Mindfulness – Kitty Wheater

Responding Wisely to Sadness

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.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about how a holiday – amidst its blessings – can create a space in which feelings that have been accruing emerge, sometimes unexpectedly. This is particularly true in difficult times. When things are urgent and important, we barrel through, and place things on the emotional shelf to be dealt with ‘later’. ‘Later’ can come as quite a surprise: the writer Elizabeth Gilbert, describing the loss of her partner, says of her grief that it comes in waves, and she usually gets about five seconds’ warning that one is coming.

Sadness, in particular, is such a powerful human emotion that when it wells up in us, we react equally powerfully. We often try to push it away: we tell ourselves that we have to get through the workday, so we can’t afford to be sad; we remind ourselves how much sadder other people are; we decide that we must be strong for others, or that there’s no reason to be this sad. It can be wise, sometimes, to place something carefully to one side; to say, ‘I know the time will come, and it is not now.’ But when sadness persists, we can feel swamped by it. It takes over our thoughts: how can I fix it, why am I all alone with it, it will never go away. We can get angry with it, and ourselves. And yet – here it is, heavy, solid. It wants something. What?

When sadness returns, it is because it wants to be felt. We resist it, as human beings, because we fear that if we allow it to be here, we may crumble once and for all. But in the end, trying to hold back sadness is like trying to hold back the waves. We can try: we come up with brilliant techniques, like drinking too much or working too hard, that seem to keep it at bay for a time. But sadness wants to wave through. When we are sad, it is because something important has happened. And so to respond wisely to sadness, we need to feel the water in our hair, and the salt on our skin, in ways that will tend it as it needs.

Last week, we looked at how to ground and settle the attention for a sense of safety and resource, and how helpful this can be when followed by Tara Brach’s practice RAIN. Here, now, is what my Oxford colleague Chris Cullen calls a GRAIN practice – Ground, Recognise, Allow, Investigate and Nurture – for times when sadness is here.

You might wish to do this sitting down, or, if you feel particularly agitated, on a walk, where you can pause or speed up as you need.

Ground

Feel your feet on the ground – the texture of the carpet, floor, or earth. It can be good to take your shoes off for this, and really feel the contact with what is holding you up. If sitting down, sense your sit-bones on the chair or floor. Spend some time here, allowing your awareness to pool and settle in the base of the body, almost as if your body were a mountain, reaching down into the ground.

Recognise

Notice what emotional tone is present in your experience right now. Sometimes, when we go to look for sadness, we find numbness. Looking more closely, there may also be anger, or anxiety, alongside sadness. Notice if the mind pulls you to thinking, and narrative. Some of our most compelling thoughts are images: a strong memory may pop up, or a visualisation of the future. See if you can name, internally, the emotions that are around: ‘here is sadness,’ ‘here is anxiety.’

Allow

Touch back in with the sense of the soles of the feet, and your seat. Feel how sadness can be here, and your contact with the ground is also here. Bring a sense of gentleness and allowing to the feelings, knowing that it’s OK that they’re here. You might even say, internally: ‘here it is. Here it is.’

Allowing your sadness to be here is not the same as resignation to what is causing you pain. Rather, it’s acknowledging that it is OK for you to feel the way that you feel about it. When we fight sadness, it often intensifies, as it asks, louder, to be heard. So hold it gently. Know that the ground can hold you, amidst it.

Investigate

Notice what sadness feels like in the body, and name this. It could be heaviness in the stomach; you might feel cold, or as if your body wants to curl up in on itself. Notice, too, your reaction to the sadness – there may be a sense of trying to push it away, or problem-solving. Note this, gently, and check back in with the soles of the feet, and your seat. These are always here to support you.

Nurture

As you attend to sadness in the body, the body may well tell you what it needs. If it wants to curl up, then curl up, and pull a blanket over you, and rest for a while. If tears come, give yourself space to cry. Sometimes, it helps to drop in the question, softly: ‘what does this need?’ Listen to what comes back: a thought, an image, a spontaneous movement. Give yourself permission to follow this through, however small it seems.

Naomi Shihab Nye, in her poem ‘Kindness’, writes:

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.

Sadness can feel as though it is just ours, and we are alone in it. But it is so very human, and the size of the cloth is the size of all of us. As you tend your sadness, sense that you need not bear it alone. This is something that we share, that we carry with and for each other. Read your favourite poem, or call a loved one; as you sit or walk, give the sadness to the ground, and allow the ground to carry some of it for you.

If we have pushed sadness away for years, there may be a lot of sea waiting to come through. When we finally begin to listen, it can feel as if we are feeling all the sorrow of the world. It may shock us, how much sadness is here, and it can feel as if our head will never emerge from beneath the water. You may find yourself grimly pushing through GRAIN, teeth clenched, determined to feel it all and be done.

We don’t need to heroically purge ourselves of our sadness; that is only another form of trying to push it away. We honour it by attending, with gentleness, and care. Sometimes, that means sitting down with it, giving it space and time, perhaps with another person to help. Sometimes it means acknowledging sadness very lightly, greeting it as it laps at your feet. There may be days, weeks, and months of your life where it is entirely appropriate simply to Ground, and Recognise, and Ground again – maybe with the breathing space.

