How to Stay Sane During a Pandemic

In this strange moment where the epidemic is dominating our headlines, it's even more important than ever to pay attention to our emotions, to our well being, and to how those things relate to the stories we read in the news. Life as we know it is turned upside down. Schools are closed, offices are closed, long lines at supermarkets. It's very easy to feel anxious, it's very easy to feel hopeless.

But Laurie Santos has some good tips for how to cope, or she would probably put it how to regulate herself.

She's a professor of psychology at Yale University, where one of her classes, called Psychology and the Good Life, has become the most popular class in the history of Yale University and has attracted five hundred thousand students on a Coruserah, you heard that right, Pushkin Fans may also know Laurie as the host of The Happiness Lab, her podcast where she uses scientific research to talk about how to achieve

and maintain happiness and well being in life. Needless to say it, Laurie is more than qualified to help us deal with coronavirus anxiety. She is, in fact, the one go to expert that you can think of. Laurie, Let's just start with your own personal experience and what you're doing to stay happy. You're in charge of a college of three hundred or four hundred undergraduates who are all have all flown the coup, So you have a very large, very empty nest. How are you handling it? It's been

surreal and really sad. Honestly, Yale had this very incredible situation where as Corona is emerging as this awful threat, was while our students were on spring break, and so Yale made the really hard decision to kick students off campus when they are all off on spring break wherever they were. You know. So we had students who were in cancoon with a small backpack and things, and they're told, hey,

don't come back. You know, we'll figure out a way to get your textbooks and your laptops and all that stuff back to you. And so for our students, it was really frantic, right because they didn't even get to say goodbye to their friends or pack up their stuff. Many of them don't know when they're getting their stuff

because we can't let them on campus. And so managing that anxiety for four hundred other students at the same time as I'm managing my own anxiety, and I'm sad I don't get to say goodbye to these students, and I'm uncertain about what's going to happen next and how long it's going to take. So it's been it's been a lot, both processing it myself and seeing it through the student's eyes. You sound very much, unsurprisingly in touch with what you're feeling, which is excellent for the us.

It may not always be so simple to access our full set of feelings. How important is it in your view for us to try to be more or less aware of or conscious of the strange different emotions that are coursing through all of us still right now? I mean, I think it's absolutely essential, if for the only reason that the only way we're going to make it through this crisis. Is to make sure our immune systems are functioning at their absolutely optimal level to protect us against

this physical health threat. And I think that means that we need to take the mental health threat of this crisis really seriously, Like we're plunging people into social distancing, basically not letting them do the one thing that they really want to do at this time in their life, to feel connected and close with other people, you know,

hug their mom. We basically can't do that anymore. I think we know that just the anxiety and uncertainty of the situation is the kind of thing that can lead people to say, have things like panic attacks and so on. One of the most awful things is that, you know, a main symptom of coronavirus is you have the shortness of breath. That's also the main symptom of feeling anxious, right, And so I think a lot of us are even seeing these phantom symptoms and wondering do I have it?

Am I really shorter breath? What am I feeling? And so I think getting through this crisis successfully is going to require a lot. It's going to require figuring out political infrastructure, of figuring out medical infrastructure, But I think it's also going to involve all of us individually doing everything we can to make sure we're flourishing as much as we can to keep ourselves sane and physically healthy.

Were you hinting, as I thought maybe you were, that there might actually be some clinical connection between mental well being and a well functioning immune system. Oh, there's so much evidence that immune function really requires not having stress and so on. So we know, for example, that really

upping your sympathetic nervous system function can affect immune functioning too. Right, So I think allowing yourself to be incredibly stressed out, allowing yourself not to sleep that much, both of those things are not great for protecting your body against viruses, you know. Add to that the kind of panic eating that we're all doing, of sugar and ice cream and

these kinds of things. These aren't great for our bodies to fight off threats like normal level threats, let alone the kind of threat that we're facing that's so virulently contagious. I'm impressed you still have ice cream left. I had to empty everything out of everything in essentially out of my freezer to put in the vast amounts of protein that I need to support two growing deans is the plus and minus of living in a huge bunker that

is normally there to support four hundred students. You know, once my college is empty, I'm sitting on freezers of you know, thirty pounds of mozzarealistics and so on. So I really have to keep the panic eating and check. Can I ask you about something that's really been on my mind, and you alluded to it earlier when you mentioned that we can't do something that gives us a great sense of well being, namely to have meaningful human contact.

