Coronavirus isolation is causing extreme anxiety, trauma that most people can't cope with, warns expert
As the coronavirus rages on and continues to spread, many countries and their governments have resorted to enforcing lockdowns to prevent the virus from spreading within communities.
The lockdowns have bought daily life to a standstill and old routines have had to be modified severely to adjust to the new normal. This change has been a shock to most people on an individual level as well as a global level. The days since the outbreak of COVID-19, have been hard. Anxiety levels have spiked, causing reactions ranging from distress to a severe sense of isolation.
Dr Tracy Thomas, emotional sensitivity expert, spoke to MEA WorldWide (MEAWW) exclusively to provide some insights on how the lockdown could be affecting people's mental wellbeing. "This is a huge 'emotional pattern shift' where so many things have changed at once, this is a great shock to the human system to not only make sense all of these changes, lose all these liberties and to emotionally process this new reality, this pattern shift is a total shock to people’s emotional system," she shared.
Looking at the impact of the lockdown on an individual level, she explained how this level of change is very fast-paced and so "people are forced into an emotional 'adjustment to reality' (reality check) that most humans don’t have the emotional capacity for."
"For most people, their coping skills are not used to needing to adapt at this level, so when something significant like this happens the reactivity is off the charts and the trauma is extreme," she added.
While on a global level, each country will react and experience the consequences of the pandemic as per their cultural conditioning.
"This is in itself a representation of how populations have responded to being human (human traumas) over the course of human history. So whatever the previous emotional patterns are of the collective society in each country, each country will be affected based on how emotionally strong they were in the first place," Dr Tracy shared.
Explaining this further, she said that if a country is better at processing their emotions into productive results and outcomes, then the country will likely do better than countries that deal poorly with their emotional abilities. This can also be applied to an individual as well.
"The reality is that we are all connected through one big emotional matrix of experience and wherever there are emotional weaknesses in any part of our global society, then we are all subject to experience the emotional effect of them. And wherever our emotional strengths lie from one country to another, we will be lifted up as a global society, through the emotional strength of our fellow countries," she revealed.
As seen with one of the worst-hit countries in this pandemic, Italy, the community had initially responded in a very positive way while dealing with the outbreak. "Italy reacted with it’s most productive emotional response, which was to have the positive attitude they are known for that makes them the number one place in the world that people want to spend time in."
"However, as the weeks have gone on and their foundational emotional strength was put to the ultimate test, the other reactions they are known for have also surfaced, which is the other end of the pendulum when it comes to being a highly emotional culture, which is the anger, rage, and revenge qualities that they are also known for," she added.
While discussing the consequences and impact of the pandemic on people, Dr Tracy explained how this "global reactivity" has the power and means to "create more emotionally driven disease, death, disorder, dysfunction, and destruction, than ever seen in human history."
Thanks to the internet and social media, the ability to spread the emotional disease of reactivity is very high and so "we being intentional is a requirement more than ever." She also shared that we currently possess the power to harm ourselves with viral reactivity and that "we will all continue to be impacted by reactivity if we don't collectively harness our negative emotions towards our greater purposes, by using our creativity, NOT our reactivity, which always causes the opposite outcomes that people intend."
With regards to the aftermath of the coronavirus in terms of how people will interact with one another, Dr Tracy believes that at its worst, there is more reactivity, fear, and more of creating outcomes opposite of what we want.
"At it’s best, now there will be more self-awareness of what people are actually doing so they interact with each other intentionally and purposely in a way that our society has always needed for us to do. Ideally, people will now be more conscious of what they are doing when they are interacting with others and focusing attentively on what they want to achieve, rather than acting in default ways that aren’t good for humans anyway."
"If we can all recognize our reactivity and instead choose to be intentional, purposeful, and creative in our dealings with each other, this is the major benefit that will come from all of this difficulty. This is the vision that I have for everyone in the world," she said.