Coping with the stress, anxiety and uncertainty of this blasted winter lockdown

Hopefully it goes without saying that most sensible people understand and accept the reasons for lockdown, observe the hospital numbers and death toll with a heavy heart and don’t do anything reckless and stupid with other peoples’ lives. Our sincere condolences to all who have lost a loved one or who are suffering ‘long’ Covid.

But although we understand the reasons for it, lockdown 3 really is grim isn’t it? It seems to be going in slow motion. Lockdown 1 for me was strange in the summer but it was nice to be able to appreciate nature especially in the nice weather, lockdown 2 was a bit frustrating in the autumn but we understood and accepted it. However, for many people this winter lockdown has been really difficult.

I use yoga, meditation and exercise to get me through these awful times and find they help me keep positive, motivated and hopeful.

A few weeks ago I explained how Mila, my gorgeous cockapoo has been the perfect antidote to lockdown and has really helped me through it. See my article Mila, the perfect antidote for a terrible year

That article proved to be by far my most well-liked post. Strangely it was more popular than my fascinating insights into HR theory and practice. Really? What’s wrong with you people? 🙂

I appreciate that seeing pictures of me doing a yoga pose isn’t quite as cute as photos of my gorgeous puppy but don’t worry, I’ve sneaked a really cute photo of her into the article towards the end. Any excuse!

Clearly a dog isn’t right for everyone, and also even though she is brilliant it is so important to do all we can to look after our minds and bodies during these awful times. Both before Covid and during, I have found that yoga, meditation and exercise have helped me to stay positive, motivated and helped to keep stress and anxiety at bay.

Anxiety is awful and can be debilitating. I am so pleased that we take it more seriously now and seem to have moved on from the attitude of ‘pull yourself together’!

That washing machine feeling in the tummy at 4am making it impossible to go back to sleep; the tumble dryer in your brain making thoughts race around illogically time and time again at 100mph; and the illogical and repetitive dread of things about to happen that your rational brain knows won’t be an issue but for some reason they keep on dominating your thoughts, over and over again.

But I can say with certainty that the techniques I cover today have massively helped me and so if you or anyone you know needs to find ways of overcoming these issues then I hope this article helps. I suspect I will alienate different people at different times during this latest blog as it is not for everybody. Yoga? No thanks! Meditation? You must be joking! Exercise in winter? You’re having a laugh! But I am going to give it a go, and describe what works for me.

Yoga

I’ve been practising yoga for around 3 years now and I can honestly say that I have never slept as well in my life as I do the night after a yoga session. It seems to stop anxiety, insomnia and stress in their tracks. The feeling of complete calmness you get is difficult to describe. A warm cosy blanket? Galaxy chocolate? No, they don’t even come close.

My yoga teacher, Helen Martland from Mula Yoga studio in Burscough, is absolutely brilliant, if slightly crazy! But crazy in a good way. From walking in to her studio for my first session as the only bloke in a room with 15 lycra clad bendy, fit ladies she has made me feel welcome and has been so incredibly patient. Without that I’m not sure I would have had the courage to return.

I couldn’t do any of it on that first practice. But I was keen to learn and Helen’s explanations of what you need to do in each pose with each part of your body, breathing techniques and maintaining a poker face even when it hurts like hell were fabulous. She encouraged me and praised me on the (very rare) occasions I got something right.

The rest of the class were also really understanding and supportive. I very quickly felt accepted and with friends. Yoga seems to be a great community of lovely people.

My goal from a few sessions in was to eventually be able to do a Peter version of the ‘eight angle’ pose which can be seen in the main picture of this article. I say a Peter version because I am clearly never going to be able to do the pose like that!

This is my current version of the pose. I know I look ridiculous but I challenge you to do it better. It’s so hard and takes a lot of strength, balance and determination to do it well. If you’re sceptical, try lifting yourself up on your hands and stick your legs out to the side, off the ground, for ten seconds. You’ll then appreciate the added benefit of how yoga massively improves your core strength.

