The affluent Western world where a lot of us live has often presented itself as a plethora of different options. In this world, we should ideally be able to keep ‘on the move’ by changing countries, relations and jobs, endlessly reinventing ourselves. COVID-19, currently limiting our movement and confining us at home, has become the antithesis of that. We are being told to stop, isolate, slow down, confine. What happens if slowing down is precisely what you try to resist? What does that mean for mental health in COVID-19 times?
COVID-19 psychology advice: one size fits all?
Six weeks into confinement, as a psychotherapist in Lisbon, working predominantly with urban, national and international middle-class clients in their 30s and 40s, nothing is clearer at this point than the psychological diversity of reactions to COVID-19. In psychological advice found around the internet, exclusion is key. Articles about the struggles of working parents and children in confinement exclude the particular struggles of childless couples spending time in isolation or the struggles of the families where the parents keep working through confinement. Articles focusing on couples and families tend to exclude the experience of individuals going through confinement in isolation. Articles focusing on national citizens often leave aside the expat experience of COVID-19 or what it means to be spending confinement in a country which is not your own by birth. Most articles addressing the current mental health of individuals and families in the middle-class professions leave out the experience of individuals and families living through poverty and unemployment. Against this drop, we may say that no form of psychological ‘advice’ during a pandemic is able to encompass all experiences at one time, which is right and fair. Perhaps so. Yet to the sad exclusion of situations of dire poverty where ‘mental health’ is but a layer of many other problems, there are some common aspects of psychological reactions to COVID-19 which we can refer to across many different groups, our relation to ‘choice’ being one of them.
Acceleration and choice
In therapy work, I am currently learning about the difference between accepting the invitation to ‘slow down’ which the world seems to be throwing at us at this point versus the cost of resisting that invitation. “I shall not slow down, no matter the world”, is a particularly hard rule to live by currently. Living in the fast lane is by no means a product of COVID-19 but something long preceding it. If anything, COVID-19 seems to have become its antithesis.
For Hylland Eriksen, an anthropologist writing about modernity, ‘acceleration’ is one of the most evident aspects of contemporary societies. From the exponential growth in energy uses, the quickly changing urban organization, the endless mobility of people, work and transport structures, our pre-COVID-19 life has been about living through a continuous flow of movement of peoples and goods. In a world progressively inter-connected and relentlessly in motion, choice has become embedded in anxiety. Where to live, what to do for a job, whom to be with, is not only something which belongs to the individual or the family, but also something which can be endlessly witnessed and evaluated in the public forums of social networks. In this context, being perceived as someone not making the right choices carries the risk of being perceived as someone not keeping up with a world in gradual acceleration, i.e., not keeping up to speed. Here, perhaps, we trace a first source of our current anxiety: being told to slow down while feeling we were not keeping up in the first place.
Choice in COVID-19 times
For many of us confined at home, writing a mental health story of COVID-19 times is like writing a story of people’s relation to choice. Given the extra time at home, couples reflect on how they have come to be in relation with the other person (“how did we get here?”). Single individuals confining at home reflect on the nature of their singledom and the previous history of relations (“is it me?”). In both cases, professional options are examined in greater detail and angst is going into that examination. Now and again, regret comes in for a visit. Expat individuals going through confinement in a country that is not their own by birth rethink the story of the relation with this country, their home country or other countries they have lived in before. National citizens who have considered migration previously engage again in fantasies of migration. There is anxiety about the future and ruminations about how long it will take until we go back to some form of ‘normal’. There is anxiety about making up for present time, particularly if one is living the lockdown as a form of ‘lost’ time, or time in a standstill, requiring it to be made up for, in the future. Sometimes, the lifting of the lockdown is idealized as a time in the future where all the choices which were postponed long before COVID-19 will need to be made, once and for all. Attempts are made to both think about those choices and to control forms of anticipated regret, should one not follow the right option. Economic recession adds its own layer of unrest. The mind spins.
For people with children, the anxiety of choice reaches some different destinations: getting your children back to school and risking contamination of the whole family or keeping them at home (thus increasing the difficulty of the multitasking involved for people working at home); letting them see grandparents or keeping both at bay; mediating fights between siblings as the ‘cabin fever’ and boredom sets in; listening to their children’s fears and anxieties while making sense of their own, being humble enough to recognize that despite being adults, we don’t have all the answers for what is happening at this point. Torn between juggling kids and work at home, parents too think about the meaning of their intimate relations and professional choices. In some moments there is a release of anxiety for all – couples, singles, people looking after children. For a moment, even, we are able to accept that our days at present are what they can be, they are what is possible at this point, WE are what is possible in this moment, all of this while focusing on the immediate actions of our routines. In such moments, a sense of acceptance comes through and some relief is found. The mind quietens.
The days we struggle
In the days when we struggle, we seem to want to believe that the ‘individual’ and ‘the power of the individual’ can trump an external world in quick transformation, imposing limits on our current ways. In those days, we occupy ourselves with denying the external changes of the current world. It becomes, again, not about a world confining us or limiting us in any way, but about a person, I, myself, limiting myself in whatever ways while not making the right ‘choices’. In those days or moments, we refuse the world’s current invitation to slow down. Rather, we try to make up for the current slowing down happening outside of us by accelerating from the inside: running through options, devising different plans of action, trying to beat a world marked by uncertainty and unpredictability, as if it were a race, ourselves at one end, that world at the other. ‘My inalienable right to choose will not be taken from me, we feel’. In such moments, both the body and the mind spin. Anxiety awakens.
Barry Schwartz is a psychologist reflecting on the value of choice in affluent Western societies. Schwartz’s account of the modern relation to choice is anything but serene. According to the author, facing a multitude of options, we often torture ourselves with the trade-off of every option, sometimes to the point of paralysis. For people refusing to accept trade-offs, regret is paramount. Schwartz suggests that in order to diminish choice anxiety we could try relearning to choose: we could define areas of our lives where we allow for a greater diversity of options versus areas of our lives where we take ourselves, intentionally, to a smaller set of possibilities to choose from.
As psychotherapy rewrites itself in troubled times, part of our way forward with clients may be exactly in helping people to develop a more serene relation to choice, namely by contemplating trade-offs in their full extension and accepting them, much as one can. This does not necessarily imply political passivity towards everything happening around us. A world facing all kinds of crisis (economic, ecological, ideological) needs involved citizens, more than ever before, and citizens that can teach their children to get involved. But citizen involvement and emotions don’t need to follow suit. Facing the difficult emotions arising from a changing world, limiting and confining us beyond our immediate control, we could use a place of less resistance towards trade-offs and more acceptance of whatever choices are possible at a given point. A world where a mind spinning in an accelerated state accepts the invitation to slow down and rest. Welcome to that world.