I'm concerned that there's like a Corona associated social media paradox. And the paradox is, on the one hand, as you've shown and other people have shown, too much reliance on phones and other technologies can actually have an alienating effect on our ability to form meaningful social connections. And yet in this Corona moment, when we say, well, how will we maintain social connection, the immediate answer that everyone has is,

let's use zoom, Let's use FaceTime. Let's transform snapchat from something that I'm trying to keep my kids off off to something which I'm encouraging them to use in reasonable proportion. So is there, in fact some social media paradox in this moment? Yeah, I think even I even had some folks criticizing me over email because we've just for our

own Pushkin podcast, the Happiness Lab. We just started a Facebook group because people want to connect in this time, And people wrote to me saying like, didn't you and your course say that Facebook is really bad for us and it promotes anxiety and depression, And yes, so I

think there's a paradox there. I think for a long time, technology in particular kinds of technology, right using our phone to scroll through an Instagram feed rather than picking up our phone, and like calling a parent from far away, we are often using technology in ways that socially limit us, that prevent us from connecting with other people. The irony is that that is all we have right now. We can't physically connect with people and the way we normally would.

But these technologies are really going to be a lifeline. The key is that we have to use them the right way, and I think most of us haven't built up the right muscles for how to use these technologies in a positive way to connect with people. So, for example, my first instinct when I'm feeling a little anxious is to hop on Twitter or to hop on Facebook and just kind of scroll through, Like my instinct is like that will make me feel social. I'll see what other

people are talking about. But that is having exactly the wrong reaction, like I'm not really connecting with people in real time, I'm kind of experiencing all their anxiety from their posts. A better way to connect with folks would be to use things like FaceTime or Zoom, when you can see people in real time, see their expressions, talk with them, see the kinds of things that they're doing. Maybe even have shared activities together where we can watch

Netflix together or cook a meal together. Those things the science suggests are ways that technology you really can connect us for the most part. I mean, we do lose some things by having things on technology, obviously, things like touch and so on. But for the most part, in real life conversation where we are in real time watching video of what someone's doing, if you have a decent connection, that can make you feel incredibly connected. And it's the one thing that a lot of us are going to

rely on. And so I think we need to be careful about this paradox because some people have this knee jerk reaction of like, oh, technology is bad, it's going to hurt social connection. Given that that's all we have, we need to find the best ways to make use of it so that we can decrease loneliness in this really potentially really lonely time. So then, to summarize, then, Professor Santos is less than number one for social media

is something like talk, don't scroll. Yes, yeah, get as close to replicating a real and an irl human connection as you can and avoid the scroll, which we know is not the most heartening undertaking. That's exactly right, And I think I love that you use the word real social connection. And it's important to remember what that looks like. That doesn't look like a work meeting where we schedule it on zoom and we meet exactly at seven pm

and so on. That looks like I run into somebody at the water cooler or I just chat with somebody at the coffee shop. We need to find ways to use these technologies in really like low key kinds of

ways that don't feel so formal. So I I keep hearing from friends who are using things like FaceTime to kind of make dinner together where you just put it on in the background and you're running around chasing after your kids, and like when you can come to the screen, you come to the screen, but it doesn't feel as formal. I did this with my college roommates last night, and we did a spa night together. So once someone was steaming their face, and someone was putting on a mask,

and someone was just like painting their nails. It's not formal. It's kind of low key. That's what we need right now. What we're losing is the low key stuff, the kind of informal ways of running into each other. But again, if you kind of do a little scheduling and use

these technologies, we can replicate that mostly well. Any advice on how to break the ice in those situations, I mean, if you're with your college roommates or people you've loved for many years, it might be a little easier than with people who are sort of in the middle ground

that you know when you like you know. I have found that the distance between formal encounter and non formal encounter in these spaces is actually kind of big, and I feel a little awkward even with people or colleagues that I might sit down after work and have a drink with. One of them said, well, why don't we have a drink on you know, on zoom or on FaceTime, And I said yes, But I keep on delaying it

