8 Powerful Strategies For Managing Stress During a Crisis

As the world experiences COVID-19, people are facing enormous stress and anxiety. Managing that stress can be overwhelming.

If you are finding it hard to manage your stress during this crisis, here are some actionable ways you can manage (and even prevent) feelings of stress and anxiety during a crisis.

1. Identify signs of stress

You’ve heard that the first step to solving a problem is acknowledging that there is a problem. It follows that the first step to managing stress, uneasiness, and anxiety is learning to identify signs of stress.

Signs of stress can include having trouble sleeping or falling asleep, mind racing, or news addiction, as well as physical sensations such as tightness in your chest, body aches, headaches, or feeling sick.

2. Use mindfulness to recognize emotions

Mindfulness is a powerful tool that can help you recognize feelings as they arise, and understand what is bothering you at the moment. It’s a skill that is often built through mediation.

I recommend using Headspace, a meditation app that provides guided meditations. Mindfulness helps you observe and accept the way things are, which can help in stressful situations where avoidance is a common defense strategy. Additionally, mindfulness can help you identify physical sensations, such as tightness in your chest, or your shoulders tensing, and connect that to an emotion. Once you are aware of the emotions that are causing physical and mental stress, you can work to accept them and move past them.

Mindfulness is great for being aware of emotions as they arise before they get too intense. But at the moment you’re experiencing intense emotion, you should first decrease the intensity of the emotion so you can figure out what to do next once you’re thinking clearly.

Some ways to decrease emotional intensity is to remove yourself from the situation, turn off the news, go for a walk, do yoga, splash cold water on your face, do vigorous physical activity, or distract yourself by calling a friend, watching TV, or playing a game.

3. Realize your emotions are valid

It is pretty common to feel bad about feeling bad. And in challenging situations like these, you can even start to feel bad about feeling good. But while it is important to recognize when you are experiencing both good and bad emotions, you don’t need to feel bad or guilty about them.

Your emotions are valid – this is a really stressful time and it’s not unusual to be feeling scared or sad. It is also important to create moments where we do feel good. So don’t beat yourself up for your emotions, they are all valid.

4. Give yourself grace

The world is changing right now. Life is changing too, in a big way. Accept that some things about your routine and your mental state are going to change.

You may find that you can’t work as much right now. You might be finding it more difficult to focus or feel that you are more easily distracted. It could be that you are more emotionally exhausted than usual, or that you need more sleep than you usually do in a normal situation.

Give yourself some grace to accept these changes. After all, our world and our lives have changed a LOT recently.

5. Reduce emotional vulnerability

Emotional vulnerability is when we are more susceptible to an emotion because of our physical state. This could be that we are more apt to anger when we are hungry, and thus get “hangry” around noon every day. 

Emotions and emotional reactions can be exacerbated by hunger or tiredness or sickness.

To reduce emotional vulnerability, we need to take efforts to physically prepare ourselves. That means eating healthy and eating enough, getting enough sleep and going to bed early enough, addressing physical illness or pain, exercising regularly, doing recovery activities such as reading, and avoiding mood altering substances such as alcohol or coffee.

6. Set boundaries & plan ahead

To reduce stress, it is essential to set boundaries. Delineate your work day from your personal time, even though you’re working from home. Set limits on how much news you consume and how much TV you watch. Create expectations about how much sleep you will get.

Planning will help enforce these boundaries. By planning to go to bed at a specific time in order to get 8 to 9 hours of sleep, you will be more successful. Meal planning can help you ensure you are eating healthy food, and enough food. Planning what exercises you will do, where you will do them, and when you will do them will keep you moving.

Also be sure to plan for relaxation and restorative activities into your schedule, so you can have some time off.

7. Work towards the future

Coping is not enough to have a meaningful life. It is important to incorporate strategies to build a life that you love while you are weathering this crisis.

Rather than just surviving, start thriving. We will feel better if we know the reason why we are coping, and what we’re working towards in our lives. Finding small ways to work toward your long-term goals will help you feel accomplished and like you are taking meaningful steps towards your future.

To identify how you can work towards your long-term goals during this challenging time, consider your core values. You can still achieve them, even though your circumstances have changed, you will just need to go about them slightly differently. This is an amazing opportunity to decide if our old lives serve our true core values.

8. Transition from obstacle thinking to opportunity thinking

In the beginning of a crisis, we tend to perceive the negative more clearly than the positive, and obstacles feel much larger to us than opportunities. Having a long-term plan for the future will help guide the way you seek opportunity now.

First, we can transition from being sad about what we don’t have to being grateful for the things that we do have. We can also pivot our actions to be relevant in this changing circumstance.

We can find ways to evaluate the way we were living and see if that matches up with our values. We can also recognize that while we are socially distancing, this is actually a big opportunity for social connection with people who live far away from us.

Finally, this is an amazing opportunity to go deeper and evaluate our values. This could mean going beneath the feeling of valuing travel and realizing that the reason you like to travel is because you want to feel adventurous. Then being creative about how you can apply that to things that you are able to do right now. It could mean taking risks, trying things, or doing something you’re not sure you can do.

Transitioning from obstacle thinking to opportunity thinking will help reduce your stress and move you towards building a future that aligns with your values.