Lori Gottlieb reveals how to reset your mindset during the coronavirus crisis
Psychotherapist Lori Gottlieb sat down with Yahoo Life to discuss how to reset your mindset during the coronavirus crisis. “There’s so much going on right now and it’s a strange time for all of us,” she says. “I think we’re experiencing a collective sense of anxiety, loss, grief, sadness and uncertainly,” she adds. But it’s not all bad news--Gottlieb says it’s a great time to reset the way you think about things around you. “I think the silver lining in this situation is we’re really being forced to focus on our emotional health,” says Gottlieb. Gottlieb reveals that there are 2 kinds of anxiety. “Productive anxiety is useful anxiety because it helps us to act on something. A productive anxiety is having reasonable anxiety about something so that you can take action,” she says. She continues, “Unproductive anxiety, on the other hand, is obsessive rumination. It’s futurizing or catastrophizing. It’s thinking about something scary that might happen in the future but has not happened yet and may never happen.”
Video Transcript
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LORI GOTTLIEB: I'm Lori Gottlieb. I'm a psychotherapist, and I'm the author of "Maybe You Should Talk to Someone."
There's so much going on right now, and it's a very strange time for all of us, and I think we're experiencing a collective sense of anxiety, loss, grief, sadness, uncertainty. I think the silver lining in this situation is that we're really being forced to focus on our emotional health.
One way that we can reset our minds is to live more in what I call the both/and, which means that we let the joy sit alongside the pain. People are afraid to feel joy in this time because they feel like it minimizes the difficulty of what's going on all around us.
So people think, you know, there's so much suffering going on. I can't laugh. I can't enjoy myself. I can't have fun playing a board game with my family. So I think one way to reset your mind is to say it is OK to feel the range of feelings and to have a range of experiences, some of which are going to be challenging and some of which are going to be nurturing.
When people are going through a hard time, often they think this will never end, and especially right now because there's so much uncertainty about when things are going to normalize again. Productive anxiety is useful anxiety because it helps us to act on something. So a productive anxiety is having reasonable anxiety about something so that you can take action. So we are reasonably worried about the spread of the coronavirus, and so we're taking action. We are social distancing. We are washing our hands. We are following the guidelines.
Unproductive anxiety, on the other hand, is obsessive rumination. Its futurizing or catastrophizing. It's thinking about something scary that might happen in the future but has not happened yet and may never happen. So checking the news every hour is not necessarily productive. Worrying about something that hasn't happened yet, not necessarily a productive use of your anxiety.
So instead when you're feeling unproductive anxiety, what can you do in that moment? Can you take a walk? Can you read a book? Can you talk to a friend? What are some things that you know help you to relax and to stop the obsessive rumination?
I think that the biggest secret is that we have a lot of agency over our lives, and in particular, we have a lot of agency over what goes into our minds. We get to choose what goes in our minds at any given moment. So we might not have a lot of control over the situation, but we all have control over how we respond to the situation.
One of the tools that I hope people take away from this time is really knowing what matters to them, what's important to them, and what they want to prioritize. So I think it's really helping us to say, what do I value? Am I living my life in an intentional way and in a way that aligns with what is meaningful and fulfilling to me?