because I think I'm worried that it'll be awkward. Yeah, I think this is another spot where our minds lie to us. I think the startup cost is awkward, you know what I mean, Like we all have like, oh is your a mic on? Like, oh, move your thing, I can't see your face. There is that awkward startup cost, there's no question, But once you get into it, it's actually a lot more pleasant than we expect. I think we put in too much emphasis on that startup cost,

which causes us not to schedule these things. But in practice, once you do them, I mean, I've had lots of different versions of these now because we've been kind of stuck in the house for about two and a half weeks now, and all of them kind of feel like they're going to be awkward, but in practice they work

out pretty well. With one group of friends, we did games with a roommate of mine from grad school and like her ex boyfriend slash friend, and he was in a different spot and we decided to play celebrity like this dumb like party game, and I was like, this is just not going to work. And I was again kind of dreading it and like putting off doing it. But then in practice, once we did it, you know, fifteen minutes in we were just playing the game and

it was fine. So our minds adapt incredibly quickly to these technologies. We just have to overcome that misconception that it's not going to be fun or it's just going to be too awkward, so it's not worth it. We'll be back in just a moment, So okay, next question. This has also been very much front of mine for me, creation of routine and schedule when stuck at home. Intuitively, it seems as though that would be very important, and so I lectured my children unwisely before actually talking to

the psychologist. But is there anything to that routine is essential? You know, that's not just an old wives tale. I think if there's anything we can do to have more routine in our life, all the better. And so one of the things I've been advising my students about is to create their own rituals. You know, whatever you used to do in the morning before you were stuck in

your parents' house. Keep doing that right now. If that was getting up to go to the gym, you know, drag out a towel and do some exercises on the floor, if that was getting dressed up to like run off to your first class and grab a coffee you know, on your way there at the coffee shop. Find a way to replicate that. The more we can feel like we have a normal schedule, the better we're going to get through this. And part because when you don't have

a routine, you kind of just feel off. One great thing about habits and routines is that they just what to do without anxiety. You know, I just know that when I get up in the morning, you know, I hit my yoga mat, and then I take a shower, and then I get a coffee, and then I start working on podcast stuff. It just is my day. If you don't have those routines in place, it can feel kind of uncertain. You're like, well, what do I do next? You know, do I take a shower down? Like what's

going on? And that a little bit of uncertainty on top of all the other anxiety, on top of all the other uncertainties, we're facing right now. It does two things like it first of all, it just doesn't feel good, But second of all, it makes it harder to get your tasks done. So imposing some kind of routine, even if it's a fake routine, even if it's a new routine, I think can be incredibly powerful. And it's especially powerful for kids. Right even if you're doing kind of homeschooling.

Right now, you know, set up like this is the reading hour, and now it's the take a break hour, and now it's the lunch hour. That can really really help kids. And even if you have kids at home and you're like the heck with homeschooling, like I'm just going to let them watch Netflix, even still have a routine, like you know, from nine to two is the Netflix time, and we take a break at new for lunch, And any routine you can kind of impose on yourself is

going to feel amazing. Well, I'm glad that I've managed to get that accidentally right. But my question is actually, why why are human beings creatures of scheduling anhabit in this way? I mean, just from a purely evolutionary perspective, doesn't seem super obvious that this would be so optimal for us, you know, when you know, when out there hunting and gathering on the velt, what's so great about a routine? Yeah, it just kind of reduces our choice,

and choice can feel really overloading. Right, So if you have to make a choice every morning, like should I shower first, should I exercise first? Should I get coffee first? Like I check my email? That can feel incredibly paralyzing. And so the brain just has a trick to avoid those kinds of choices where it just says, hey, if you did something yesterday that was rewarding, lay down that track in the brain so that you can just do that over again without having to make the choice of

doing it. It means sometimes that we sometimes lay down tracks that are rewarding that aren't great for us. You know, some of us are now realizing that the habits that we have at night, for say, snacking all the time, those might not work when you're in your house twenty

four seven. Right, So sometimes we lay down bad tracks, but often we've laid down tracks that are rewarding before, and it just reduces the choice that allows us to kind of get on with our day without getting sort of stymied by like, well, well, what should come next? We kind of just know what comes next because it

sort of feels natural. We can sort of do things on autopilot, which, to the extent that they're rewarding it kind of works to help us avoid all these choices that can feel so so overwhelming it otherwise really overwhelming time. So routine is one mechanism of reducing anxiety by reducing choices. What are some other tools that people can use on their own to address anxiety in the current current situation?

