Coping with the Pandemic 01 March 2021
Speaker: Vivien Philps-Tate
The subject of the speaker meeting on 1 March 2021 was coping with the symptoms and worries we had had during the pandemic.
Vivien Philps-Tate worked as a psychotherapist in the corporate world for a number of years and has also helped children with psychological difficulties. She began by looking at people’s behaviour in big organisations and ways of encouraging them to change. About 14 years ago she noticed that their behaviour was affected not by their adult reactions but by reactions deriving from their childhoods, so she decided to qualify as a counsellor and now treats children and teenagers as well as adults.
Since much of her work is with police and frontline staff, she specialises in trauma. This is triggered by situations which remind people of when it first occurred and has happened a lot with Covid.
After asking club members what had most bothered them during the pandemic, Vivien Philps-Tate was able to identify a pattern mainly involving anxiety, feeling out of control, and catastrophising – what if? – although she pointed out that fantasy is often worse than what actually happens. Poor motivation was very common. Another was thoughts of mortality, which have occurred in all age groups.
Part of her aim, on this occasion, was to help us to understand our symptoms and why certain feelings arose.
Neuroscience is the study of how the mind and the emotions interact. In the last 20 years major advances have been made in understanding the functioning of the brain and its neuroplasticity. Modern neuroimaging techniques are used to understand how the brain’s neural pathways work in conditions such as attention deficit disorder, Parkinson’s and dementia.
The brain does not stay the same as it was when young: ‘old dogs’ can be taught new tricks by rebuilding the brain’s neural pathways (the series of interconnected neurons that send signals from one part of the brain to another). This work is particularly useful with people who have experienced brain damage, for example in accidents. Neuroscience looks at the reasons behind our symptoms. The brain likes to work with patterns and to find solutions to problems but the difficulty with Covid is that since there is no pre-existing pattern or experience. Our brains cannot analyse, simplify and replicate, as they would usually try to do.
The brain’s neutral pathways try to navigate their way through what Covid is doing to us, but since it cannot do what it usually does, it becomes anxious. As with sport, where training programmes have to keep changing to prevent them becoming too easy, so too does the brain’s programming need to change periodically to make it work harder. The brain has to be kept working since otherwise it loses motivation. The chemical cortisol has the effect of getting us going, but if we are under too much stress and have no way of relieving it, the cortisol has nowhere to go and so it seeks out our weak points, with the result that the brain diverts the cortisol into something tangible for us to worry about.
The nervous system has two main parts: the sympathetic nervous system which is activated by cortisol; and the parasympathetic nervous system, in which the hormones dopamine and oxytocin help the system to calm down. However, if there is too much cortisol, the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems can become imbalanced and insufficient dopamine and oxytocin are produced, with the result that the brain is unable to navigate its way through as it would do normally, and we become depressed and lacking in energy and motivation.
Vivien Philps-Tate next mentioned dreams, which process things that we cannot make sense of in our waking hours. However, she suggested that we should just go with them, since during the pandemic the chemicals in the brain may have been out of control, but something we can influence is within ourselves, especially our emotional responses. Avoiding thinking is all very well, but only up to a point since it can lead to depression, in which everything shuts down. We should not be frightened of our emotions since we are emotional beings, but we can benefit from learning to live with and to contain our emotions.
We tend to think of ourselves as one-dimensional beings, but we are not. Since our emotions are bodily responses, the way to live with ourselves is to understand these.
It helps to understand how the body responds to emotion: if something is not happening in your head, it will not happen in your body. Understanding this gives you space to think, whereas excessive emotion will stop you thinking.
A major part in our emotions is played by the amygdala – the fight or flight response – but the part of the brain that does the thinking is the prefrontal cortex. When our emotions are heightened, a way has to be found to disconnect the amygdala so that the prefrontal cortex can step in and effectively regulate our actions.
Two therapies that help to manage the symptoms caused by the pandemic are CBT (cognitive behaviour therapy) and somatic experiencing, which contends that negative symptoms of trauma, one of which is anxiety, result from denying the body the opportunity to fully process a traumatic event.
Several strategies are available to slow our emotional reactions so that the prefrontal cortex can get into action. With the help of a club member, Vivien Philps-Tate then demonstrated these and how they can help with anger management and anxiety.