Have you been struggling with motivation during the lockdown? Do you find it almost impossible to concentrate? In spite of your best laid plans, do you find that the days are dragging on but you're still not getting anything accomplished? If you are, you're in good company: turns out, that's a pretty normal experience for a lot of people right now.
And all that would be hard enough on its own, except alongside this collective agony with getting through the basic tasks of life, there's a bunch of assholes on Instagram telling you that if you're not taking the lockdown as an opportunity to write the next King Lear or blast your abs into divine levels of shreddedness, you're a piece of shit who's failed at life.
Okay, maybe assholes is too strong a word. In many cases, they're well-intentioned Type As like me who think they're encouraging you by listing all the things they've been able to accomplish during this time. The only thing these folks are really guilty of is having an unsophisticated view of human behaviour and not understanding the impact of anxiety, trauma, and grief on the psyche.
So let's fix that. Let's talk about why you're feeling such a lack of motivation right now, why it's so hard to concentrate, and why the days are dragging on. Let's also talk about what you can do about it. And while we do, it would be great if all you Instagram influencers out there could take some notes.
The Collective Mind Fuck of Trauma and Grief
Let's be real: we've all just had our worlds turned upside down. Everything was going along just fine: we set some sick New Year's Resolutions, enjoyed the guilty pleasure of two great new reality series airing on Netflix, maybe spent some time worrying about our love handles — and then boom: the fucking world ended.
Without warning, we were plunged into terrifying uncertainty, financial hardship, the possibility of losing those we love most dearly, and thrust face to face with our own mortality.
Then there were the losses. Many of us lost our daily routine, our face-to-face contact with other human beings, our savings, our jobs, our control over our lives, our ability to trust that the world is a safe place, and, in some cases, we even lost our loved ones to a terrifying new illness.
"Mind fuck" is almost a strong enough term to describe the experience, but not quite. In the mental health world, the word we use to describe an overwhelming mind fuck is "trauma." And the word we use to describe the psychological response to such staggering loss is "grief." Either trauma or grief on their own are devastating experiences that can bring even the most heroic among us to their knees; trauma and grief together are a vicious duo that will break your heart, sap your will to live, and shatter your former view of the world.
How Trauma and Grief Impact Your Brain: They Make It Hard to Concentrate and Do Stuff
So how might you imagine this collective mind fuck on steroids would impact your ability to concentrate, motivate yourself, and effectively work toward goals? You guessed it: trauma and grief cause anxiety, impaired cognitive ability (like focus, planning, learning), sadness, intrusive thoughts (like self-criticism, upsetting memories, or fears about the future), difficulty sleeping, eating too much, eating too little, yearning for the way things were, guilt, stress that something bad could happen at any second, and a whole bunch of other stuff that make it really hard to write that amazing new screenplay or chisel out that gorgeous 8-pack.
And just so we're on the same page, this isn't touchy-feely campfire stuff -- this is science. Trauma is what happens when our ability to integrate a new experience is overwhelmed and a whole bunch of neurons get stuck and maladaptively stored in our brain. Anything that reminds us of the original traumatic event - a smell, a line in a TV show, a thought, a news story, a situation - then activate that network of neurons, and you go back to thinking, feeling, and behaving as if you were re-living the trauma all over again.
Let me be clear: ANYTHING can be a traumatizing experience. What makes something traumatic isn't what kind of situation it is, but whether or not it overwhelms your brain's capacity to integrate it. And is almost everyone having a hard time integrating what the fuck just happened? We sure are.
So imagine, for a moment, trying to write the new King Lear with that shit going on in your brain.
Grief, on the other hand, is a process of adaptation characterized primarily by sadness, guilt, and anger. It's a natural process our brains undergo to adapt to a new set of circumstances, since a loss by definition results in a new normal and requires an adaptation on our part if we are to continue to function effectively within that new normal.
Sadness slows us down so that we can reflect and integrate the experience, and it also signals to others that we need support, so they will come toward us and help us to process the event.
Guilt is also hardwired into us to encourage reflection. We feel guilt when we've acted in ways that don't align with our values. The discomfort of guilt motivates us to repair the damage that was done and change our behaviour so that we don't cause the same damage in the future.
Anger, by contrast, doesn't motivate us to pause and reflect; it energizes us to fight to get our needs met. It's the natural emotional consequence of unmet needs, which of course is part of what happens when we lose something or someone important.
All three of these emotions are integral parts of the grieving process, because all three help us to adapt to the new normal in their own ways. Unfortunately, until the grieving process has run its course and helped us adapt, these very powerful emotions also impair our ability to eat, sleep, think, feel, and behave normally.
So, if your ability to integrate an experience has been overwhelmed, then you have been traumatized. If you have experienced a loss, you’re grieving. There is no weakness involved, no morals, no campfire woo woo — just science.
The Icing on the Cake: We Need Connection to Heal from This Shit
You can imagine why, given the cacaphony of pain, confusion, and terror I've just outlined, the #GlowUpChallenge might not be psychologically feasible for a lot of people right now.
