Mindfulness – Page 2 – Kitty Wheater

Staying on Holiday at Home

This piece was first posted as the Mindfulness Virtual Drop-in from the University of Edinburgh Chaplaincy. You can subscribe by emailing mindfulness@ed.ac.uk.

Staying on Holiday at Home

Scotland has shifted towards re-opening dentists, hairdressers, and cinemas. There are new possibilities for physically-distanced socialising, and staying somewhere overnight. And many of us are thinking: could I…might I…go on holiday?

As in: GO on holiday. Pack a suitcase, get in the car, get on a train. Marshal the hand sanitizer and the DIY masks. Buy too many snacks, and forget rubber bands to tie around the half-eaten ones, so that the bottom of your rucksack fills with peanuts. Take after-sun instead of sunscreen. You know the drill.

After nearly four months in lockdown, you may be desperate to escape the confines of your city or village; your bags are half-packed as you read this. Or you may be horrified at the thought of having to put yourself through all of the above, with an added dose of re-entry anxiety.

Rarely, in our University, have we had more people in need of a holiday, with less energy, clarity, financial means, or choice about it. And so more of us will be tucking the guidebooks out of sight, and staying at home this summer.

Staying on holiday at home – after a time in which you have been not so much working from home, as at your home, in a crisis, trying to work – turns particular features of ‘holiday’ upside down. There is none of that satisfactory change in gear that we used to get by arriving home and putting the work laptop in a dark corner with its notes unfinished, because it’s 7pm and you have a plane to catch. The boundaries are murky, if not gone.

‘Boundaries’ are so useful, because they don’t just mark things as different from each other – they create space in which each can flourish as it is. The work/home boundary is so useful, because by enabling us to put work away, we can attend to what’s important at home in its own right: cats, children, a homemade pizza, a courgette plant. This, in turn, enables us to recover more effectively from depletion at work – which often makes room for curiosity and creativity in our work.

So the boundary between work and holiday protects and nourishes both. But with more of us staying at home this summer, in spaces that have become pervaded by work, we will need to be creative about reclaiming holiday as holiday, and home as home. If, like me, you are staying at home for your break this summer, here is what to expect – and how to find rest, and maybe even some joy, in the midst of it.

1. Holiday Dread

Holiday dread comes in many forms. You dread shutting down your emails, because work, with its structure and connection, has been a life-line. You dread taking time off because it only reminds you of the holiday you had to cancel. You dread having time to spend with and around your family or flatmates, because they need more from you than you are able to give right now. You dread taking a holiday, because you live alone, and the last thing you want is more time with yourself.

This is completely normal. If you have been under stress, and your holiday is impending, the mind triangulates every stressful moment from every holiday you’ve ever taken, and multiplies it by every awkward conversation, or loneliness, in the last month. Then it creates a prediction, based on this lovely subterranean machination, about just how dreadful the next two weeks will be.

Start to spot the mind’s predictions as they pop up in the mind. Notice how they attach themselves to those last bits of work business, as you finish up on a Friday. If you’re really rundown, they will even tag along to your moments of happy anticipation, just to make sure that you don’t forget that you should be worrying.

Be gentle with your mind in this moment; it is your age-old fight or flight system, trying to help. As you put away your computer, and cook yourself meals that aren’t pasta with pesto for the first time in weeks, those thoughts will begin to soften and settle.

2. Holiday Bugs and Blues

If you’ve been ticking along at work, feeling a bit tired or grumpy, but basically doing ok, you may find that the first few days of your holiday are unexpectedly…not as great as that wonderful week you spent in the South of France, with the local red wine, and the market garden tomato salad.

Aches and pains may surface. Day two of your holiday sees you in bed with a migraine. The hayfever you’ve been combatting turns into a cold. (Hopefully not a cough.) And – you may feel lower than you expected. Small irritations explode into big ones, as you worry about the effect of iPads on a generation of small eyes and minds, and dread your inbox on your return to work.

As we start to relax, and the firefights of work and study fade, the new space gives way to what was waiting in the wings. Some of these can wait; others will make themselves urgently felt.

Give them space, gently. Wrap up your migraine in an eye mask and blanket; take your worries to a friend, on a walk. When you feel better, give yourself permission to put the irritation away. Thank goodness, at this time when the kids can’t hug their friends, that there is Peppa Pig – and Sally Rooney on iPlayer.

