Staying Strong During Lockdown Means Reaching Out — And Working Your Mind, Too
Keeping your brain busy but relaxed by volunteering, gardening, or learning a new language, for example, can help you cope with hard times now and in the future, psychiatrists say.
It can be tempting, as the pandemic wears on, to shut down — to escape into TV binging, social media and other inadequate ways of blocking out the stress and fears of illness or economic disaster.
Dr. Maryland Pao, the clinical director of the National Institutes of Mental Health Intramural Research Program and a psychiatrist who regularly sees children with life-threatening illnesses, says she's seen striking similarities between the ways her young patients deal with their diagnoses, and how lots of people are responding as we roll past month 5 of the pandemic.
We all tend to default to two
