We welcome you to our series on how to protect your mental health and your relationships during the coronavirus-related lockdown.

Dr Ali Shakir, our resident psychotherapist, has filmed a series of videos that we hope will be useful. In this first video, which you can watch here, Dr Shakir talks about what we might be experiencing currently.

We are all feeling a range of emotions that might be unfamiliar to us in both quality and intensity.

Dr Shakir believes that there are three key experiences that unite us all during this difficult period.

Loss and grief

We are experiencing a collective loss and are in a grieving process. Do you feel heavy and low and can’t quite name the feeling? You may be experiencing grief.

You might not immediately identify this because it might seem somehow silly to be in a grief process over the coronavirus lockdown. But look at what has happened around us – our way of life has had to change dramatically, we have lost our daily structure and many of our capabilities. Some of us have lost opportunities, things to look forward to, connections with friends and loved ones, seeing someone we have been dating.

If you look and examine your life, you’ll notice that loss is actually quite significant. And moreover, we are going through a pandemic and we hear about death every day. Even if we have not lost someone close to us, we are aware that people are losing loved ones and we empathise and regularly think about the loss of loved ones.

Anxiety

Dr Shakir says in his video that there is a direct correlation between anxiety and structure. As we have lost our daily structure, it is inevitable that our anxiety will increase. He recommends creating a new structure and maintaining what you can of your life before the coronavirus-related lockdown. Keep an eye on our youtube channel for his video on how to create structure during this period.

Stress

As soon as lockdown was announced, we all swiftly found that our demands increased suddenly and our capabilities decreased. As a result, our stress levels have spiked. Dr Shakir describes stress as simply the gap between our demands and capabilities.

Our next blog post will detail how to reduce your demands and increase your capabilities and Dr Shakir’s next video will focus on this also.