COPING WITH COVID-19

It is so hard to believe that a little over a month ago, everything was normal. We were making plans to go on a family vacation to visit our friends in Spain. The business was going well for me, and I was getting ready to make some significant business decisions. Life was good, and all of a sudden, things changed.

To be honest, I never really thought that it was possible to go through a pandemic during our lifetimes. An epidemic was something that we saw on sci-fi movies, and it was not something that we would experience; talk about living in a bubble. I guess I am not the only one who thought this would be impossible.

It has been a crazy month for everybody, and I don't think I have ever experienced this much stress in my life. I did have a breakdown in our second week of quarantine. I had a little too much to drink, and I started crying because of the stress and uncertainties this pandemic has brought into our lives. As tempting as it is to have wine every day, I try to keep to 2 times per week because I know it is not healthy. There are countless amounts of uncertainties that we have to deal with, such as trying to keep our families healthy, the economy, and whether this will change us all in such a way that we will never be the same. I used to wake up in the middle of the night and read the news, mostly horrible stories of what other people were going through. I decided that doing that was no longer serving me any purpose, but stress.

Once I eliminated all the unnecessary news reading, I realized that I was feeling better emotionally. For me, it took reducing useless news in my life to realize that I was practicing emotional self-care. It is important that we practice self-care in our lives to be more emotionally stable during this pandemic.