An approach to reduce negative vibes during the pandemic.

Charlina Noble M.D.
Cafes for the Holidays




Working Through Holiday Stress

An approach to reduce negative vibes during the pandemic.

Posted Apr 29, 2021
SHARE
TWEET
EMAIL











Source: Photo by Bonnie Lane on Unsplash



I am birthing a pregnancy in the maternity ward of the baby Cambrian facility. She wants me to be there for her during her 32 weeks, through the four months, of pregnancy. She is the first baby born in the facility and she is also the first human being to be born in the world in the middle of the night in the sky. The other babies were born on the twelve-week-old guinea pig back in April.

The COVID-19 pandemic has been a long battle, with close to 3.4 million people globally still battling the pandemic. The Healthcare Workers and PPE workers href="https://psychologyofadhd.com/"> across the country have been treating patients just outside New York City just full-time. My position across the three-tower facility has been to look critically at the psychological capabilities of these workers, and we have been able to identify changes in their stress tolerance, and in the way they are caring for the patients. For example, one of the first doctors who href="https://psychologyofadhd.com/"> worked at the facility said he was shocked how sick he was being. He came back from the emergency room the first time he was exposed to dust. The other doctors had already been stressed because they were working late hours even while waiting for cases to be closed. This doctor remembered his stress levels rising when he had begun to hear the daily COVID-19 reports across the radio.

The COVID-19 pandemic has been a time of social and political unrest in our nation. The constant screen time, social distancing, self-monitoring has made the toxic combination of constant social anxiety, fake news and a pandemic fatigue all the more evident.
I have been working with medical professionals all over the country to mitigate the negative href="https://psychologyofadhd.com/"> spiral of the pandemic fatigue, and I have high hopes for the medical professionals of the team involved in the pandemic. The good news is that with better coordination and better communication between teams, we can be more effective in restraining the negative href="https://psychologyofadhd.com/"> spiral of the pandemic fatigue. We can also use this experience to mobilize resources to help with the resiliency pandemic, both from the inside, and from outside. 

The pandemic has been a time of paralyzed, shut down, and drastically altered health care systems around the world. As a mental health professional and health educator, I have seen firsthand the extent of the damage a pandemic does to our mental and physical health, and this impact has been felt right across the globe. I am beyond thankful that the COVID-19 pandemic has been a step to help get back on track, safely traveling, and enhancing our mental wellness in the new year. 

The holiday season usually brings a plethora of needs for us to focus on—relief, focus, warmth, and affection. The pandemic has been a time of strong, sunny, loaded emotional responses to these needs, and we certainly want to focus on them this year.
But because of some special connections building between people, other than in the pandemic, we might not have been called upon to effectively address some of the psychological needs.

In order to address the needs of the vulnerable, I organized a practice of deeply centering emotional needs for support and empowerment. This practice has enormous potential for improving psychological wellness, reducing the stress and affecting our sense of well-being. I have used my own training in emotional healing and have worked with many organizations in addressing the psychological needs of organizations. While I would be happy to be able to point you in the direction of where these connections might be helpful, I am also disappointed that we didn't have the same level of interdependence with regard to the needs of the vulnerable. 

The idea of needing to build psychological wellness was to go back to the caveman days of yesteryear and assume that the weak, non-threatening members of society still had the ability to erect and maintain a strong sense of self. 
But since the pandemic, we have learned to use other strengths of reason to gain emotional wellness. We use other strengths of reason to explore, explore, appreciate, and develop our sense of self to bring greater meaning and wellbeing to our lives. 

The challenge for us is to use these other strengths and abilities for what they matter in order to create a deeper sense of self that connects to another without being separated from it.