And I think I want to tweak the question to say, you know, it's not just the general question of anxiety. It's anxiety that's in some degree justified. It's not really the situation of the patient who comes to you and says, you know, doctor, I have anxiety and you say what about and the person can't even express it. It's it's

not you know, grounded in reason. Here. If you're not a little bit anxious about what's going on in the world right now, or the probabilities of getting Corona where the launchm economic effects or your job were your four oh one k, or the well being of your loved ones, you're actually not rational like, I mean, some degree of rationality here mandates some degree of anxiety. So how do

you think people should manage that set of issues? Yeah, I mean, I think one way to frame it is that emotions are tools, right in some sense, is the best way to think about them. They're there for a reason, and as you said, there's a reason we're supposed to feel anxious in this situation. We can't be going out

and being social. It's an incredible risk, right. We have to have some degree of anxiety if we're going to flatten the curve, if we're going to do what we need to personally do to protect ourselves in our family. That said, being so anxious that you're not sleeping, being so anxious that you can't work if your job demands you working from home. This doesn't feel good, and it's

ultimately not a great way to deal with the problem. Again, because kind of spiking your sympathetic nervous system is not great for your immune function. That's not going to be an awesome thing that you're doing to your body to help it fight incoming viruses, And it just feels really yucky. And so I think it's not a matter of getting rid of anxiety completely or kind of polyannishly pretending that everything's fine. It's just using your anxiety wisely. And I

think that differs for different people. I mean, I know I can just speak for myself. I can feel when I've been on social media a little bit too long, when I've been kind of panic scrolling, when I'm learning information that's not helping me, it's just making me incredibly more anxious. Right. I think everyone needs to know the symptoms of this virus. You know, they need to be thinking about kind of planning for how they're going to

get food and you know, keep their family safe. But if you're on article number seven hundred that says, you know, look for cough and shortness of breath and fever, that's not helping anymore. You have to watch for yourself what it's doing to your emotions, what it's doing to your sleep scheduled, what it's doing to your kid's anxiety. I have lots of folks with young kids who are reporting to me that they're watching their kids pick up on

their own anxious scrolling and so on and so. In terms of what to do, I think part of it is just recognizing it. It's noticing like, huh, I've kind of thrown my body into a tizzy reading that last article about you know how twenty year olds can catch this like useful information. But I didn't need to spike myself that badly. And then I think you're feeling that, know what your own go too's are to feel a little bit better. For some of us, that can start

with just taking a really conscious breath. For me personally, I know that when I'm getting anxious, I can just kind of watch my chest muscles tightening. I can feel that I'm really taking these really shallow breaths. And for sometimes in those cases, I just force myself to be like, all right, I'm gonna do just like three deep breaths. And just the act of doing that has a real

physiological effect. What you're doing is you're kind of putting the brakes on your sympathetic nervous system and turning on your parasympathetic nervous system, which, if the sympathetic nerves system is sort of the fight or flight, the parasympathetic is kind of the rest and digest. You know, It's the thing that can allow you to do your normal bodily functions. So your body can kind of go through its normal day,

but it needs a little help. And deep belly breathing, which is just kind of taking deep breaths where you're breathing lower in your belly rather than in your chest. That can kind of help making sure you're taking deeper breaths so you're not kind of in the kind of mode where we breathe or kind of having a panic attack. Those things sound so simple, but they can be incredibly powerful. The second thing I would suggest is to find ways to distract yourself. That is hard right now, and even

our best podcasts are running their coronavirus episodes. I know we're contributing to the problem even as we speak, Even if we are telling people how to calm down, don't listen to us, we are making it worse. And I you know, I can feel that too. And it's like, you know, I go on my social media, I'm like, I wish it was just cat video as people like what happened to my normal Reddit feed of like silly animal stuff. You know, but you know that stuff is

still out there. You know there are funny Netflix movies you can watch and so on, and laughter is a real anxiety reducer and is also thought to be something that can potentially bump up immune function by kind of letting the parasympath nervous system kind of take its action and sort of shut off the fight or flight, even for a little while, it can be powerful. So what

I'm hearing, I think is two different approaches. One is, notice what stimuli are making you respond anxiously, and maybe don't subject yourself to those stimuli and constant subjection, yeah or no when you're doing it right. I mean, what I've found is that for me, it's the specific, awful stories of coronavirus hurting someone. If I was one of these folks who was not sheltering in place, and I was thinking about, well, maybe I'll go out to a bar right now, maybe I need a little bit of anxiety.

