Psychology's Lessons For Coping With Stress - Dr Samantha Boardman | Modern Wisdom Podcast 358

... the other sort of backdoor intervention that I've always found to be unbelievably powerful is putting yourself in a position of adding value to someone else. It's unbelievably empowering, it puts you in the position of being a giver. Like, what advice would you give to somebody in this moment? It's also a wellspring of motivation. (wave crashes)

You're a practicing psychiatrist. What have been some of the most common trends that you've seen over the last year?

Interestingly, at the very beginning of the pandemic, I was really worried about some of my patients who have a lot of anxiety. And here's what happened, is a lot of them felt unbelievably prepared for the pandemic. They told me that they were giving advice to their f- their, their worried, well friends who, you know, typically would say to them, "Why are you so anxious? What worries you all the time?" You know, "You should come out more." And it was really interesting that they, I think, they had a lot of strategies that they used. They had a lot of, you know, they would use CBT, they sort of knew how to manage their anxiety, and so they found themselves in this position of being advice-givers, and that their experience was sort of helping somebody else. And as one of my patients said to me, like, "You know, I've been doing this all my life. Like, I've been ready for this, you know, for the past 20 years, and so I'm, you know, ready to go." And, and I think that that was a surprise, for sure, um, you, you know, in giving them sort of some strength. But, but of course, I mean, uncertainty was obviously what was really difficult for people. But what I try to work with them on is how certainty is such an illusion anyway, and what we sort of imagine our lives, and being able to predict what tomorrow's going to be. So, I, I, my hope is that emerging from this, that there has been some growth, some focus on, you know, what has one gained, um, in it, and even some, you know, post-traumatic growth is that we've actually seen. I, I don't th- you know, you can only really talk about post-traumatic growth in, afterwards, um, as an outcome, and I think we're very much mid-pandemic right now, so it's hard to, you know, look at, we can't really say in, in retrospect. But I've had them sort of working what are the ways, what are the factors that contribute to post-traumatic growth, and we can get into that, or we could, um, we can talk about that later.

What about lockdown shame? Have you seen any people feeling like they should've, could've, would've done more, "I haven't been as productive as I, as I ought to have been"?

There's been so much of that, like regret, and there's nothing worse than sort of that guilt, um, like, you know, that, that sh- you know, "Why didn't I manage, you know, learn how to speak Mandarin? Why didn't I, you know, learn how to, uh..." Somebody on your podcast was saying they'd like climbed Mount Everest on their staircase or something. I mean, what an accomplishment. But, you know, I think a lot of people think, "God, I just did nothing, you know, and I didn't get anything done." But that has so much to do with the way our brains work, is that we're, we're so good at noticing what is left undone. Right? Like, we're so good at seeing what we haven't completed. And there was a researcher in Vienna in the 1930s, um, uh, Dr. Zeigarnik, who noticed that when waiters were working in, in restaurants and serving tables, they, you know, had an amazing ability to remember the orders, the multiple orders that were open. And though what they, once an order was completed and people had paid the check and left, it would just be obliterated from their memory. They had no idea, like if you said to them, "What did those people have again?" they would have no idea. But they could remember the orders that were sort of half-complete, like, "That person still needs a coffee, that one needs some cake." And so what this is, is our, we're, we're so good at remembering sort of what's undone, but not particularly good at remembering what we've accomplished. And so, I mean, I think this can work for us and against us too, and it can work for, you know, against us when it comes to regret, like, "Why didn't I do this?" Or, "I had on my to-do list to write that screenplay, to get in shape, to quit smoking," and all those things. But we're really bad at focusing on what we have completed. And again, that's an attentional deployment issue, right? I mean, it's like how, what, what are you seeing? If you do sort of ask yourself to remind yourself, like, "What did I check off that list today?" And I think that can sort of help people just getting through the pandemic. You know, maybe, did you, you know, did, did you speak more to your kids than you ever have before? Did you, like, deepen your relationship with your spouse during this period? Like, what, what, maybe, did you accomplish? And I think refocusing attention is a really big part of that.