3 Tips to help ease you calmly out of lockdown and into the real world

How are you feeling about the UK heading out of lockdown? What do you feel when you think of returning to a more normal work and social life?

While some people can't wait, and essential workers have had to carry on regardless, many people say they feel uneasy, even highly anxious about having to return to ‘normal' life.

This can be puzzling to them and the people around them. A year ago, weren’t we focused on when life would be able to return to normal? Normal’s on the horizon, and now we’re worried about it?

Here’s the thing about the brain.

It loves familiarity and routine. Once it gets used to something – like staying at home – it can operate on autopilot a lot more. It can refer the previous patterns of behaviour and just re-run them. This doesn’t take as much effort as having to process new things – and the brain likes an easy life.

Change is scary to the brain. Uncertainty too. If it knows change is coming but it’s not certain exactly what’s in store, then the brain doesn’t know which template to apply, which pattern to run. Our primitive mind starts to engage a stress response, and we feel worried, anxious or stressed.

So how can we counter the worried and unsettled feelings about what is to come?

1. Sleep! Get enough quality sleep so that your brain gets time to process your emotions and experiences. Struggling with sleep? Download one of my free relaxation audios to listen to at bedtime.

2. Look for and, if needed, create small positive moments each day. Sit in the sun with a cuppa. Watch your favourite thing on TV. Talk to someone you enjoy interacting with. Cuddle your pet.

3. If your thoughts start to run away with you, take three deep breaths, lift you head up, put your shoulders back and recall one of your positive moments. Bask in it. This steers your brain to a more positive place. Then come up with one achievable positive that you see in the future, like a pub lunch, or getting back to the gym or, the UK’s no.1 choice, getting a haircut!

If you feel your anxiety is causing you a problem, please get in touch and we can talk through how solution focused hypnotherapy can help! You can call me on 01684 355007 or email fiona@beaconhypnotherapy.co.uk