3. Holiday Frenzy

As I wrote a few weeks back, when you’ve been looking forward to time off, it’s possible to get very excited about all the things you’re going to do. Your glass is not just half-full, it’s a glass of that wonderful red wine from the South of France.

Depending on your individual flavour of frenzy, you could be envisaging two weeks of: self-improvement, catching up on emails, Netflix, intensive home-schooling, or reading six months’ worth of Times Literary Supplements, which are currently sitting in the corner of the hallway still in their plastic wrappers. (No comment.)

We all wind up needing a holiday from our holiday from time to time. This year, of all years, it’s so important that we spend our precious time off doing what nourishes us, and reminds us who we are. There are many lovely things, big and small, in our lives – even amidst uncertainty, and sorrow. We want to be open to them, and allow them to fill up our drained and depleted minds and bodies.

And: we want to be gentle with ourselves. Your body has been sitting still, in a too-small chair, for a long time. Your mind has had to read pixelated faces for many months. Your heart has been troubled, and determined, in equal and often competing measure. This is tiring, and you may only come to understand how deeply so when you pause, and notice.

So be kind to yourselves, on your holidays at home. Allow it to be a holiday. Allow it to be home. Know that it will be messy – and that that’s just fine, and could even be quite fun.

© The University of Edinburgh. No part of this content may be used without prior written permission of the copyright holder.

Words To Live By

This piece was first posted as the Mindfulness Virtual Drop-in from the University of Edinburgh Chaplaincy. Open to all, you can subscribe by emailing mindfulness@ed.ac.uk.

A couple of weeks ago, my colleague Marti Balaam and I were joined by the actor Emilia Clarke (as in Game of Thrones) for our Nursing Now workshop on compassion and mindfulness. Emilia, who has been running an online poetry salon during lockdown, opened the workshop with a reading.

I didn’t know in advance which poem she was going to read, and was moved when I recognised the opening lines:

Before you know what kindness really is

You must lose things,

Feel the future dissolve in a moment

Like salt in a weakened broth.

This is from ‘Kindness’, by Naomi Shihab Nye. It’s a poem that felt just right to begin an exploration of the importance of belonging, and the power of the present moment. Not only that, but it felt right to have beautiful words alongside talk of stressed-out nerves, and cognitive sub-systems.

After all, during lockdown, many of us have turned to the written word for solace. Words, written, are tangible. They capture things, and so, if we return to them, we may recapture something we might have lost. And we have lost things, during this time: routines, structures, places; the unremarkable, much-missed fabric of ordinary life. We may have forgotten confidence, vitality, or hope. Our financial stability or good health may have been shaken. We may have lost loved ones.

Loss tires and compresses the mind. For a lot of people, it’s a feeling like a literal tightening in the head. You may notice that your visual perception changes: you look down a lot, or you see things in a grey flat murk, rather than in broad depth and colour. Those of you who have seen Inside Out will remember how the young girl, when she is depressed, sees the world in black and grey, rather than in reds, blues and yellows.

In this mind-state, actions are a more typical therapeutic port of call than poems. ‘Behavioural activation’ is a core CBT principle of lifting low mood. Very effective, if rather prosaic, it hinges on working gently and realistically through tasks, and beginning to do things again which bring pleasure and energy – doing this step by step, even and especially when we don’t feel like it. Many of us do this naturally. We will have our go-to pick-me-up, or a sense of which of the piles of dirty dishes, laundry, or discarded junk mail it would be easiest to tackle first. The Nike adage ‘just do it’, with a bit more gentleness, and perhaps less high-tech gear, is roughly the idea.

But there are moments, when the future dissolves, as in Naomi Shihab Nye’s poem, when it is too hard even to begin to imagine what to ‘do’. To attempt this may simply be a reminder of what we have lost. And in those moments, words can become the ground under our feet.

Whether it’s Shakespeare, Lemn Sissay, or Cheryl Strayed, words speak to us in various ways. They can come to mind of their own accord: a poem in a Whatsapp message from a friend, that we carry with us, and find ourselves repeating in our heads. We search them out: a series of books we have read a hundred times, and hunker down with in the evenings, because we know how they end, and they are a trustworthy thread to hold on to. We store words up, like how someone once said something to us, and we wrote it down, because we loved it, or them.

