Coronavirus – why your mind may be tripping you up!

Fearing the ‘Killer’ Coronavirus

With the coronavirus well and truly amongst us, a lot of people will be becoming anxious about the risks imposed. Whilst there are obvious risks, as with any virus, the following tips might help you ease your anxiety:

1. Remember that minds are very poor at estimating risks. If you asked 100 women what is the biggest killer amongst women, most will say “cancer”.  The biggest killer for women is in fact, heart disease. But stories about women dying of heart disease hardly make the news; it is cancer cases that we get told about, often in dramatic ways, and based on that, our minds ‘anchor and adjust’ our estimates of cancer to (wrongly) tell us that cancer is more prevalent and deadly than heart disease.
2.  Remember that minds are very poor at making rational judgments looking at all the evidence. So, we know that the ordinary flu is much more deadly (and has been, reliably, for years) than this new virus. Yes, when we think about Coronavirus, we tend to ignore those statistics instead focusing on the numbers that are getting diagnosed with Coronavirus every day. At the time of writing, there are just over 50 people diagnosed with the condition in the UK. For how many conditions that might affect 50 people in the whole country have you previously worried  about, to the extent you are worrying about Coronavirus today?
3. Uncontrollability of an event is scary. If you consider the major phobias (snakes, spiders, flying, dental treatment) the major issue here  that fuels the fear is the uncontrollability of the situation. People report being scared of spiders / snakes, mainly because of the way they cannot predict  or control the creatures’ next movement- they tend to move very fast! The same goes with flying / visiting the dentist – ‘stuck’ in a chair in both cases, people feel they have little control of life at that moment, which contributes to their fear. The same process explains the increasing levels of fear with Coronavirus. It is the perceived uncontrollability of the virus, that contributes to its sensationally increasing fear levels at the moment.

So what can you do?

Simple ‘grounding’ exercises can often help with anxiety that comes and goes. These can simply be just getting your mind to come back to the present moment (rather than letting it wander off in the catastrophe it is worrying about!). You can do this by becoming aware of the present moment (what you are doing, what you can see, hear, taste, smell) and observing what you are doing as if you were a curious scientist.

Where your worry does not respond to grounding exercises, you may need more help. Please feel free to get in touch.