The Role of Mindfulness in The New Normal of 2020
It's the little things that you notice in a crisis, that stick with you. Those of us who lived through 9/11 can all remember the moment when we learnt the news from New York, just as an older generation would say they remembered where they were when they heard that JFK had been killed. The current crisis has played out more slowly, but still the details of our lives as the lockdown started seem to have an added clarity.
On Monday 16th March 2020 I went to my son’s school to buy him a spare jumper that he would only need until the end of this school year. There were rumours of schools closing, but they seemed to be just that, rumours. On Wednesday 18th March, my friend was still there selling the jumpers. That was the day that the younger children were sent home because there were not enough staff at school. They were keeping the older ones in because they have exams coming up. On Thursday they announced that the school was closing. Friday 20th March was the last day of school.
If it wasn’t for that one green jumper I wouldn’t have had a record of how fast this had happened. I might have blamed myself for not entirely paying attention to the signs, or I might have thought that I had remembered it wrong because my version of events seemed too incredible. The green jumper which, on Monday was a sensible spare jumper, by Friday was the evidence of the fastest changing week of our lives.
I told everyone I know about this jumper. I wasn’t worried about the money or the inconvenience, I was just astounded about how an utterly unremarkable piece of our old normal had become an icon of how quickly, and how thoroughly, our old normal had completely and utterly disappeared. I doubt whether we will ever again experience our world changing so dramatically in such a short space of time. The feelings of shock and panic that reverberated around our communities were entirely normal. Suddenly everything that defined our normal was gone. Everything was out of our control.
In my professional life, I teach mindfulness in the workplace to groups and individuals. In my personal life I am a founder member and coach of a community running club, and I teach mindful running. In both these roles I teach people what mindfulness is, how it works and how it can help each person, or organisation, depending on their needs and lifestyle. Mindfulness is about knowing what is going on in your mind and being able to focus better. This has been proven to increase efficiency, problem solving, creative thinking, improve sleep and wellness and to decrease anxiety, depression, mind wandering and distraction. I have found that as you increase your focus, your performance tends to improve, as does your ability to remain calm. Up until this moment I had prided myself on doing almost 100% of my teaching face to face, based on the value of eye to eye contact. This was the rug that was pulled from under my feet.
I felt a professional responsibility to remain calm as my clients, both current and past, looked to me for reassurance and strategies to help them manage the situation. I felt an overwhelming personal responsibility to my children, to manage their time and education and to establish their new normal while maintaining their happiness. Quietly, I felt a little overwhelmed myself.
In mindfulness we teach that while we often can’t control the situation we find ourselves in, we can control our reaction to it. I found my mindfulness incredibly useful that following week. I started to prioritise what I could control. We needed a new domestic routine and I needed to get to get to grips with some new technology for online training. I was lucky to have some 1-1 clients who were in the middle of a course of sessions with me. After their first online sessions, I asked them how the experience compared to our previous sessions where we had been physically together. I felt challenged by the internet glitches and the distance. I felt deep down that this changed the connection between the two of us, and doubted my ability to offer the same service. However my clients consistently said that they felt the same benefits from the sessions and were keen to continue. I am hugely grateful to them for giving me the faith in the new system and for enabling that to become our new normal.
And I reminded myself again and again that when we can’t control the situation, we can control our reaction to it. I maintained my meditation practise which helped to maintain my focus on what I could control, what was working and what was going well. In mindfulness meditation we focus on the breath, or on the body, and although other thoughts will come and go, we try not to get caught up in them.
This helps to minimise anxiety and time thinking, ‘what if?'. There are an awful lot of ‘what if’s around at the moment. Some ‘what if’s are exacerbated by exaggeration or speculation by the media, and we need to do our best to minimise our consumption of this. But we are also being bombarded by our own worries and concerns for the future, and the worries and concerns of other people.
At this time it is hard to stay focused on what are the actual threats and what is our actual situation. Our minds are programmed to continually investigate and analyse all the possible outcomes and to warn us of threats, but we need to develop an understanding of the mind to enable us to deal with these possibilities more effectively.
Mindfulness can provide a solution to this. Many of us are having to develop a new daily routine. Building even a short meditation into this routine will help you to focus better on what your actual situation is, and on what you need to get done. It can be helpful to take a few minutes out today to check in about how real your worries are. Discard those which are ‘what if’s, or which may belong to other people.
Meditation is good for the mind and the body. The more you practice, the more you are able to do it, and indeed the more you remember to do it, so taking mindfulness into our daily activities is really useful, especially at the moment. Here in England we are allowed out once a day to walk or run, or cycle for exercise, and this is the time to start doing these routines mindfully. It is tempting to use this time to think through the things we have to do, or ponder on something that is on our mind, but our minds will be more productive if they get a break from the otherwise incessant internal chatter.
To practice mindful walking and running, you just choose to deliberately bring your attention to your breath and your body. You can try breathing in for two steps and out for three. Just to get your focus onto the breath. It is more likely to work in for two, out for two if you are moving fast or uphill. It doesn’t matter, it is just about getting your focus away from the busyness of the brain and back into your body. You can run a quick body scan, starting with your head, just checking what is going on in the body, checking for any tension you can release, checking your posture, and maybe dropping your shoulders. You scan down the body all the way to the feet and then, if you choose, you can just focus on your feet hitting the floor, focussing on the sensations and the rhythm.
Then you can choose to bring your focus to your surroundings. At the moment we have bright, clear blue skies. Here in the south of England, l this is something to be noticed and appreciated. It doesn’t happen that often. Let’s enjoy the brightness of the spring, the first flowers to emerge, the bluebells spreading across floors of the woodland. One of my favourite aspects of lockdown is the decrease in traffic noise which makes it sound like the volume has been turned up on the birdsong. This is the time to enjoy the quietness and give ourselves a break from everything else that is going on.
We will all remember this time, and we will remember whatever we focussed on most, so this is the most important decision that we make in our lives at the moment. What are we going to focus on? It is understandable if that is sometimes the uncertainty and the panic and the sadness of the deaths, but we must also allow ourselves time to focus on what we have and what we have gained from this situation.
We can use this time to intentionally focus on what is working, what is safe and what is secure. This is the time to remind ourselves of what we have to be grateful for. This could be our health, our families, time spent with children, time spent maintaining and nurturing connections by phone or video calls. Time to be grateful for the chance to slow down and appreciate what we do have in our lives, and to share this new found sense of what, or who, is important with the people who are important to us.
This is the time to think about what we really appreciate in our own lives, and what we appreciate about the current situation. Time to think about what is really important to us, and what we would like to learn from this and to take forward into whatever comes next. Because whatever comes next is going to be a whole new normal again. We don’t know quite how it will be, but now we have the time to think about how we would like it to be, and what we would like to take from this new normal into the next. As we head out of the strict lockdown measures, life will inevitably speed up again and it is our communal responsibility to take the lessons that we have learned from this new normal into the next new normal and decide now how we want to live the rest of our lives.
This was written for a book called “The New Normal: How COVID-19 Changed Us”, which is available on Amazon. As the second wave begins and anxiety is increasing, so is the importance of mindfulness and managing our stress levels. Contact me for more details about how this can help you.