We do this because words are more than the sum of letters. They are how we connect with our world, and each other – particularly when we can’t be physically present. And so here are some ways with words, to shore ourselves up for, and in, those dissolving moments.

Take Time

The words we need to pick us up when we are down, or comfort us when we are afraid, often reveal themselves at the right time. But they ask something of us, too: that we are open, and willing to meet them.

So when the poem touches you, allow yourself to pause and listen. When the phrase leaps out from the page, stay with it a while. When you are out on a walk on a hard day, in which your mind seems to offer you nothing but worry and pain, and from nowhere comes a glimmer of a line of verse – let it come through. Write it in your diary, and print it for your wall. When you are feeling stronger, sit with the book you are reading at lunchtime, or at night. Permit yourself that time and space, like a gift.

If we are open, and allow things to resonate – even if we don’t understand quite why – we store them up like a great quiet library of comfort. One day they will be there once more, flitting through the mind to bring courage, hope, or respite.

Seek Them Out

There are sharp, dissolving moments in life, and then there are long, slow, tired ones. In the latter, it can feel as if the world before us is flat, like an A4 photocopy of itself. In such moments, the way back into the world is to follow the thread of what is here. It may start blank, and flat – but it ends with something shimmering and alive.

So when a Mary Oliver poem comes to mind, and you can’t quite remember how it ends, go back to it. Riffle through the book, and see what else captures your attention. When you keep thinking of that passage in a favourite novel, dig it out from your bookshelf, dusty and real, and set aside a half hour for it, with a cup of tea after work. The author whose books you used to read, and whose latest has sat on your Amazon wish-list for a year: buy it. Let it land through your letterbox with a satisfying thump.

Curiosity is a force of nature inimical to sadness and exhaustion. So take one step, however small. The words will meet you halfway, and soon enough, your mind will feel alive once more.

Pass Them On

Some of you will have followed the Daily Prayers and Reflections that we ran until the end of June; my colleague Ali Newell set these up, with a daily prayer, poem, or quotation from across our diverse Chaplaincy team. They have brought comfort to many, and are still all on our website. You may also have been tagged, as I was, in ‘poetry round robins’ through lockdown – sending favourites to strangers, and friends of friends. Not another email, you think, or I don’t know any poems…

But there are many ways of passing on words that speak to us. A cheering article or a quote in a Whatsapp group. A book for a friend, because she is having a hard time, and you know it’s just right for her. And maybe you have your own story to tell, and a person you could tell it to, for whom it would bring solace, or hope.

This week, try a mindfulness of body and breath practice to settle and ground the attention. And maybe listen to Fergal Keane, reading a blessing, by John O’Donohue. It’s a beauty that was passed on to me, earlier in lockdown. Here it is.

This is the time to be slow,
Lie low to the wall
Until the bitter weather passes.

Try, as best you can, not to let
The wire brush of doubt
Scrape from your heart
All sense of yourself
And your hesitant light.

If you remain generous,
Time will come good;
And you will find your feet
Again on fresh pastures of promise,
Where the air will be kind
And blushed with beginning.

© The University of Edinburgh. No part of this content may be used without prior written permission of the copyright holder.

Trouble Sleeping

This piece was first posted as the Mindfulness Virtual Drop-in from the University of Edinburgh Chaplaincy. Open to all, you can subscribe by emailing mindfulness@ed.ac.uk.

‘It’s late and I’m feeling so tired,’ sings Corinne Bailey Rae. ‘Having trouble sleeping…’

It’s a sentiment familiar to many. A King’s College London study finds that two thirds of us have experienced some negative effect on sleep since the pandemic began, with a disproportionate impact on women, young people, and those facing financial difficulties. Intriguingly, though, most of us are sleeping more than we did pre-lockdown. With commuting shelved, and no pub to go to on a Friday night, total sleep time is actually up – it’s just not so restful.

So what might this look like? You may find yourself sleeping in fits and bursts, with long periods of wakefulness in between; waking groggily early in the morning, and watching the clock until it’s time to get up; finding it hard to fall asleep at all. You may have unusually vivid dreams, and remember more of them when you surface. If you have recurring stress dreams, or nightmares, these are probably putting in more of an appearance during your slumbering hours at the moment. They may be specifically about the pandemic, or they may be older stress patterns, flaring up with new potency thanks to the extra layer of lockdown worry-fog.