Thankfully I have found that one of the beauties of yoga is that it doesn’t matter if you are a bit rubbish. What you look like seems irrelevant to anyone except yourself, it is about what the actions of adopting the poses and breathing techniques do for your body and mind that are important. Even when I started and was ridiculously stiff and wooden, I felt the benefits and slept like a baby afterwards.

And my classmates didn’t judge me either, they are such nice people and incredibly supportive. Well, they didn’t judge me to my face anyway but I am sure I have given them a few sniggers over the years falling over or getting poses completely wrong. But that’s ok.

At present the yoga classes are via Zoom, which took a bit of getting used to as, when I get lost with a particular pose – which I do in pretty much every class – I used to just copy off someone else in the group but on Zoom I can’t do that. It’s a comfort to know that when that happens nobody is watching me, they are all concentrating on trying to do it right themselves.

My advice to anyone suffering lockdown blues, poor sleep stress or especially anxiety is to give yoga a go, ideally in one of Helen’s classes. You won’t regret it, she’s amazing. I’ve persuaded various friends and family members to try it and they all have enjoyed it and also every single one commented about the great night sleep they had that evening after the class.

Meditation

The next thing I find helps enormously with lockdown blues, poor sleep, stress and anxiety is meditation.

We’ve all read about the incredible things Buddhist monks can achieve through meditation, and who doesn’t love the Karate Kid? But their world seems so far away from our hectic lifestyles it is easy to dismiss it and so, for me, meditation in the UK is more about achieving calm and reducing stress and anxiety than finding your ‘inner self’. That’s certainly what I use it for.

A lot of meditation techniques seem to be quite similar and involve concentrating on the breath for periods in the practice, and it seems that this act of the brain concentrating on something simple, natural, neutral and that doesn’t spin round like a carousel that calms it.

The techniques I use are mainly mindfulness meditations but I also add in some observations from the shavasana that we do at the end of each yoga practice. I find that the act of being mindful about myself, my body, my breathing and even – depending on the meditation I do – my eating or taking a walk outside, calm my brain and result in a feeling of peace throughout my body that helps me live in the moment and appreciate life rather than my previous frustrating habit of worrying about the future and planning relentlessly for my next big purchase or promotion, only to move on to the next thing as soon as I’d achieved that one i.e. never actually enjoying and appreciating the moment.

It’s a revelation the first time you have a good meditation and realise that your brain is actually calm. It made me realise that I had spent literally decades with my brain spinning like a fairground ride with thoughts going round and round. It’s exhausting!

Meditation will usually stop this washing machine brain action and lead to calmness. Depending on when you do it I find it can also help you sleep better, or if you wake up with thoughts spinning in your head and unable to get back to sleep I try and meditate but find I invariably fall back asleep well before I have finished the meditation.

I do various different meditations depending on how much time I have. These days, especially with yoga working so well for me, I tend to only do 5-10 minute meditations when I’m feeling anxious or my brain is spinning. But even this short version can help a lot and can be done pretty much anywhere, including at work.

I am certainly no meditation guru or Buddhist monk but after a bit of practice I know what works for me. I’ve put together this short 9 minute video of one of my meditations where I talk you through what I am doing. It may be useful, or you may think it is a load of cobblers but give it a try, you never know. If it works for you, you can do short meditations at any point during the day when you need it. Or have a set pattern of when you do it during the day.

My mates read my blog articles and they will slaughter me for that video, and also the above picture of me trying to do a complicated eight angle yoga pose very badly but never mind. If I am able to persuade one person to try either yoga or meditation when they wouldn’t have otherwise done so then it will be worth the abuse that I will undoubtedly receive. Thank goodness for lockdown so I won’t see them in a pub anytime soon!

Exercise

I am a huge believer in the benefits of exercise for the body and mind. In this crazy world it is a bizarre contradiction that we all know this is what we need, but for some reason most of us seem to be less active not more even though we have more spare time in which to do it.

As I’ve got older I’ve moved from impact sports to exercise with very little impact as injuries became more frequent and took longer to heal but I couldn’t give up exercise because my cake intake remained constant. So these days I swim, row and do yoga. I also spend a lot of time walking Mila, which is so good for me in many ways.

