Bye Bye Cabin Fever Crankies
With the arrival of COVID vaccines, things may be looking up. But after more than a year of this, we’re all too aware how the conditions we live with impact our mood and mental health. What’ll it be next: more searing anxiety, chronic uncertainty?
Image by Sumit Saenthong, Noun Project
But there’s good news. It turns out that we have options about how our circumstances impact our mood. Yes, going on vacation can definitely help. But I want to share a far cheaper and, right now, far safer one.
Ready?
Try naming and describing your emotional states on a regular basis, similar to the way you maintain your health by regularly brushing your teeth, exercising, and eating vegetables.
It’s a way of talking to your nervous system, which depends on your thoughts (as well as your senses) to accurately produce your mood. When there’s no new information, or if the information is vague or incorrect, you can actually get thrown off. By intentionally naming and describing your moods in this way, you can literally have a say in how you feel.
This mental health routine is based in recent research by neurobiologist and mood scientist Lisa Feldman Barrett.
I invite you to give it a try:
Note the emotion
Identify what’s contributing to it
Use both pieces of information to name it. Make sure to be specific.
Then, each time you encounter it, mentally call it out with the name you gave it.
If several versions of an emotion arise, be sure to give each a slightly different name and association
Stick with it
And use humor! To get you in the swing of it, here are a few of mine from last September, when it became really clear that we were in this for the long haul: The Zoom Lonelies, The No-Chatting Blues, The Cabin Fever Crankies.
If you’re curious and want to learn more, Barrett is the author of the book How Emotions are Made. If you prefer listening to reading, here’s a page of her podcast interviews.