As we go about our days tired and stiff, the worst part of disturbed sleep is often creeping dread or anxiety about it. Sleep can become a place in our minds that is not restful, a sanctuary to enter at the end of the day, but rather a site of stress and fretfulness. We fear not sleeping – or if we sleep and have nightmares, we fear sleep itself. The other week I came across a passage that captured this cycle perfectly, in The Long Winter, by Laura Ingalls Wilder. An autobiographical children’s book, it depicts a ferocious seven-month winter in the tiny settler town of De Smet, South Dakota, in the 1880s.

Sometimes in the night, half awake and cold, Laura half-dreamed that the roof was scoured thin. Horribly the great blizzard, large as the sky, bent over it and scoured with an enormous invisible cloth, round and round on the paper-thin roof, till a hole wore through and squealing, chuckling, laughing a deep Ha! Ha! The blizzard whirled in. Barely in time to save herself, Laura jumped awake.

Then she did not dare to sleep again. She lay still and small in the dark, and all around her the black darkness of night, that had always been restful and kind to her, was now a horror. She had never been afraid of the dark. “I am not afraid of the dark,” she said to herself over and over, but she felt that the dark would catch her with claws and teeth if it could hear her move or breathe.

It’s a poignant description of how fear can flavour sleep and the wee hours. Unseasonal though The Long Winter might be, there’s reassurance in knowing that trouble sleeping, in the face of trouble, is an age-old experience. The psychological impact of endless howling prairie blizzards, with no end in sight, is not unlike that of being steeped in uncertainty and hard news.

So how might we look after ourselves in the face of sleeping troubles, and soften some of those internal blizzards? Here are some ways of responding, when sleep goes haywire.

1. Find Your Rhythm

Your body has powerful circadian rhythms. It wants to rest, and when it doesn’t, it will find a way to make it happen – as we’ve all discovered at one time or another, falling asleep after lunch. Fortunately, there’s a lot of wisdom out there on sleep hygiene: practical steps to realign the body’s sleep/wake cycle. During a tricky sleep patch, it can feel as if it will take forever to get back on track. But our circadian rhythms thrive on routine. Sleepio, for example, is an effective cognitive behavioural therapy app, that intervenes pragmatically and quickly to reset sleep patterns. But a few simple steps – a time limit on your smartphone in the evening; re-establishing some daily exercise – can also promptly make a difference.

Simple though such moves are, entrenched habits often get in the way. A quick message turns into twenty minutes on Twitter; rain clouds gather, and your walk looks less than inviting. Autopilot is a powerful thing, so outsource the willpower on this. Delete that app, and charge your computer in a different room overnight. None of us can quite be bothered to walk next door, at 3am, in order to scroll through BBC News.

Part of the misery of sleep disruption is that it can feel mysterious. If it has been relatively short-lived, cast your mind back and make a note of what triggered it. Often this is something quite straightforward. It could be that the heat kept you awake, that you missed a walk or online exercise class one day, or that a difficult message last thing at night had you up for hours. Re-establish your usual routines as soon as you can, bookmark any difficulty that requires some attention, and be patient with yourself: you will be a little slow and tired at first, but you will find your rhythm soon.

2. The Tell-Tale Mind

When it feels, as it did for Laura Ingalls, that the dark awaits you with claws and teeth, this is because your stress system is amped up. Thoughts scurry around in the mind, and your body holds itself up away from the bed, poised to fight or flee. As you try ever harder to fall asleep, rest seems more and more elusive, and you worry ever more about what will happen tomorrow.

The mind tells powerful tales about the past and the future. As if its usual fears and worries weren’t enough, many of its stories may be about what will go wrong if you don’t sleep enough, or what has happened to cause your restlessness. We may try to fight our thoughts, angrily batting them away, generating more thoughts about how badly this night is going. Remind yourself that thoughts are not wrong: they are your mind trying to help, but because you are tired and stressed, it is helping in a way that is tired and stressed.

Instead of trying to stop the thoughts, see if it’s possible to label them gently as they come up: ‘here is planning; here is self-criticism; here is prediction.’ Thoughts, you will notice, come and go: they are flickering, not solid. So you might imagine that your thoughts are like a waterfall, and that they can just fall past you as you sit beside them. You may get a little damp, but the thoughts need not drench you; and imagine that your seat beside them is soft, and comfortable.

