Managing Stress in the Pandemic
Chris Dunkerley shares his experience of navigating the last couple of years as head of psych services .
Stress buckets.
Everyone has a stress bucket. It’s your internal capacity for stress. The level of stress in your bucket goes up and down and most of the time you might not be aware of it. Now and again, something big comes along and your bucket overflows. That shows in different ways with different people; anxiety, depression, insomnia, becoming more snappy. It’s a metaphor I often use with clients. Throughout the pandemic, we haven’t seen so many people for whom the illness itself has created the primary problem, but we have seen a steady stream of folk for whom the whole situation has been one big dollop of stress in their buckets. For others, imposed lockdowns or self-isolation have come as a relief, to be ordered to stay at home and stop rushing.
“Now and again, something big comes along and your bucket overflows”
A new experience.
The Psychological Services Team at HealthLink360 have kept on seeing clients throughout, helping them with their overflowing buckets. We’ve helped clients remotely for many years, so it was easy to make the transition to an online service. But working from home, instead of at our clinic, was a new experience. Get up, breakfast, check my HealthLink360 calendar, then onto Zoom to undertake an assessment with a burned-out missionary 4,700 miles away in India, make some coffee, take a breather, then back online to provide therapy to a young man 20 miles down the road in Edinburgh. Lunch. Phew! Tackle some emails, write a report, pat the dog, and then onto a video call to talk to a troubled church minister down south. Pause, reflect, write up some notes, log-off, shut the laptop, and go for a run…
Meanwhile, we have had to learn to navigate work working from home as a virtual team. Phone calls, Zoom meetings and check-ins are all essential.
Never the same again.
People say that the world will never be the same again. The Psychological Services Team at HealthLink360 will never be the same again, but that’s looking like a blessing. We have expanded our pool of sessional clinicians and, being virtual, we can spread a much wider net to include counsellors and psychologists with particular expertise. This is good news, because omicron has poured even more stress into most people’s buckets.
Here to help.
We are here to help you if your bucket is overflowing, whether it’s burnout, stress, depression, OCD, or some other mental or emotional difficulty. If money is one of those stressors, don’t forget that we have a bursary available for people who would otherwise struggle to pay.