But that's probably not even the worst part of this whole experience. The icing on the cake is that the primary way human beings heal from trauma and grief is through seeking connection with others who are themselves healthy and stable.
See how this would be problematic right now? What happens when you're traumatized, grieving, AND you're not allowed to have any human contact? Or if you do have human contact, then all those with whom you connect are just as traumatized and grief-stricken as you are? Odds are, you know exactly what happens, because you're living it. Instead of helping each other to heal, we keep each other stuck, triggering each other's trauma and grief responses and spiralling into some pretty dark places.
The Psychological Impact of the #GlowUpChallenge
Enter Instagram influencers. "Hey," they think to themselves, "people aren't doing anything right now, and inactivity makes people sad! I need to motivate them to get healthy and happy by posting heavily edited photos of my abs or sharing how I designed an online course so that by 25 years old I live in a waterfront mansion in Maui and only work 4 hours a week!"
Thank you for that, my friends.
Let's look at the psychological process of what happens when grieving, traumatized, isolated people are presented with such compelling Instagram inspo.
The most likely response this will evoke in someone is shame: "I'm not living like that, so I'm a piece of shit." How does shame impact our brain and our body? Homo sapiens evolved shame to motivate us to hide when we believe we have done something that would get us kicked out of the tribe. The impulse when we feel shame is to shrink into ourselves, isolate ourselves, and shut down, because these behaviours limit the chances that our perceived defectiveness will be discovered by the tribe and result in our being kicked out to die alone on the plains.
In other words, shame is not a particularly inspiring emotion.
Tone deaf Insta posts may also activate anger as someone thinks, "These fuckers really don't get it," and thus their needs for understanding and validation are not met. Anger energizes us, but it also narrows our focus and limits our ability to think, plan, and act in any way that's any more productive than fighting off an imminent threat to our survival. In other words, also not helpful right now.
Seeing #GlowUp insta posts can also create a sense of anxiety, which I've made a bunch of videos about, and which also makes it nearly impossible to think clearly or act effectively.
These kind of posts can also, of course, have the effect of shoving your face in everything you've lost, triggering and adding to the trauma or grief responses outlined above. Again, worsening your grief or exacerbating your traumatization aren't great sources of inspo to finally get that dream body or start your own business.
But The Insta Influencers Aren't Totally Wrong
Still, no one is ever 100% wrong. The seed of truth in the #GlowUpChallenge is that it's actually true that not doing anything and avoiding what scares you does make your mental health worse. In psychotherapy, our fancy word for not doing anything is "behavioural deactivation," and the research shows that it's very clearly linked to depression. No one came up with a fancy word for avoiding stuff so we just call it avoidance, but it is well-documented to cause and contribute to both anxiety disorders and trauma-related disorders.
So then there is actually wisdom in the belief that becoming totally paralyzed by our grief and our trauma will make things worse and slow down our ability to recover from everything we're living through. But the way to get motivated to care for ourselves isn't by scrolling through post after post on social media that shame us, enrage us, sadden us, or re-traumatize us.
So What Can We Do?
If you injured your shoulder, I sincerely hope you wouldn't just look at pictures on Instagram of people with healthy shoulders and shame yourself for not being more like them. What I hope you'd do is reach out to a physiotherapist and start getting some manual therapy and doing some stretching and strengthening until your shoulder felt better and was functional and mobile again.
Similarly, if you started getting a weird rash that was really itchy and uncomfortable, you probably wouldn't just sit around telling yourself that it's okay that you have a weird rash and you accept yourself just as you are because you're still lovable and fuck all those rash-free people who think they're better than you. You'd probably call your doctor, get some cream, follow your doctor's advice about how often to rub the cream on your rash, and eventually go back to your formerly itch-free life.
So what do you do if stress, anxiety, depression, trauma, or grief are getting in the way of you enjoying and living your life? Well, that's where psychotherapy comes in. Those of us who are actually good at our jobs will work with you to help your brain get back on track with its natural healing process so you can live life on your terms and start enjoying it again. First, though, we'll explain to you what's going on so you know you're not crazy, and we'll tell you how we're going to work together to get you back to enjoying life. (Those of us who are not good at our jobs will do none of the above, smile and nod for an hour, then take your hard-earned money. Don't waste your time with these folks.)
Is your suffering during all of this valid? Abso-fucking-lutely. Do you have every right to be scared, angry, worried, insecure, stressed, unmotivated, or traumatized right now? You sure do. Is the #GlowUpChallenge the answer? Probably not. Is there nonetheless something you can do to come back to yourself and start feeling better? There sure is.
Psychotherapists are here to help you during this time. Reaching out to us because stress, anxiety, grief, or trauma is interfering with your life is no more shameful or awkward than calling a physiotherapist when your shoulder hurts or seeing your GP when you get a weird rash. We're going to get through this, and a good psychotherapist will help you do it as wisely, compassionately, and quickly as possible.
Whether or not you end up reaching out, know that we’re sending you all love as you navigate these difficult times.