Anxiety or Grief During This Pandemic? | Ashok Gupta | Coronavirus Challenge |

Before we go into some tools to help us let go of anxiety or worry, we need to understand what anxiety actually is. Now, stress is a short term experience. We get stressed by somebody or stressed by an event. But anxiety is when it continues in the medium to long term and it may come and go. In an earlier video I talked about something called your sympathetic nervous system, sometimes called your fight or flight response. And this is what gets triggered continually when we're feeling anxious. And it's a protective response, a defense response. And that response has two main a physical response and an emotional response. Physically, your body may tense up. You might notice your heart rate going higher than normal, or trouble sleeping. Emotionally, you might have racing thoughts, restlessness, trouble concentrating. This is our body's natural response to physical threats, like when a wild animal is attacking us, so we're protected. However, this physical danger response generalizes and then we have the same physical response to emotional threats as we do to physical ones. This danger response is what I call survival anxiety. Biologically, our bodies want to survive, to pass on our genes to the next generation. But if we're under physical threat from, let's say the virus, or under financial threat from the loss of livelihood, then these defense systems, these anxiety systems, will override our logical mind and will go into fight or flight mode. The coronavirus pandemic has put many people in touch with their own mortality, perhaps even the fear of death. And this is particularly true for those in the higher risk categories, like the elderly or those with underlying conditions. Now normally this protection response, this danger response, would switch off as soon as the danger eases or as soon as we put the situation into perspective. But sometimes the brain can get stuck in a loop when we're feeding those anxious thoughts and that keeps over protecting us in an anxious way to warn us. And in these times we might be getting continually re triggered when we watch the news or we see how the pandemic is affecting our daily lives. An anxious mind thinks of all the worst case scenarios, everything that could go wrong. And ironically, the mind does this as a way of minimising risk. But by overdoing the protective response, so many anxious thoughts, it actually suppresses our immune system unnecessarily and affects our mood. So dealing with the anxiety is crucial to our mental, emotional and physical well being and it's also crucial to boosting our immunity.