Blah and The Umbrella of Yuck
Well here we are again Vic. Lockdown 4.0: the extra long version. I thought I would take this opportunity to write out a few dots points on how to tackle the return to lockdown and to perhaps give a name and a voice to some of the things you might be feeling.
Lockdown has produced an interesting and exciting new vocabulary. We talk about “iso”, “magpying”, and “sannying”. But my favourite word that keeps coming up is “blah”. So many people I see are describing themselves as feeling “a bit blah”. Blah is a great word because it sums up so much (it can also happily be replaced by Meh). Blah describes that vague feeling of nothingness. We feel tired, unmotivated, unfocused, uninterested and generally a bit rudderless. There are a few reasons we’re feeling this way. The neuro-physiological explanation is that our nervous systems are burnt out. They’ve fired so frequently and so for long that they’ve hit this state of comparative numbness. The other, and I think more relevant, explanation is the crushing sense of disappointment that we’re back here again. We thought we were done, and yet here we are again. Last time we rallied, we baked sour dough, we explored every inch of our 5km and we got through it. We summited the mountain, only to find that the apex was actually a ledge. There’s more mountain to go. It’s such a big feeling, full of so much stuff, that only a word like “blah” can fully capture it. I once worked with a young body who gave me an excellent word to combine so many feelings in one term. He described his feelings as “the umbrella of yuck”. This was his term for the mix of anger, frustration, sadness and fear that he could feel all at once. I think Blah is the 2020 (+2021) version of the Umbrella of yuck. It’s pretty easy to see how Blah represents a whole gamut of other emotions. The disappointment that we’re feeling easily mutates into its sister emotions. It might turn into grief, or anger, or deep sadness. However your feelings are finding form here are some tips to keep them from overwhelming you.
1. Express your feelings. The situation is shit. It just is. So it’s normal that you’re feeling shit about it. Give your feelings voice. Talk about how you’re feeling. Whether you express it to a friend, a counsellor or even write your feelings down in a journal. Give them form. We can’t write or speak with the same speed with which we can think. So processing your feelings through these slower modalities is useful to help take some of the heat out of them.
2. You don’t have to feel good about bad things. For many, many people in our community the lockdown has come at significant personal loss. You have a right to feel unhappy. The only advice I can give here is to check where your distress matches the real problem, and where it’s born from a fear of “what if”. Problem solve where you can, grieve where you need to and calm your mind from the dreaded whirl pool of “what ifs”. If you’re someone who can talk those thoughts away, do it, if you need to distract yourself away from the “what ifs”, do that instead. You’re suffering enough, you don’t need to suffer over imagined futures as well.
3. Be mindful of where you put your anger. Our world is messy, its imperfect and a global pandemic has highlighted just how imperfect we can be. Anxiety will always look to resolve itself by gaining control. But we’ve got such limited control here. If we look at where we sit on the responsibility vs controllability axis we have very little control over this pandemic, but a lot of responsibility for managing the repercussions of outbreaks. This is stressful. Because we can’t stop or predict how this virus will move, but we get lumped with the outcomes of it’s reappearance. Yes there are many things we can and should be doing to prevent outbreaks, but we can’t control everyone and not everyone can always make the right decision. As humans we hate this sort of uncertainty. It’s likely that when faced with this we will try to blame someone. Someone must be in control, someone must be to blame. That someone might be the government, but your mind might also say it’s your neighbour who chin wears their mask, your school teacher who hasn’t uploaded your kids work yet, or those people who are nervous about getting the jab. It’s ok to be angry, but be careful of anger that makes the world black and white. Anger fuelled by an intolerance of imperfection will ultimately be self defeating.
4. Keep a future orientation. It’s hard to focus on the future right now. Can I go into the office on Friday?...I dunno. Will I be able to go to my cousins wedding in August?...dunno. But the future doesn’t have to mean the big things. It can be as simple as planning out your next 24 hours. Or if you’re really brave your next 72 hours. Getting stuck too much in the here and now can zap your motivation. It leads to those “what’s the point” thoughts. A psychologist named Phillip Zimbardo who specialises in future orientation (yes he’s also the Standford prison experiment guy) uses the sentence “The future is expanding around me” to help pull his head out of a present focused ditch he’s gotten himself into. This simple sentence reminds us that the world exists outside of our desk (or our couch). We can focus on doing something next, whether its taking a walk, cooking, calling a friend or ordering whittling equipment because you think this might be a good new hobby (yes I have done this). This concept isn’t in contrast to having a mindful present focus. They’re definitely related. They both tap into the idea of expanding your focus beyond yourself.
5. Be kind. Be kind to yourself and to others. Start with an assumption of good intention both in yourself and in others and go from there. We’re all going to do or say the wrong thing in times of stress. Let yourself and others be imperfect. Kindness also has the double whammy of feeding back into ourselves and increasing our own happiness. So get yourself into some happy kindness loops.
Good luck Victoria.