We live in an age of fear. The hysterical responses to the coronavirus corroborate a whole range of additional fears: fear of the implications of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, fear of growing older, fear of loneliness, fear of death, fear of an uncertain future. Everybody is affected but there are hardly any meaningful attempts to deal effectively with these fears.
In my theoretical and practical work on Emotional Intelligence, I have learnt that the most effective way of dealing with fear is to face it. Precisely! We must learn to face our fears.
Most people believe that our emotions should not be indulged. But the current hysteria about buying up tons of toilet paper and gallons of hand sanitizer can be explained as an effect of trying to suppress our emotions, particularly our fears. As a result, we are in danger of losing what is most precious: friendships and human connections.
It is high time to think of productive ways of managing our fears: if we learn to admit openly that we are terrified of losing everything that makes life worth living, we can create new ways of connecting with other human beings. As a result, we are able to deal better with the things that worry and frighten us.
Thank you for your thoughtful comments, dear Soumia. We urgently need to come up with similar initiatives as the Italians. We need to find new ways of expressing our humanity, in spite of a whole range of threats that are suddenly facing everyone. But we have art and creativity to express our anguish, our sorrows, our worries, our fears about getting our physical integrity damaged, and losing the people we love.
In my academic research on theories of emotion, I have learnt that talking about our emotions makes negative emotions less frightening and positive emotions more pleasurable. I have been practicing this actively for several years by now, and I can vouchsafe that it works. This is why I want to encourage everyone to do the same. In particular, I want to talk about the consequences of the fear for our health. I understand that it is a useful strategy to refrain from shaking hands. But what about a smile from the distance? It is true that most people feel too absorbed with their worries to smile. But how are all those who are going to survive the virus planning to live afterwards? Is pure physical survival going to be worth it, at the cost of losing our human kindness?
The reference to Maya Angelou's gaged bird who sings is very relevant. In addition to the real cage imposed by quarantine, we humans have a tendency to build a second cage of our own making. But we can choose to refrain from locking ourselves off. We can talk about our deeply human fears and hopes through email and social media. I jokingly said to a friend the other day that what we need is "fear fighters". I think it is time to declare myself as a Fear Fighter openly.
I want to talk about social distancing now. Of course, I see the reason for doing it. But I also see what it is doing to a population that was already inching towards increased isolation and loneliness. I am a people person, and now that we have to go through a period of quarantine, I am spending a significant part of my day speaking to frightened friends and students on the phone and through email. It is strangely contradictory that I am engaging in proper human conversations with a lot of people who were not close to me before. -- What are your experiences of social distancing?
Right now, human society has to make some important decisions. One of them concerns our approach to using social media, digital tools and other technology. If we use them as tools that make it possible to communicate across distances, great! However, we still have to do the communicating. This means, we have to find an authentic way of expressing our preoccupies: we have to find words to talk about what we fear and hope. But a lot of "us" have lost the ability (if we ever had it) to talk about who we really are, or who we really want to be.
It will take a while for psychologists to figure out how social distancing affects the human psyche. Right now, the majority of people believe that their FEAR is about being infected. But at heart, our deepest fear is to be abandoned and left alone. In the long run, isolation is going to wreak more havoc than the virus.
We cannot escape from the isolation that is caused by social distancing, but we can choose to use digital media as a means of talking to each other.
In any event, I am spending a lot of time everyday trying to build (or strengthen) connections to other human beings. The experience of showing somebody else that they are important and that I care genuinely care for them makes me feel more human.
true, we have to confront our fears and to find meaning in our fears. Here is our paper on EI and another on confronting very difficult circumstances: file:///C:/Users/bewal/Downloads/Medical_Students_Specialty_Preference_Relative_to%20(1).pdf
Sorry, i put the wrong link.
Dear Béatrice Marianne Ewalds-Kvist, I understand your desire to make the people out there read your work. I know that it takes so long to get an essay into publication and then it's only a handful of experts who read it.
I believe that the current circumstances have shown that scholars and academics must learn to talk to people who are worried and anxious. We are surrounded by people who are struggling, and we must learn to calm them down.
Necessity has taught me a great deal about how to help, say, a student who is terrified of the future. I would dearly like to hear from colleagues who have discovered new ways of using their skills, and who are willing to share their discoveries in their words.
We have a new and young government now and they provide us with almost daily updates on the pandemic. This make me believe that Covid-19 perse is not the most threatening thing, it is more all the regulations that you cannot travel from one part of Finland to another and the border to Sweden is closed. Also belonging to certain age groups and risk groups impact. If you live in a small room and cannot go to university or other places as you normally do, it may cause you depression and other mental strain. However, we have about 350 who have died from COVID-19 and we are awaiting the next wave as we experienced with the polio-epidemic. It is more scaring that the schools and other settings are trying to rob our children from their security in life, their belief in a God and in an afterlife. Those who have this belief are not so scared of the future but if you have deleted both God and the devil and have to read your future out of tarot-cards life is terrifying.
Dear Béatrice Marianne Ewalds-Kvist , I completely agree that the virus itself is only a fraction of the problem. Our society is transforming at a breathless speed -right before our eyes. As teachers, we can't just watch. In my own experience, I suddenly have to be able to talk to a student who is thinking of finishing his or her life. In fact, I believe that we will see a lot more of this.
I am a passionate teacher, and I believe that I have the duty to contribute to a solution.
In my own experience of counseling students for over 25 years, I have discovered that students benefit hugely if I create for them a safe space in which they can talk about their emotions, particularly fear. In practical terms, I advise them to spell out how precisely their fear feels. According to neuroscientists like Lisa Feldman Barrett, this increases their emotional granularity and makes them feel more in control. I am convinced that the community at large will feel less overwhelmed by the frightening consequences of the pandemic, if academics become community leaders. We can disseminate a basic understanding of the most recent scientific explanation of our emotions, and we can offer some basic guidelines on how to cope better with anxiety and depression.
Dear Christa,
You are a really devoted teacher and I am sure you succeed in your task to build a safe relationship with fearful young persons. Kind regards from Finland.
The World Health Organization has predicted that we will be facing a mental health pandemic. Even if they have exaggerated (which I hope), global society is facing the results of abdicating responsibility for our mental wellbeing for a long time. We have reached a point when there won't be any efficacious pills and there won't be enough psychiatrists for everyone.
This is no reason to despair. All it means is that we have to start to admit that the vast majority of people is caught in a tightly woven web of fears. But stress and exaggerated expectations were taking their toll even before Covid. Now the consequences of social distancing and fears about health, job, income and basic survival have aggravated the situation.
The circumstances demand that academics (the intellectual leaders of society) do something. Simply conducting research is not good enough. It has become necessary to combine research with practical initiatives.
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Fear is an element in our lives that allows us to stay alive: for example, it makes us jump out of the way when a vehicle is driving straight towards us. But fear of the future is a crippling experience. So we must learn to be more specific: if we learn to understand what exactly we are afraid of, we can decide which challenges are worth facing.
If we understand our fears better, we're able to use it to our benefit.
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