3. Creature Comfort

When the mind is whizzing with memories, and plans, and what-ifs, the body as it lies here is not the past and future. It’s just the back, and the backs of the legs, and arms and head, against the sheets and pillows. So gently practice bringing your attention into the places where the body is held up: the surface of the skin, the texture of the sheets. When your mind veers off, acknowledge the story it tells, and just come back. You are reminding yourself that you are a body, safe and supported in this moment, in this space – nowhere to go, and nothing to do. Often, people find that a body scan helps provide some structure for this. It’s something you can do with the track a few times, and then just by yourself.

Often, as the mind quietens, sleep comes naturally. But sometimes you may realise that you are physically uncomfortable. You may be too hot or cold; you are hungry or thirsty. Tune in to what you most need, in this moment, and give yourself permission to follow it through. We are creatures, not floating brains.

‘Daytimes were not so bad as the nights,’ Ingalls Wilder wrote. ‘The dark was thinner then and ordinary things were in it.’ And so in daylight hours, when the dark is thinner, give some attention to the ordinary things that may make your sleep more comfortable. A soft blanket, a fresh pillow, a turned mattress; an open window for the smell of summer air; and something lovely to look at, when you open your eyes in the morning.

© The University of Edinburgh. No part of this content may be used without prior written permission of the copyright holder.

When Zoom Fatigue Becomes Zoom Burnout

This piece was first posted as the Mindfulness Virtual Drop-in from the University of Edinburgh Chaplaincy. Open to all, you can subscribe by emailing mindfulness@ed.ac.uk.

A couple of months ago I wrote about Zoom fatigue: that specific kind of tiredness created by hour after hour of meeting without meeting, presence without presence. ‘It’s the plausible deniability of each other’s absence,’ Gianpiero Petriglieri – professor of management at INSEAD – writes. ‘Our minds tricked into the idea of being together when our bodies feel we’re not. Dissonance is exhausting.’

Three months into lockdown, we hear staff and students reporting digital exhaustion of a kind that goes beyond fatigue. They describe finding it hard to look at faces on the screen, or feeling the urge to sit on the floor rather than a chair. Some struggle to sit still, or get distracted by pictures on the wall behind the computer. You may find yourself tapping your feet constantly, or crossing and uncrossing your legs; your mind going blank when the person on screen mentions something that upsets you; you may find that you look down, or to the side, rather than at the screen. Alternatively, you stare at your screen fixedly, while not hearing what is being said. You may feel, sometimes, that you simply cannot sit there for another minute.

All these experiences make perfect sense if you consider how our social nervous systems are being challenged on all fronts right now. We are already under strain from the effects of physical distancing; our usual repertoires of human contact and connection have been profoundly altered. We have not seen our colleagues or tutors in person for months. If you are a new start, you may not even have moved into your office. Don’t forget what happens after hours, too. We may be unable to hug grandchildren or parents, and those of us who are clinically vulnerable cannot take socially distant walks with friends. When we go out, we must read the eyes and foreheads of masked faces, and listen extra closely to muffled voices.

These challenges are important to acknowledge. Although some may seem to be different – more personal – than those of working and studying, they are directly affecting our neurological and psychological resilience for month after month of online meetings and studying.

So intervention is needed, because online work is going to be here for some time. The good news is that this is an adjustment period, not the final picture, and as we talk to each other and find out what works, we can pre-empt Zoom burnout, and lay the groundwork for sustainability instead. There is much that we can do – and here is some of it.

1. Looking

Sit in the space where you usually take Teams calls, and notice what you see. Observe what is in your direct line of sight, and what is in the periphery of your vision: up, down, to the side. Where are your eyes drawn? If you are in a meeting and find yourself looking everywhere but at the screen, this is your nervous system seeking out regulation by looking elsewhere for comfort. It is not wrong, or a mistake. In fact, this is useful information about your state of mind.

Having noticed where your eyes usually go, you might put something nourishing in that place: a favourite postcard or houseplant, a pine cone, a keepsake. If your eye is drawn to a nondescript pile, you might tidy it.

Notice, too, if the position of your screen warrants some adjustment. Months on a laptop require the eyes to look forever downwards, drawing the head and neck down too. While aching shoulders and neck may ensue, this posture also – critically – physically mimics low mood. So if you haven’t already, you might consider a laptop stand (or a pile of books) and external keyboard, to protect your back, and your mental energy.

