Most of us, including me, do believe that “normalcy” will re-enter our lives at some point, and my guess is that May-June is when we will all be back at our favorite restaurants, enjoying baseball games and basketball playoffs on television and being back at the office instead of our home library conducting our work. However, on a minute-to-minute, hour-to-hour and day-to-day basis, the situation is very difficult on our psyches. Some of us feel lots of anger, many an abundance of anxiety and an ever-increasing amount of people will have depression set in.
There are no magic words such as “everything will be fine” that will assuage people and immediately hoist them out of depressed moods. I wish I had some magic to share with you but the best I can attempt as your doctor is to make some recommendations. Here goes:
- GET OUTSIDE: I posted this recently and I will emphatically state this again: The very worst thing to do to get out of depression is to sit inside, watch the news channels and take in all of the depressing news. To hear how many new cases are occurring (well, duh, now that we have increasing testing, there are gonna be LOTS more “new” cases diagnosed…how about the people that recovered beautifully without ever being tested???) and how many deaths (remember, the flu season kills 12,000-61000 Americans a year and we don’t get the body count nightly like we do now with Covid-19) occur daily significantly add to depressed feelings. This doesn’t even include the depressing financial news scrolling at the bottom of their screens as to how much money we have all lost that day.
- TALK TO YOUR LOVED ONES EVERY DAY: We have these beautiful video conferencing platforms such as Zoom so let’s take advantage of this. Talk to your siblings, your children, grandchildren and teach your parents how to download one of the video conferencing platforms.
- WORK ON YOURSELF: This is a great time to focus on weight control, as we all have more time to plan meals, get some extra exercise time in, get outside for walks/jogs/biking etc.
- WATCH HAPPY/POSITIVE/FUNNY SHOWS: Laughing is one of the best non-pharmaceutical remedies for depression. We all have these streaming services and there are different categories displayed to choose from. I suggest you head right to the “comedies” and NOT the horror genre.
If you need any medical help to intervene with anxiety/depression/insomnia, I am readily available 7 days a week.
History has shown that time and time again, pandemics resolve and normalcy returns. This will be the case here as well. Hang in there.