Maybe I need to read that story. But me right now, who's been sheltering in place for two weeks, who already knows the symptoms and is already worried, I didn't need that story right now, Or I definitely didn't need it right before where I was about to go to bed, and now my adrenaline is spiked and I can't sleep. So I think curating your own media around this can be incredibly useful and powerful, and that doesn't necessarily mean

not paying attention to what's going on. I think you can be an incredibly informed citizen but still curate what you're reading, when you're reading it, how much you're reading. All of these things are conscious strategies you can control to feel a little bit better, or to kind of allow yourself to spike the anxiety when you need to. That's incredibly fascinating you everything you just said, and I'll

just say why. So, you know, going back I think roughly to the Reagan years, it became increasingly common for politicians. I think Reagan was the greatest genius of this, not to speak in terms of general policies and their overall statistical public effects, but rather to use anecdotal examples of individuals.

You know, this is sort of like the State of the Union and phenomenon, where the present says, you know, there's a nurse in Texas who did this, then it moves to the one where we bring that person to the State of the Union. And basically the idea was that people don't necessarily have powerful responses to this policy has raised employment by twelve percent they respond to, you know,

to anecdote, to human story. What you're saying, in a sense is that can be too effective, and so sometimes if you're aware about yourself, that you'll be too empathetic, so empathetic that will actually affect you, maybe step aside from the anecdote. And I noticed that I'm fascinated by this because I noticed myself doing it all the time. I mean, I triage reading the paper. I see a human interest story about this, I pass it right over.

I see a story about you know, the statistics. I look at the statistics because somehow, you know, I'm not sufficiently empathetic to have that kind of reaction just to the statistics alone. Yeah, and nurse science suggests no one is right. You know, psychologists talk about this so called

identifiable victim effect. You know, if I tell you, you know, five hundred thousand people you know died today of you know, this earthquake or coronavirus or something that doesn't affect as much as Jill, this one person who is thirty four years old and worked as a nurse. Like, what happens in urs scientifically is we have regions of the brain that process information about what other people are thinking and what they believe and what's happening to them. We have

regions of the brain that respond to individual people. Evolutionarily, we didn't build in regions of the brain that respond to statistics. And so the things that spike our fear is seeing someone else get hurt, not the statistics of someone getting her The thing that spikes our anxiety, that spikes our empathy, that spikes our compassion is seeing you know that this one woman can't get her groceries this week because she's so scared of going out. And so

I think it can be a really powerful technique. I mean, Reagan was right, like, it gets people moving, but it can sometimes get it gets you moving too much. But the flip side is that you can do the opposite for the COVID kindness stories, right Like, I was reading this story of this Yale student in fact, who started this project called Invisible Hands where he is recruiting a bunch of twenty year olds to give groceries to the

elderly who can't go out. And that's a human interest story where it's pumping up my compassion, is pumping up my positive will, it's making me feel like, oh my god, they're still good in the world. You want to read those in the flesh kinds of stories as opposed to read the statistics about it that feels really good, and so we can curate that to a certain extent. I mean, I think that's the blessing in the curse of the twenty four hour news cycle, is that there's so much

more content out there. We're pulled in and it affects our emotions in ways that we can't control. But we can control what we're bringing in. We can curate what that content is. Can I ask you a philosophical question that arises from this whole approach? I mean, I'm fascinated by it, and especially in a crisis, it seems incredibly appealing that one could do a little bit of curating of the information that one takes on board in order

to help manage responses. I'm wondering if there is a philosophical kind of objection, a kind of a hard nosed philosopher who would say, well, yeah, no, I mean, that's nice that you're doing that, but there's a form of denial in all of that. There is a cold, hard reality out there, and you should be feeling some sense of existential dread, because that's simply what the circumstances warrant.

