Are Covid Lockdowns Creating Emotional Overwhelm?

For me, the answer to that question is YES! And, the last couple of times I haven’t been able to handle my reaction to the announcement of the lockdown very well. Thankfully I’ve recently learned some self-compassion strategies that I’m including in my self-care routine and they’re helping me to connect better with what I’m feeling. I’d like to share with you my experience of how I came to know about these self-compassion strategies and the exercises/practices so that it can benefit you whether you’re feeling emotionally overwhelmed or not.

Last week when it was announed we were heading into our sixth lockdown here in Melbourne I went into emotional overwhelm. I hadn’t heard a lot of news the previous 2 days so was unaware more covid cases had started appearing again.

At the time I heard this news I was making icing for cupcakes with my 3 year old that were for my son’s 1st birthday which just happened to be the very next day. A pretty fun activity. Quite quickly I found myself getting irriated with our task. The butter kept splitting. So I chucked that batch and started a new one only to have the same thing happen again. I felt stressed, got frustrated and unfortunately took my emotions out on my daughter. In a rather yellie voice (oops bad mummy moment) I told her it wasn’t working and we couldn’t do it now as it was getting late and I needed to start dinner. Of course she didn’t understand and got upset. She left the kitchen. And, I got on with making dinner stewing in my irritation and blaming the butter, frustrated because I couldn’t understand why it was splitting.

I can’t really remember exactly what happened over the next minutes but at some point I headed into the lounge where my partner, daugher and son were playing and my daugher said I had to apologise to her. She was right but I was so caught in my emotional overwhelm that I, ooops, yelled again. “I don’t have to apologise to anyone” I said. “I’m upset because we can’t celebrate (my son’s) birthday anymore.”

Yep, there it was. Nothing to do with the butter or the icing. It was clear that celebrating my son’s 1st birthday was super important to me and I was struggling with what I was feeling around the fact that because of lockdown we couldn’t. I think I spent much of that evening in tears. I went off to bed just wanting to shut the world out. I felt very sad the next day being alone at home with him all by myself (he was unwell too which didn’t help). I had planned to meet up with my sister, take my son for his first baby cino and take him to a play centre for the first time. I had wanted it to be really special and enjoyable. It was also a big reminder that his grandparents from NZ couldn’t be there to celebrate with us so I was sad about that all over again. I was really struggling to get out of my hole of sadness.

I’m not really one for putting super personal posts up on facebook but I put one up simply saying I wasn’t OK. Because I really didn’t feel ok and I wanted to say it to anyone who’d listen. Lockdowns don’t make a huge difference to my current life as I am home a lot with 2 small kids but they mean I’m not able to work. I’m not able to give Shiatsu treatments. It means I don’t get to do what I love and I don’t get the time out from being a mum that I need. In this particular week I was also doing birth preparation treatments with a client and was looking forward to our next session which was also going to involve her partner. So I had 2 very important things that this lockdown was affecting.

I had lots of wonderful supportive responses to my facebook post. I also had a few responses that whilst well meaning just didn’t feel right to me. They were the ‘you’ve got this’ and ‘if I can do it you can do it’ type comments that are just all about having good vibes.

Avoiding Toxic Positivity

Fortunately, I had a session with my psychologist booked in so on Wednesday I got to talk the situation through with her. She explained to me about toxic positivity. This kind of positivity tries to find a silver lining to every situation, it doesn’t want you to have excuses, thinks that the bad only makes you stronger, doesn’t allow for feelings or for things to be hard, doesn’t offer support and doesn’t encourage rest. Those comments on my facebook post that didn’t feel right were toxic positivity comments. They weren’t supporting me to just let myself feel sad.

But I also wasn’t doing anything to help my sadness and emotional overwhelm. If anything I eventually started to try and avoid the feeling because I didn’t want to end up stuck in the sadness and melancholly like I have so many times before. So she introduced me to and took me through a self compassion strategy so that I could connect with the sadness and feel it in my body.

Using Self-Compassion to Deal with Emotional Overwhelm

According to Dr Kristin Neff self-compassion is acting the same way towards yourself when you are having a difficult time, fail, or notice something you don’t like about yourself, that you would towards others you have noticed are suffering. “Instead of just ignoring your pain with a “stiff upper lip” mentality, you stop to tell yourself “this is really difficult right now,” how can I comfort and care for myself in this moment?”

“Instead of mercilessly judging and criticizing yourself for various inadequacies or shortcomings, self-compassion means you are kind and understanding when confronted with personal failings – after all, who ever said you were supposed to be perfect?”

My pscyhologist took me through an exercise called Self-Compassion Break. This very short exercise is something you can do anytime you find yourself facing a challenging situation or difficult feelings. It takes you through 3 steps whilst you think of a situation in your life that is difficult, that is causing you stress. You call the situation to mind, and see if you can actually feel the stress and emotional discomfort in your body. Then you say to yourself that “This is a moment of suffering”, “Suffering is a part of life”. Now, put your hands over your heart, feel the warmth of your hands and the gentle touch of your hands on your chest and say “May I be kind to myself”.

That is the very short short version of this exercise but you can find the full exercise plus many other self compassion practices on Dr Kristin Neff’s website.

It was a lovely experience to connect with myself so compassionately, to create space for my sorrow and to recognise that the loss of the things that were important to me was very difficult. And, that getting locked down over and over is getting really hard. I will definitely be listening to the self-compassion audios so that in future I can handle my emotional overwhelm in a more compassionate way.

Just so you know, I did apologise to my daughter. As simply as I could I explained to her that I had heard something that had made me very sad and very angry at the same time. And, that I was sorry I had been angry at her. We hugged and then made a plan to buy some icing and some new sprinkles from the shop together so that we could finally ice the birthday cupcakes. And, we did. And, they were delicious :)