3 Easy Steps to Calm Anxiety in the Coronavirus Lockdown

When I’m not being a writer and editor, I’m a mentor in a local school. Many of the pupils I see struggle with anxiety, and in these times, that’s all of us isn’t it?

I wanted to share a simple three-step process designed to ‘reset’ your system when anxiety takes over. It involves activity, relaxation, and thinking of a happy memory – all things you can do under lockdown conditions!

Holiday memories

Nearly all my happy memories are of holidays. My upcoming novel, The Year of the Ghost is about a treasured annual family holiday which one year is the scene of a haunting. It’s a story of family: of brokenness, secrets and love. The characters are not my family, but it is based on our annual pilgrimage to my father’s Welsh homeland. My memories of this beautiful place span most of my life and my happiest times. I have spent the last couple of years immersed in them as I write.

The good news is that those memories which keep you going through the winter can be accessed in this difficult time, and all the good feelings they give you will bolster your spirits right now. There's a reason why people all over the world are sharing pictures of beaches!

Anxious times

I have a constant background hum of alarm, apprehension and sadness which I put aside as I try to live this crisis one day at a time. But the effort of powering through it tires me out. Most of the time, I'm fine, but I have bouts of low mood and over-sensitivity that are not like the usual me.

These three steps are designed to help when anxiety becomes overwhelming, but at the moment I’d suggest that we need them all the time!

1 Activity

When you’re worried, your heart beats faster and your stomach feels wrong. Just becoming aware of these symptoms can make the anxiety worse. The first step to resetting your body is to do something active and fun: take your daily outside exercise or do something indoors. Make sure it’s actually fun, not something you have to force yourself to do! Dance to your favourite song, do step aerobics to music on your bottom stairs, play table tennis on the dining room table, bounce a ball against the wall… Changing how your body feels is a quick and effective way to start transforming your state of mind. Now move onto the next step.

 2 Relaxation

Tense all your muscles at once: make tight fists, clench your buttocks and tighten your leg muscles, then scrunch up your face. Count to 5 with everything clenched! Then let go, loosen, relax.

Now take a deep breath in through your nose. Picture the air going in, down to your belly and out to every part of your body… then breathe out slowly through your mouth. Again, let the good, cooling, balmy air in through your nose – and all the tension will flow out through your mouth. Do this five times altogether, in and out, in and out...

 3 Your happy memory

Think of a time you were happy and relaxed, perhaps in your favourite place. Remember all the details: the smells, the sights, the sounds. How did it make you feel inside? Be there again in your mind. Relish it, revel in it, enjoy that feeling now.

I really hope that this combination of getting your body moving, relaxing and remembering a happy time will help you through your day. 

How to Look Terrible on Holiday (and not care!)

I always look crap on holiday. It's an old tradition, like fish 'n' chips or Sangria. 

I don’t know how I looked on my travels before the age of 17 because at that time I was unaware of the Cosmopolitan Commandment:

Thou shalt always look amazing on holiday.

This had never been an issue, since as a small child I mainly went on day trips to Hastings. Then when I was ten, my Dad inherited his father’s Ford Anglia and drove us to far-flung Wales, where you could still buy setting lotion if your hair went wild.

At 17 I went Interrailing with friends, some of them very glamorous. While I had packed practical stuff, their rucksacks spilled out hair products and sexy dresses. The pressure to look good infected me like a dose of holiday tummy. I took my turn with the time-shared turquoise off-the-shoulder dress in which we wowed the Paris fashion scene.

As we ventured further South, though, my holiday curse took hold. In the Italian sunshine, I burned every visible skin surface, including my eyelids, while the rest of me remained white. I was feasted on by mosquitoes which ignored everyone else.  

I was already heavier than my friends, which wasn’t the end of the world in school uniform, but when we arrived at the beach in Rimini, I saw my bikini body beside theirs, and knew that I was fat.

I also had swollen eyelids, was covered in livid lumps and had the skin tone of a raspberry ripple.

The Adriatic sand got in my hair and in all our towels, condemning me to another holiday tradition – rubbish hair.

Over the years since, I have read all the advice, bought all the products and dared to believe that this year I’ll look my best in the holiday snaps – legs Veet-smooth and Holiday Skin-brown, hair Frizz-eased and straightened, toenails polished, outfits rigorously vetted for fit and style.

But every year comes that moment of realisation, as my hair takes on the texture of a brillo pad and my bites turn into scars that last weeks longer than my tan – oh yes! Who was I kidding? I always look terrible on holiday.

Things are not improving. I am fifty-four. I have hair that goes insane in humidity. I swell up in hot weather, and on planes. My feet and ankles are allergic to EVERYTHING, causing angry red rashes – really fetching in sandals!

So this year when we went away over Easter, I had to ban Holiday Skin and face the world with winter-white legs.

We were off to visit my son, who I hadn’t seen for 6 months because he has moved to Vietnam – my favourite place in the world.

And after all these years of failing to have a beach body or a sunkissed look or pretty hair –something dawned on me…

What if this holiday is not about what I look like?

What if it actually doesn’t matter?

Before I went away I heard an overweight woman on the radio. She said she’d read that women can spend up to 60% of their brainpower thinking about weight and dieting. She thought, what could we achieve if we used that brainpower for other things? And so she stopped caring about how much she weighed – and she was healthy, and happy, and achieved great things.

What if during our two weeks away, I could just decide not to care?

There’s always a beautiful woman on the beach, isn’t there? She’s young, slim and tanned; her hair, nails and skin look perfect and her bikini fits her beautifully. But does she look happy? She doesn’t, does she? She’s often in a strop with a handsome youth who’s worshipping at the foot of her beach towel.

I will never look like her, and yet holidays have been my happiest times. Imagine that! I remember exploring the world with my boys, relishing our annual Welsh pilgrimage with the wider family, and discovering foreign cities with my husband. I don’t remember how I looked.

So off we flew to Moscow and on to Hanoi, and my ankles swelled and made my legs into treetrunks.

In our Airbnb, I stood on a stool to hang something up, and it tipped over. I crashed through it, enhancing my pasty granny legs with black bruising which covered my whole calf and turned an interesting green.

I wasn’t even getting brown – the sun in Hanoi creates a hazy sauna that doesn’t so much tan you as steam you.

In soupy humidity, my hair went through a brassy brillo look before reaching peak candy floss as the heat soared. My cheapskate Wilco bug spray didn’t work, and my bites turned into attractive blood blisters.

And I didn’t care. I made reasonable efforts to look presentable and stay cool, and I let the rest go. I looked as terrible as ever, but I loved being with my son in his new home. I loved Hanoi and Danang and national parks we visited. I loved the people, the food, the astonishing scenery, the quirkiness, the craziness, the ancient and modern wonders that make up Vietnam.  

The beauty industry has made suckers of us all, but I don’t buy it any more. It’s NOT what you look like that makes a holiday – it’s what you’re looking at and who you’re with.

And the most beautiful thing you can wear in those holiday photos is a great big carefree smile.

The Other Holidaymaker

Sorry for the interruption in weekly posts - holidays and family illness have intervened. Here is this week's chiller:

Who is the one who always walks beside me – along the holiday hedgerows and across the beach, leaving no footsteps? He flickers at the edge of vision and looks overjoyed, bounding among family and friends, at ease, like me in better times. He is there through the tasteless chill of ice cream; he savours the acid coffee that only burns my gut. Happiness comes easily to him; he throws it in my face, mocking my unshakable mood, my sharp longing. I see his quick look of disgust. I think he would destroy me if he could. I wish he would.