
Agoraphobia, Social Anxiety, and how to deal with it.
Students are going to be returning to school in September. As always, it will be full of changes, but this year, it will be full of masks, social distancing, and fear. Not just the fear of covid-19, but the fear of each other. Students have been relying on the internet too long, and not able to physically interact with each other. Suddenly coming together like this causes, and has caused, a great deal of anxiety. Normal social interactions are scary, not just because someone might carry a virus, but because we haven’t had them for so long, and students are still developing, which means those social skills are falling behind.
So how do we deal with this? How do we deal with students being afraid to interact, with this social anxiety? How do we get students out of their own heads, where they have been for far too long? Schools are doing all sorts of social-emotional programs to help students deal with the trauma that they all underwent.
Make no mistake, that kind of isolation is traumatic. I will not minimize that. But the solution is not to dwell on it, because that keeps students in their own heads. The solution is to get out of their own heads, and into your own bodies. One really good way to do that is Mindfulness.
Anxiety can be characterized as a disease or disorder of the future, with contributions from the past. Racing thoughts remind you that bad things have happened in the past, and project all the bad things that can happen in the future, because of your failure or random events. The thoughts come with chaotic and turbulent emotions andstrange sensations in the body. People try to fight and tame their thoughts through willpower, try to distract themselves from those thoughts with activities, chemical stimulants or depressants, or other addictions, but these are not good coping mechanisms. If you hide from these thoughts, if you distract yourself from them, they expand until they undermine the foundations of yourself. Eventually they impact the daily activities of your life, and strip out the meaning, the joy, as you hide from them or try to deny them.
So what do you do? Accept them, but do not give them substance. Instead, focus on the present, the only thing that you can affect, the only thing that is real, that is right now. The past lives on in memories, but memories change. The future has not happened yet. So live now. Easy, right? Well, not really. This is where mindfulness meditation comes in.
I came to mindfulness meditation through 2 books. One, Wherever You Go, There You Are, by Jon Kabat-Zinn, puzzled me. It was quite mystical, and made no sense to someone who was going for an advanced degree in neurobiology. One day, as I puzzled over it in the bathroom, I had a flash of enlightenment. I find much enlightenment comes in the bathroom, perhaps because you are attending to your bodily needs, and so your mind is freed up to be creative. (There are other explanations, of course, so insert your bodily function joke here, and season to taste.)
I realized that meditation was, when you stripped out all the mysticism, simply a mechanism for training your attention, your ability to focus. You were practicing a skill. This is not to say that the mysticism wasn’t useful, it is, and I recommend the book highly for the wisdom and knowledge within it. However, when you strip mindfulness down to its core, this is it. Training yourself in the skill of focusing on the present moment, being present in it and in your body, which is the most real and present thing you have. All the rest is for later.
I was confirmed in this understanding by an even more practical and simple book, 10% Happier, by Dan Harris, which strips the practice down to its core. The last few pages are mindfulness practice at its essence.
So here is the essence of what I learned, the simplest tricks to help someone, perhaps you, manage anxiety. Once you have these, go read the books I mentioned. But keep at these, every day for a few minutes. There are apps, like Calm and Headspace, which can help you, and they have free versions. But here is something you can do without even a phone.
Sit with your feet on the floor. No fancy postures, no fancy breathing. Just sit up straight, in a chair. Breathe normally. If you want to set a timer for 5 minutes, do so, but make sure it’s not somewhere you can see it, and is out of arm’s reach so you can’t pick it up and check it.
Close your eyes and focus on the breath. If you are having trouble, you can either:
Put your hand on your stomach. You should feel your belly rise and fall as you breathe. You don’t want your chest to be rising and falling if you can help it. Breathing into your stomach calms you, gets you into a more relaxed mode, and helps your overstressed body to switch out of constant fight-or-flight.
Breathe through your nose. You should be able to feel the air moving in and out through your nostrils. If you have a moustache or nose hair this can be a stronger sensation or tickle, so don’t breathe too hard. Steady and relaxed.
Now focus on the feeling, the sensation of breath moving into and out of you. If you find that your thoughts have started to run away from you again, gently refocus on the breath. Do this as many times as necessary.
You will find, at first, that your thoughts are running away with you. Your brain is a thinking machine, and it will constantly throw thoughts around. It doesn’t know how to be calm, yet. You must train it.
Something to remember about thoughts is that they only have as much weight as you give them. If you give them all the power in the world, that is what they will have. Otherwise, they are just thoughts. Anxiety and depression both involve giving weight and power to thoughts that you don’t need, and in your better moments, don’t want. With those thoughts comes an associated emotion, and that allows you to associate the thought you just had with other thoughts linked to the same emotion. This can cause a spiral, a cluster of thoughts linked to each other through anxiety and sadness, where you jump from one to another in a well-characterized path, one that you tread over and over again, your mood worsening every time the thoughts cycle. Eventually your mood spirals down the drain as the thoughts come faster and faster.