A wave rises and falls; this is its nature. It rises, as it seeks to make itself felt. It falls when we plant our feet firmly on solid ground, when we recognise the wave for what it is, when we say ‘it’s OK that this is here,’ when it moves through the body, and when we care for ourselves in its midst.

As we allow ourselves to feel the water, and taste its salt, we emerge, blinking, into the sun.

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

Going to Ground

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.

A few weeks ago, on a morning walk, I came across a spectacular carpet of morning glories. Otherwise known as bindweed, these marshmallow pink flowers grow rapaciously on scrubby ground in the summer months. True to their name, they are open and most glorious first thing, when the sun is up; by the afternoon they have folded in a tight pink whorl, waiting for the next beams of morning light. In gardens they are often uprooted, but if left undisturbed in farmland and hedgerows, they will roam over the ground without limit, like a green and pink web of delights for visiting bees and butterflies.

There was no other way to appreciate these ground-dwellers on a glorious morning: I sat down on the sun-baked earth, and settled in to watch the flowers and their visitors. Slowly but surely, peace, like the beetles, crept over me.

When we think of going to ground, it often has a fearful quality. We think of how rabbits disappear into their burrows at approaching footsteps, or a mouse bolts below the skirting boards. Indeed, with no burrow in sight, it is a profoundly animal pattern to drop to the ground in times of terror or distress: think of how a gazelle cornered by a lion will freeze, and fall.

Humans are just the same. In a moment of shock, we crumble to our knees, or say, ‘I need to lie down.’ In Eat Pray Love, the writer Elizabeth Gilbert describes how during the years of the breakdown of her marriage, she spent nights on the bathroom floor. The ground offers us something: as I wrote a few weeks back, even being in contact with it through walking activates the pressure receptors in the soles of the feet, helping to meet the body’s neurological need for touch.

To see what the ground gives back, you might watch how that gazelle, apparently felled, can bolt for freedom at the predator’s momentary inattention; how a human’s blood pressure rights, as they fold to the floor in a faint (ouch); how Gilbert’s prayers on the floor opened her to a guiding voice within. Going to ground gives us time. It allows us to replenish. Indeed, given the time of year, and your need for a holiday, many of you as you read this may actually be horizontal – or wish you were.

But the ground is not only palliative. As the dancers among you will attest, our bodies’ relationship with the earth is also the source of some of the most beautiful forms of art. Watch a contemporary dancer roll and lift from the ground, in a seamless wave of motion; or a Cuban salsera, or a tap dancer. You will see how going to ground does not only restore us to baseline: it makes new and rather wonderful things possible.

Here, then, is some ground beneath your feet this week.

GRAIN, For Hard Times

I’ve introduced Tara Brach’s RAIN practice to you before as a way of responding wisely to fear, worry, and illness. The practice’s four stages – Recognise, Allow, Investigate, Nurture – are a very helpful way of using your attention to explore and tend to the experience of stress.

Sometimes, however, if distress is acute, or RAIN is unfamiliar as a practice, it is difficult for us to move attentively through this process without losing the thread, or getting sucked into the worry. My colleague from the Oxford Mindfulness Centre, Chris Cullen, talks about the value of Grounding first, by sensing the feet on the floor, and the seat on the chair. This allows the mind to begin to shift mode out of the fight-flight response. Indeed, once you have grounded, and are moving through RAIN, you might return the attention to the feet and the seat, in between its stages, to help steady the attention as you explore the practice.

In particularly sticky moments, simply attend for a few minutes to the soles of the feet on the floor, and the sit-bones on the chair. ‘FOFBOC’ – succinctly standing for ‘feet on floor, bum on chair’ – was developed by the Mindfulness in Schools Project, as a brief practice to help teenagers’ minds to settle at the beginning of class. It’s a great one to do regularly, so that the attention learns to settle in these places, and your ground is ready and waiting in the moments you need it.

Your Head in the Clouds

Leaving the ground can be one of the most exhilarating experiences known to humans. Think of the plane taking off to a faraway land, the phrase ‘flight of fancy’, the rollercoaster, the simple pleasure of climbing a tree. There is a reason that the penthouse is the preferred floor.

Extraordinary things can happen when we go up. But we also sense, with animal blood in our veins, that leaving the ground carries a risk to it. Those who are afraid of flying, who prefer the stairs to the lift, are in touch with this very basic fear. The idea of strange and frightening things happening when we go too high appears across literature; think of Mrs Rochester in Jane Eyre’s attic, or the vicious Knids in Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator. Dahl, who was an RAF pilot during the Second World War, was well aware of what can happen in the sky.

One of the most interesting facets of creative thought is that it takes what is already here, and transforms it into something new. Creativity is literally grounded. The plane depends on the ground, and must return to it, to take off once more – otherwise, at some point, it will find itself running on fumes.

So use FOFBOC – not just when you are stressed and low, but at work, or play, when the adrenaline begins to peter. Take your project on a walk, and feel your feet on the ground. Dance out your energy, and feel, like the dancers do, the heels and balls of the feet, and the sense of a shuffle or spin.

We see and feel things differently from the ground. From a cognitive perspective, we shift in mode. We gain insight into problems, whether of heart or mind. When we have our feet on the ground, they support our head in the clouds. Like the contemporary dancers, we can create something new, and beautiful.

© 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.

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