It is no secret that during eight months of quarantine, lockdowns, disease fear-mongering, the unfortunate succumbing statistics, incited by both rational and amplified pandemic news reports, the increased levels of anxiousness, depression and impatience are dangerously redefining what it means to be alive in the era of covid.

With the constant perception of contagion a paranoid cough away, many latent psychological distress have raged out of deceptive hibernation. Heighten anger, resentment, melancholy, and guilt – and the well-being-compromising escapes they trigger (substance abuse) – are now becoming acute repercussions of the seeming loss of peaceful equilibrium. 

But restorative peace is not lost, in fact, it is only densely obscured. You can authentically anchor peace of mind during the chaotic pandemic flurry of fear and anxiety. You can indeed be, “in it but not of it” so that you actualize the peace you so genuinely desire to experience. The following four steps can serve as a roadmap to peaceful accommodation of your well-being as a state of mind. Apply them and be the peace you desire to witness.

See through rather than look at
There is this delightful TV commercial (for ol’ skool folks who still watch TV) where a child off-camera in another room can be heard lamenting to his mom that he’s experienced a bruise of some sort, and she, reading in the staid calmness of another room on-camera, gently encourages the semi-panicked son to, ‘get a band-aid’ to which the off-camera child continues to stress his distress to which she then says without missing a beat, “well then, get two” (band-aids), barely removing her focus from her tranquil reading repose.

This depiction epitomizes the idea of ‘seeing through something rather than looking at something” – the mom character in the ad is seeing through the reactionary hailing from the son and responding accordingly and appropriately. 

Become determined to see through the madness depicted in news reports of the grim state of things rather than reactionarily looking at the drama of the traumas displayed. This does not render you neutral or uncaring to calamity and or pain witnessed in the least, it renders you non manipulated so that you can respond rather than react. You can respond with compassion or suitable recourse to matters witnessed as opposed to reacting to the distress and thereby triggering your own sympathetic nervous system to mirror the witnessed distress and in turn undermining your own equilibrium.  

Cease trading peace for a charge

There’s an old idiom in the news reporting business (that unfortunately, still applies today) that goes, “if it bleeds, it leads” – meaning that the news stories that are the most viscerally distraught should lead the headlines, broadcast (or in this day of the internet, newsfeeds) to grab the audience’s attention. 

This shock-value climate, by its own nature, must continue to “up the ante” of titillation in order for the “shock” to remain shocking. And in a world now with as many “broadcast” as there are people with phones, the cacophony of noise dedicated to “shock to be heard” creates a nervous system acclimated to overstimulation. Obviously, this does not bode well for peace of mind at all. 

Decide to cease trading your peace for the charge of incitement. The saving grace of your capacity to accommodate peace is that the brain’s nature is to acclimate. This means that the brain will most assuredly acclimate to the equilibrium of peace as it has acclimated to the agitation and stimulating charge of shock. 

How is this readily accomplished? By retrieving your interest. Rather than allowing your interest to be led by the shocking, chose to redirect what you are interested in. Choose to be interested in what empowers rather than what shocks, choose to be interested in what is compelling about natural phenomena rather than the fabricated, purposefully attention-getting manufactured – (ever spend a period of time just witness the beach ocean tide flow in and out? – absolutely hypnotic in its own compelling nature!). 

You establish peace by directing your interest towards it rather than being a passive lemming being manipulated by the manipulators. Decide that your peace is not up for grabs to the nearest shock-manipulating source. You are not ignoring so much as you are deciding. A decision is a powerful thing.

Take a nice, warm, stress-relieving bath
In our everything-must-get-done-right-now lifestyles we don’t realize the accruing stress that “live-by-deadline” pressure exacts from well-being. “Take a chill bath!” (You men too!) A warm bath literally releases the energetic stress the body absorbs from the mind’s exposure to distress – both personal and worldly. 

The temporary energy drain you experience after a warm bath soak is actually the draining out of your system the hypertension of heighten agitation. The energy that then begins to restore itself is free of the existential pressure of environmental energy compromise. Make a point to engage your ‘energy restore’ bath soak frequently – you then return to your “regularly schedule life” renewed and revitalize of mind, body and spirit! 

Drink more water!
It’s no secret hydration benefits everything about your being. From releasing toxins in the body to lubricating bones and joints, to naturally thinning the blood minimizing cardiovascular and stroke risk. Water does a body good! If you’re one of those people that doesn’t like plain water (cease qualifying all those crappy consumed liquids as ‘having water in it’) – that’s only because the ‘acclimation’ process cited in Peace Step #2 has created a sugar-flavored appetite and dulled the taste buds to the quenching refreshment of good ol’ fashion H2O! 

A good suggestion until the re-acclimation occurs is to try drinking iced water to fool the tastebuds into thinking you are consuming a flavored treat! Your friendly hypnotherapist recently obtained one of those popular two-liter (8.5 cups) water containers with encouraging (and funny) written measurement statements on them encouraging you to complete your daily quotient of water consumption. 

Even after the humorous novelty wears off you find that psychologically, you don’t want to get behind the daily written metrics causing you to consistently consume a daily, healthy intake of water. (Instead of just carrying that metal or yoga-cute canister containing water that typically just sits in the container as a travel accessory providing the illusion of drinking plenty of water.) 

These peace-generating steps empower your capacity to be in it but not of it enabling you to be the peace you desire to see.

Do Peace.