When you hear questions like that, do they seem to you misguided or overstated or do you think, yeah, that's that's fine. But there's different ways to take your existential dread. You know, you can take it with a spoonful of sugar and they'll be a little more manageable. Yeah, I mean, I think those emotions, whether it's existential dread or joy

and compassion, they're there for a reason. They're they're there to cause us to take certain actions, and I think right now there are certain actions that are warranted, Like we need to be a little bit afraid to the point that we stay in our house. We need to be scared for our elderly relatives and for the economy, so we can just kind of shelter in place and do what we need to do. But beyond that, spiking

our existential anxiety is not going to help anyone. You know, it's not going to help me make decisions about which stocks I should deal with, because you know, doing that from the position of like massive freaking out is not going to help, right, It's not going to help me plan for my family. When I finally do go out and go to their grocery store, I'm not going to be thinking rationally about, Okay, what do I need in my pantry for the next two weeks. I'm just going

to be like panic shopping. And so the idea is that what you want is the appropriate level of emotion. That's what emotion researchers often talk about, is you want the appropriate level of anxiety, the appropriate level of compassion, and the appropriate level of empathy and so on, And we can kind of get a sense of when we're

off track, you know. I mean, I think some folks, honestly, my college students were experiencing it in the opposite direction, where they're realizing, like wait, hang on, like they're canceling Yale University, or not canceling there, they're moving Yale University to online classes. Maybe this is something I need to take really sport and clarification when I canceled when the classes are happening right now. But I think that was a moment when they upregulated anxiety, which is what they

needed to do for many of us. If they're listening to this thinking I'm in existential panic that's not going to help anybody, right, and it does doesn't feel good right, and so I think those are times when you really want to downregulate things to be able to function in this environment. Laurie, what are questions that I'm not asking

you that I should be. You're doing a whole series for your podcast, The Happiness Lab, about ways to deal with challenges to psychological well being connected to the coronavirus crisis. What are some takeaways that I haven't even asked you about it? Yeah, well, you've covered a lot. I mean one of our first episodes was about emotion regulation, in particular this idea that we can decrease our anxiety by changing our frame, and there's lots of different ways we

can do that. One way we can change our frame is to gain a little psychological distance. So it sounds kind of goofy, but you can talk to yourself in the third person, you know, Like Laurie's going to make it through this. This is really challenging for Laurie, having to teach outline and having to get stuck in her house,

but she's going to make it through. Turns out there's lots of evidence to suggest that taking that kind of slightly different linguistic approach to talking to ourselves allows us to kind of think we're hearing from a coach who's telling us important information about what our life is like.

And so those can be incredibly powerful techniques. Yeah. So, so each episode is really just picking off a different tiny tip that users can use to either feel better feel less anxious in this time, but also to use the time. Well, we have another episode coming up about how you can use the fact that you're stuck in this new situation to harness these new habits. Oftentimes, habit researchers really work to figure out, you know, how can

you change the situation? You know, how can you move the donuts from you know, the table where your office always meets to somewhere else. We're always trying to change

the situation to form better habits. But all of us are now faced with this incredibly weird, unprecedented situation, and we could set it up with the right routines and the right habits to be able to do the things we've been wanting to do for a while, you know, exercise more, you know, connect with our friends who are far away on a more regular basis, this is our opportunity to set up new habits, and so we shouldn't

miss out on the opportunity. I think that's the single most positive thing heard any human being say in a month. I'm a super grateful to do Laurie for all of these very valuable insights and for everything that you're doing. Thank you for the time, and thanks for this new series. Thanks so much for lent me on the show. Well, I think I actually feel a little better after talking to Laurie, not so much about the underlying facts as about how we can go about coping with those facts.

If you want to hear more from Laurie, listen to her podcast, The Happiness Lab from Pushkin Industries. Deep Background is brought to you by Pushkin Industries. Our producer is Lydia gene Coott, with research help from Zooe Wynn. Mastering is by Jason Gambrell and Martin Gonzalez. Our showrunner is Sophie mckibbon. Our theme music is composed by Luis GERA special thanks to the Pushkin Brass, Malcolm Gladwell, Jacob Weisberg,

and Mia Lobel. I'm Noah Feldman. I also write a regular column from Bloomberg Opinion, which you can find at Bloomberg dot com slash Feldman. To discover Bloomberg's original slate of podcasts, go to umberg dot com slash Podcasts. You can follow me on Twitter at Noah R. Feldman. This is deep background