2. Moving

On your next Teams call, notice if your body feels rigid, or restless.

If you find that you sit very still in your chair, the legs may also be clamped together, and the breath shallow in the chest. Your body is in ‘freeze’: you are the rabbit in the headlights, and the headlights are Microsoft Teams. Experiment with wiggling the fingers, and the toes. These are small movements, and no-one knows that you are doing them. But notice the effect: you may suddenly take a deep breath, or wish to yawn. Your legs may unclamp. This is your stress system down-regulating; try it little and often, and see what happens.

By contrast, you may be so restless that you can barely stay in your seat. This is your body wanting to feel safe, so start by tuning in to the sensations of the soles of the feet on the ground. Sense your sit-bones on the chair, supporting you. It may be helpful to clasp the hands together, in your lap, for a few moments, and then wiggle the fingers. After your call, have a good shake out and stretch, and pause for a cup of something before you continue with work.

On a restless day – or week, or month – see if it’s possible to take your calls while on a walk. Our bodies were born to move, and by working with them, we restore our sense of stability.

3. Resting

‘But I have so many meetings,’ you think. ‘They are endless. I just can’t bear it.’

When you are at the brink of Zoom burnout, you may notice that the mind fills with preoccupation. Rumination swirls round and round in your head, much of it heavy and dark, and it follows you before and after your meetings. In order to keep up with work, you may find yourself cancelling Skypes with friends and family, because you can’t bear more time on the screen. Many of us will be going through days and weeks like this at the moment, and it’s a sign that some proper digital rest is needed, while we limp our way towards annual leave.

Thankfully, rest comes in many forms. Your attendance at some meetings may simply be unnecessary – so don’t go. Others can be worked around: take calls on the phone, where you can; on screen, try turning your camera off, and darkening your screen, like one of my colleagues. Sit on the floor, if you want to, and feel the ground beneath you, and the wall at your back. More of us will be doing all these things in the coming weeks and months, to make online working sustainable on a given day, and they are healthy and appropriate responses.

But if you find that your weeks drag on in this state of depletion, this is your cue to take a proper screen holiday. You may be surprised at what that looks like. Going into annual leave, I had a list of films I planned to watch. They’d be fun, I thought. But the days went by, and I walked, and rested, and caught up with friends, and when I looked at my computer, I thought ‘nah.’ (Eventually, I got through Matilda. In half hour increments.)

It all adds up: the fuzzy boundaries between home and work; the months apart from loved ones; the reliance on Netflix for down-time; the relentless march of Teams invitations. Be gentle with yourself, and experiment with the techniques above. Our mind-bodies are remarkably resilient and adaptive, even when they feel like they’re not. Their signals of discomfort and fatigue are their way of speaking to us; and when we listen, and make changes, and listen again, they bounce back with admirable facility.

So look, and walk, and stretch, and rest, with some of these practices. Take your holiday, and make it a lovely one this summer. You need it.

© The University of Edinburgh. No part of this content may be used without prior written permission of the copyright holder.

Skin Hunger

This piece was first posted on For Times Like These: Blogs from the University of Edinburgh Chaplaincy to help us through COVID19 lockdowns and meltdowns, and to raise our spirits.

‘Skin hunger is the biological need for human touch,’ writes Sirin Kale for Wired. ‘It’s why babies in neonatal intensive care units are placed on their parent’s naked chests. It’s the reason that prisoners in solitary confinement often report craving human contact as ferociously as they desire their liberty.’

It’s also why, three months into lockdown, many of us may feel increasingly tearful, low, or flat. Perhaps you live alone, or you may live in that kind of respectful but distant adult co-habitation, with flatmates or family, where you are physically adjacent but never touch. You may be sharing a house with people you don’t like that much. And even if you are living with people you love, and with whom you are physically affectionate, life may simply be so tough right now that your need for connection and comfort feels ravenous. There is a reason why many of us say, after a long day, ‘can I have a hug?’

Yet if you work for the NHS, live with an NHS worker, or even if someone in your household has just popped out to the shops, it feels as though touch must be curated and planned for. After your shower, after you’ve washed your hands, after you’ve washed the milk cartons in soapy water in the kitchen sink. Did you touch the door handle again when you went to the post? It’s not exactly an auspicious climate for all the casual small comforts of other people’s presence: the hand on the shoulder, or back, or arm.