To state the bleeding obvious, both swimming and rowing are exercises that work the whole body, which is clearly good for ageing joints and muscles. After my busy working life limited my trips to the pool and gym, a few years ago we converted a little used orangery at our house into a home gym and had an ‘Endless pool’ installed.

An Endless pool is like a treadmill for swimming. It is a very small swimming pool, ours measures 14 feet x 8 feet x 4 feet, with a propellor at one end that creates a current that you swim against. The propellor is remote controlled and you choose what speed you want to swim at. You can choose anything from Olympic speed to gossiping old woman speed doing breaststroke slightly slower than a one legged snail.    

Being so compact it will easily fit in to a single garage, including the plant needed to power it.

When swimming I set the remote to just over 2mph (or one minute 59 seconds per 100 metres to be exact) and for half an hour, so I swim just under a mile each time at a rate of just under 30 seconds per 25m length. I know, I know, you’re thinking that isn’t very fast as you can do that British bloke thing of diving in to the holiday pool, swimming a length of front crawl in twenty seconds without breathing, emptying half the pool while you do it, and puffing your chest out at the end, basking in the knowledge everyone knows you’re pretty much Michael Phelps!

Whereas the pool is brilliant, and incredibly low maintenance, there’s an issue that takes a lot of getting used to when using this type of pool; tiredness. I’ve noticed that when you swim in a pool you start off like a train but then the last few lengths are more Northern Rail Pacer than Flying Scotsman so you need to pace yourself. When maintaining a constant speed, to start with it all seems too easy as you’re fresh but my god you suffer towards the end trying to keep up with the machine, as, being a stubborn bloke of course you are not going to do the obvious thing and stop and turn the speed down. Sacrilege!

So yes I have a pool but before you start thinking I live at Appleby Towers and have servants, duck ponds and a cypress lined driveway, an Endless pool isn’t actually that expensive. As it’s small it doesn’t cost much to heat either, but what a piece of kit!

Trying to justify myself like this reminds me of a great put down from my good friend Paul a couple of years ago. I was whingeing that I had had to replace the pump and it had cost a lot of money and Paul replied ‘right Pete, just how much sympathy do you think you are going to get from people when you say your swimming pool has broken and it’s costing a lot to fix it?’. He had a point!

Whereas you got an action shot above of me attempting yoga, and were also treated to a demonstration of one of my meditations I really didn’t think you’d appreciate a photo of me in my speedos in this section so here’s a photo of the pool so you can get an idea of its size and how it works

Moving on to rowing, there are 3 types you can buy and it all depends on how the resistance you battle with is generated by the machine. Magnetic rowers tend to be the cheapest but often prove to be unreliable and people normally upgrade from them very quickly in my experience. The most well known are those that use air as resistance such as the ubiquitous Concept 2 rower that you find in most gyms. They are brilliant and have some great apps you can use to virtually row with others around the world if you like, although I find them a little clunky.

I prefer a water rower, where the resistance is generated by a water tank. I find it to be really smooth and a much more pleasant experience than using a Concept 2.

When rowing I tend to warm up for a kilometre, row at my best pace for 8 kilometres and then warm down for a kilometre. I should really mix it up with some of the racing or HIIT options but I really can’t be bothered.

Apart from that I can’t think of anything else to say about rowing. It’s great exercise and it’s indoors!

But of course the best thing about exercise of any sort is guilt free cake. Especially in these difficult times when you’ve got to treat yourself or you’ll go mad. And if you’ve done some exercise to persuade yourself you deserve it then it tastes all the sweeter.

So that is how I try and look after mind and body, especially during these crazy times. But I have to admit, nothing is able to raise my spirits as much as spending time with my gorgeous little cockapoo. Here’s Mila waiting for her breakfast this morning. It was a bit delayed today while I located my socks, that she had mined through my clothes for and then hidden.

It seems that anxiety, worry and uncertainty will increase for people in the current months once furlough comes to an end and if that may result in you having to make redundancies please see our free guide to the 8 Steps to Making Redundancies

Thanks for reading, take care and have a great week. Next week we’ll be back with a HR related article but in the meantime if you have any queries please do not hesitate to contact us