Contrast this with another model of thinking, that of the rock in the stream.
(Image by C Rush from Pixabay)
You are the rock. Your thoughts are like drops of water or leaves in the stream. Each drop flows by you, and only if you reach out and grab it does it stay. Peace, freedom from anxiety, comes in letting those thoughts go by, positive and negative. Giving them power, giving them weight, is not necessary. They are just thoughts, and more will come by in a second, just as valuable, or valueless, as you choose. Emotions are the same, they will wash over you eventually as well, so just let them flow and change. You are the rock, you remain.
Sometimes you will find yourself gripped with strong emotions and sensations. You try to meditate, and it doesn’t work. They are too strong, you cannot get past the feeling of your breath coming faster, of the pain in your chest, (What if it’s a heart attack, your brain warns you) of the terrible sinking feeling in your stomach, of the tension in your shoulders and back, or in other muscles. When this happens, you can use a technique called labeling. You simply recognize what is happening, and, in naming it, rob its power.
Part of anxiety involves being afraid of the fear, of the tension, of the sensations and the thoughts, of the horrible emotions. You try to avoid them, because they are unpleasant, and nobody likes to experience unpleasant things. But you cannot avoid them, because they are within you. So instead, you must accept them. You must name them, not dramatically, not loudly. Instead, in a simple and quiet voice, maybe only a voice in your mind, say the name of what you are experiencing. I like to use words like anxious, thinking, or when it gets bad, panicking. I just say them, quietly, to myself, every once in a while, as they happen. And, and this is important, I pay attention to them, not in fear, but in curiosity. What am I feeling now? What is my chest doing? Am I sweating? Is my heart beating faster? Well fancy that. Wonder why it’s doing that? Oh, I’m panicking. I see. How about now? Ah, yes, still panicking.
Anxious emotions gain power over you only while you try to avoid them. When recognized and properly named, they weaken. Eventually, they can weaken enough to flee at the sound of their name, as your skill grows.
This rule about anxious emotions is true of activities, as well. Think of your brain, in particular your amygdala, which rules fight-or-flight among other things, as a large dumb dog. It wants to protect you, but it is overprotective and good at matching patterns. There is something you fear, so the moment it sees something like that, it starts to bark and make noise. This causes you to sweat, your breath and heart rate to increase, your muscles to tense, and so on. What you do next is critical. If you:
Stand still or walk forward, into the perceived danger, your brain goes Huh, that might not have been useful. Maybe I don’t want to do that again.
Avoid, back away, or stop doing the thing that triggered the feelings of anxiety, your brain goes I did good! I did good! I’m going to do it again, because I’m helping! (Start wagging tail, panting, and drooling on the floor.)
This is great if the thing you reacted to WAS a danger, like a large copperhead, a mugger, or someone trying to get you to buy a time-share. But what happens if it wasn’t a danger? Your brain is still trying to protect you, and the list of things that it will try to protect you FROM has just increased. The more you listen, the more restricted your life becomes.
So the final key to freeing yourself from anxiety is this:
As your thoughts wash over you, as you meditate, you will begin to see patterns. Certain thoughts will trigger spirals, and once you recognize those thoughts you can quickly step in and say Hey, quit that and start thinking about something else! Or you can look at the thoughts and gently challenge them, pointing out their unrealism. Either way, make sure to do it with humor. Don’t be angry at yourself, but be gently and forgivingly firm. This isn’t a thought you are going to think right now.
You will also see patterns in the things you avoid, the things you try to get away from, the things you don’t want to do. Think about those things, and if they aren’t actually dangerous (like petting or playing catch with a rattlesnake) then you might want to try them. You may not get all the way through doing them. You may panic, or freak out, or have to stop partway through. That’s ok. But when you walk INTO them, their power over you decreases, and your brain learns that it doesn’t have to protect you from them. Eventually it learns that you are tougher than you thought, and begins to lay off the overprotection.
This doesn’t work for everyone. Some people have severe traumas, some ongoing traumas. If this is you, then I would still recommend mindfulness, but you might need a bit more. At this point, I would suggest you find a therapist who you feel you can trust. Some people may benefit if the therapist knows Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, which works quite well for many people. At that point, it’s up to you. You can change, you can grow, and you can make your life better.
Good Luck!
Hamartic
Cross-references and questioning:
1. How can anxiety be understood from neurotransmitters ala https://mountmalt.substack.com/p/networks-and-how-to-better-apply-a7b ?
2. Does social anxiety have something to do with oversocialization or undersocialization?
Well done, mate! You need to add subscribe, share and comment buttons. I usually put subscribe and share at the top, and leave a comment and the share the newsletter at the bottom.