At this time, when we must be so vigilant about touch, you may spot various signs in mind and body that your system is craving it. Like Alice, a young Londoner in Kale’s article, you may notice after a hug that “You just get that rush of feeling better…like it’s all okay.” You may miss friends or family so much that it actually hurts – which it does. You may be hankering after a former pet, or the dog you used to walk before lockdown (how I miss Ben the collie, and his silky ears).

You may start to notice other ways in which the body is seeking out contact, too. When you skip your daily walk and feel grumpy afterwards, it’s not just that your body is missing its cardiovascular release, your mind its hit of green. “Simply walking around your room stimulates the pressure receptors in your feet,” says Tiffany Field, of the Touch Research Institute at the University of Miami. When you collapse onto the couch at the end of the day, your body wants to be held up. Every teenager’s default lounging position, remember, is full-length on the floor.

So how might we respond kindly to our need for touch during this time? Here are some things that might help.

1. Reach out to those around you

When mood is slipping, we often start to withdraw. You may notice that you have stopped being affectionate with your family; alternatively you may find, when someone hugs you, that you inexplicably become tearful. Both of these are very normal. See what it’s like to begin to reach out again: a hand on your mum’s arm when she has brought you a cup of tea, a hug from a flatmate you trust. Be gentle with yourself, start small, and see what happens.

Sometimes, reaching out begins with a conversation. You may even notice, if all your interactions are online at the moment, that a friend tells you after a good chat ‘I wish I could give you a hug.’ The mind may well prompt melancholy at this thought – ‘but he can’t!’ And yet: see if it’s possible to pause, and take in your friend’s well-wishing. Notice what happens in the body, and know that that hug will come, in good time.

Meanwhile, if you have a dog as lovely as Ben the collie, stroke the dog. “Having pets is wonderful,’ says Field. “When you pet a dog, you’re also moving your own skin and experiencing pressure stimulation.” Give yourself permission to spend time with your pet, as near or far as suits you both.

2. Feel your feet

You may live alone, or feel so flat and tired that reaching out to those you live with feels like too much effort. Movement that affects the receptors in the soles of the feet can be very grounding, and in turn, energising.

So walk, if you like to walk. There’s some great guidance here on mindful walking from Andy Puddicombe, founder of Headspace. Many of us will want to walk outside at this time of year, but walking inside if you can’t go out, picking a short path that you can traverse up and down, can be surprisingly calming. Notice your feet as you walk: if we are anxious, we may find that we are walking on the balls of the feet, almost bouncing. If we are low, it may be all that we can do to put one foot in front of the other. Allow your feet to sense the ground, holding you up.

Or shut the door, draw the curtains, put on some music, and dance in your socks. Feel the floor underneath your feet. If you’re stuck for knowing what to listen to, try the recommendations at the bottom of this blog, by University Chaplain Harriet Harris. If you’re stuck for knowing how to dance, don’t worry about that, and go with it: the body knows what it needs.

3. Seek out quiet comfort

If you have small children climbing all over you every minute of the day, you may feel ‘touched out’. Likewise, if you are feeling introverted, or that kind of exhausted-on-a-cellular-level that is perilously close to burnout, you may need quieter forms of sensory comfort.

So try your favourite blanket wrapped round you, tucked up on the couch. Gardening, and the soil under your fingers. Lying in the sun in a park for half an hour, feeling the grass beneath you. The weight of a really good hardback in your hands. A fresh pillow-case on your pillow tonight. Fields suggests, ‘‘give yourself a scalp massage, or rub moisturiser into your face.” And don’t under-estimate the power of giving yourself a hug; yes, literally.

You may like to do a body scan for your mindfulness practice this week, especially sensing the contact that the body makes with the floor, the mat, or the bed.

‘Skin hunger’ is a great phrase, because it reminds us that nourishing our senses is a key part of nourishing our minds at the moment. It needn’t take much; sometimes a well-timed walk is all that’s needed to turn a day around. But on the other hand, it could be something to choose ‘skin food’ regularly, little and often, asking yourself what might help – and sometimes being a bit brave, and turning the music up louder, just so you can lie on the floor like a teenager, and really enjoy it.

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