Feeling stressed? Welcome to the easing of lockdown!

If you have been feeling more anxious or tetchy since the easing of lockdown began, you are not alone. Even before George Floyd’s tragic death and the ensuing protests, stress levels were rising.
Anecdotally - just in every day life - incidences of confrontations and arguments were already on the increase. I genuinely witnessed a ten minute argument between a 5 year old child in a communal courtyard and a (usually placid) dog on the neighbour’s balcony. Each time the boy shouted
“You’re a stupid dog!”
Chica retorted with a growl and indignant bark. It was, as so many things are these days, vaguely surreal. So what’s going on?

It seems we’d all gotten rather used to having our own space for one. Not just literally but head space too. Peace and quiet. Bird song. Smelling the roses. As someone whose apartment lies diagonally opposite the London helipad, just off the Heathrow flight path and on the Thames, the difference was palpable. Once the fear had subsided, there was a sense of calm. When the sun shone, as it did unusually regularly for a British springtime, it ironically felt somehow freeing.

Now though, the skies are once again roaring, the trains rolling and the noise of others is seemingly all around. Social distancing in the supermarket aisle is all but a distant memory as yet another person leans over you to get what they want. The traffic is beginning to jam and the dredging up of ancient Hollywood blockbusters begins to grate: Welcome to the easing of lockdown.

Surely though the prospect of being allowed out, in whatever form that is, must be worth more than a bit of placidity? Well, herein lies the rub; we may be allowed more concessions, but in reality it falls far short of liberation. You can go to the park, but you are gonna have to pee in a bush. Yes, you can sit in a friend’s garden, just so long as you can get there - and back - without the use of public transport.

For many this controlled existence harks back to darker times. Troubled teenage years, unsatisfactory childhoods, relationships that did not work. There is a sense perhaps that we don’t trust those who are setting the rules anymore. A feeling of manipulation and an agenda that has less to do with keeping us safe than it has to do with keeping us in place. It is a most uncomfortable feeling having rules dictated to us - especially when it’s so very difficult to comprehend their true purpose.

No surprise then that many of us are reporting a rise in stress levels. If we take a look at some of the factors impacting our lives at the moment, we can begin to understand just how ‘normal’ a reaction this is:

The unknown
Although lockdown is easing and some parts of the economy and society are active again, we really don’t have an understanding of what this will look like or how it will feel. If and when we can dine out, is it really going to be an enjoyable experience? Will trying on clothes in a fitting room suddenly feel incredibly exposing - might we be risking our health for the sake of a T-shirt? On the flip side, are we needlessly being deprived of cultural events - theatre, live music, art - on a nationwide blanket ban without good reason? Essentially, we don’t know and as university professor Nick Carlton puts it “fear of the unknown may be a, or possibly the, fundamental fear”.
Not knowing what to expect and if we can allow ourselves to hope to enjoy our favourite activities is bound to increase anxiety.

Uncertainty
In the UK at least, whatever you may think of the government’s handling of the pandemic, there have been many temporary measures put in place to support people financially. Although there are certainly those who slipped through the gaps, it meant that for most as we cocooned from the world, we could at least eat. Many were put on furlough, meaning that for the time being they still had their jobs to go back to. Jump forward a few weeks however and it’s all change. Thousands of job losses are on the cards and even for those that survive, contracts are being changed to favour employers. Economic uncertainty abounds and future plans and dreams aren’t just put on hold, but risk being crushed altogether. A hard notion to get to grips with.

Societal shifts
In a fascinatingly timed article in The New Yorker Magazine, Yale professor and author Frank M. Snowden said “Epidemics are a category of disease that seem to hold up the mirror to human beings as to who we really are.” And that “ To study them is to understand society’s structure, its standard of living, and its political priorities.”.

It was March 3rd, George Floyd was going about his daily life, the U.S. had 100 known cases of the virus and only 9 deaths. Less than three months later and there were 100,000 U.S. deaths, George Floyd had been brutally killed and society changed forever. Although nobody could have predicted the tragic incident that triggered them, there is an implicit suggestion that the Black Lives Matter protests with their wealth of feeling and support from both the black and wider communities, could have been foreseen.

Pandemics, it seems, have a long history linked to societal atrocities, protest and uprising. Snowden writes “Epidemic diseases are not random events that afflict societies without warning, on the contrary, every society produces its own specific vulnerabilities.” As Opal Tometi Co-founder of the Black Lives Matter movement clearly states “We need to be able to have the opportunity to have a life of dignity, and the possibility to thrive."

With the risk of a global pandemic apparently on the radar of governments for decades, maybe a more insightful leadership might have addressed the underlying issues sooner and avoided so much fracture and heartbreak. Such monumental societal shifts are bound to bring all kinds of feelings to the surface and part of the stress is working through how to make sense of them.

We haven’t won
As it stands not only have we not won the ‘war’ against Covid-19, but the battle isn’t even over. I recall near the beginning of the outbreak, when it dawned on the UK government that herd immunity was an entirely unfeasible strategy if excess deaths were to be avoided. A graph on the news at the time predicted that we may enter into an ongoing cycle of lockdown and release until a vaccine has been found. Although I haven’t heard it recently, the fact is, we don’t know what happens next. We hope things are beginning to come under control, due to the changes we have all made, but only time will tell. The easing of lockdown then, is less celebration and more trepidation. An uneasy and indeed fretful truth to live with.

The elements I mention above are of course only a part of the picture. Individual circumstances are contributing to our own personal feelings of frustration, injustice, grief and realisation. If then, you’d noticed the stress monster breathing down your neck of late, it perhaps isn’t all that surprising. In fact it is incredible how we are all coping. We have strength within us and we need to be brave enough to reach out and seek the support we need. There is a future and whatever happens around us, it is we who shall create and shape it. There is hope - and that hope lies in the thoughts, decisions and actions of each and every one of us.