As the virus threat and the lockdown conditions continue, many of us are feeling much more anxious than usual. HR want so support employees to avoid this becoming a downward cycle of worry, lethargy and depression. The threat is real, and we can’t make it go away. What we can do is provide information and support to help everyone boost their resilience, finding ways to keep morale up.

Two principles are particularly useful to communicate. First, managing anxiety takes mental strength and energy, if we don’t actively recharge, we will become depleted.  Secondly the state of our morale affects the state of our immune system (At this point I have to say this doesn’t mean that anyone who becomes ill wasn’t positive enough!).  By pro-actively attend to our morale, we are also pro-actively attending to our health.

Here are 9 proven ideas to share with employees, and utilitise yourself as HR leaders:

1: Count your blessings
The new science of positive psychology has proved the benefits of the old adage of counting your blessings. There is an exercise known as the ‘three good things’. At the end of each day, identify three good things that have happened during the day. It’s good practice to write them down. Doing this regularly helps train your brain to look for the positives amongst the gloom, to find the silver linings, if you like.

You can find lots of similar proven exercises in Vanessa Keys excellent book: 10 keys to happier living. Based on science, written for everyone, it is full of ideas for boosting your mood.

2: Pro-actively managing your news feed and other anxiety amplifier
We are being offered 24-hour, worldwide updates. Following this minute-by-minute is not likely to do you any good. You can’t influence things other than by taking the sensible precautions we’ve all been told about. So, take positive control and limit your daily diet. You might choose to read rather than watch the news. One benefit of this is that there is less ‘emotional contagion’ from the written word than from a person’s voice, so less transmission of anxiety.

What we want to do is replace anxiety with optimism. Two great resources with ideas about how to do this are ‘Happy Brain Science’s Happiness at Work’ game and ‘Positran’s Positive Action Cards’.

3: If you have to worry, have a worry half-hour
Some of us are born worriers; suggestions of optimism only increase anxiety. If you are someone who finds worrying reassuring, try to limit it so it doesn’t become overwhelming. A time-honoured technique is ‘allowing’ yourself a specific allotted time to worry as much as you like. So, if you need to, spend a specified 15 or 30 minutes allowing yourself to name all your worries. Write them in a ‘dear diary’ if you like. Or arrange a strictly focused and time limited phone call with another ‘worrywart’. And when your time is up, it’s up. Stop, close that box and move on with your day knowing you have another half-hour of worry time allocated tomorrow. Allocating this time and allowing yourself a good worry, should reduce the likelihood of doing your worrying in the small wee hours, which is the worst possible time to do it.

4: Get into flow and out of yourself
Just ‘not thinking about it’ is hard, we need to find things that take us out of ourselves. When we are completely absorbed in things we are in a state of ‘flow’ and when we are in this state, we are not focused on our feelings. It’s like getting a holiday from your worried self.

For me writing, gardening, and complicated cooking (or these days ‘creating from what we have got to hand’) all offer me productive escape time. This is usually more effective than mindless TV watching (where half your brain is still ticking along thinking about it all). Sometimes it’s hard to get yourself over the initial hump into the activity, but once you’ve started to apply yourself, time falls away.

The book, ‘Positive Psychology at Work’ explains flow and other positive psychology concepts that might be useful right now. ‘Positive Organizational Development cards’ take twenty of the key positive psychology concepts, including flow, and give you questions to help you explore them and brief ideas for action. Or you can go straight to the master’s voice and get Csikszentmihalyi’s classic book, ‘Flow’.

5: Eat well and exercise
You are no longer at the mercy of the snack bars, train trolleys, airline catering etc. as you skedaddle from one place to another. Make the most of it to eat healthily. Lots of fruit and vegetables are good for immune system. Exercise is very important to both mental and physical health. You know the rules about keeping your distance. Put your face mask on and get out there and yomp for an hour somewhere green.

I’ve started doing a morning workout with my almost daughter, through the wonders of the internet. She has Jo Wicks ‘Seven days of sweat’ (and I can tell you, she didn’t tell me it was called that before we started!) on the computer her end, then we link up over face time and she instructs me. It’s exhausting, I puff and sweat. It’s social time and I get a great feel-good buzz afterwards. The point is, I would never do it without her company.

6: Phone a friend
Social contact is another thing that is very important to our wellbeing. I am fortunate that I am marooned with dear beloved. Even so, I am resolved to talk on the phone to at least one person who isn’t him every day. You might want to talk about the situation, that’s fine. However, I would suggest you also ask them about their plans for the day, what they are hoping to achieve during this period of lockdown. In other words, try to help them see a silver lining. Ideally you will both come away from the phone call feeling slightly better not even worse!

7: Have longer-term projects on the go
‘Wise people’, someone once said ‘prepare for the worse while hoping for the best’. Once you’ve done what you can to prepare for the worse, then turn your energy to hoping for the best.

Starting projects suggests an optimism about the future that becomes self-reinforcing. Uncertainty can act to paralyse us. By pro-actively starting a project we can break out of that paralysis. The hardest part is getting started, but once you do it will draw you forward. Apart from total house rearrangement, I’ve started a new tapestry kit. These take me years to complete. But every evening I can admire the couple of square inches I’ve completed and feel I’m making progress.

Positran do another great set of cards called ‘Positive Transformation Cards’. They are resilience building cards, full of uplifting quotes and insightful questions to help you boost your optimism, hopefulness, and self-confidence in a mindful way.

8: Self-coach
If you are feeling really stuck, and your thinking is just going round-and-round in circles then you may need to take a more structured approach to pull yourself out of the mire. Usually we can rely on informal chats with colleagues to stimulate our thinking or for ideas that haven’t occurred to us. Sometimes we just need to be asked a question that gives us a different take on the subject or causes us to make a new connection. You may already have a coach who can help you, but if not, people often self-coach. Self-coaching helps move you into a more productive self-talk, that allows you find unexpected ways forward.

‘At My Best’ offer an excellent selection of forty-eight coaching questions in their ‘Good Question Card’ pack. Alternatively, there is a set of six Coaching Cubes with thirty-six questions, based on the PRISM coaching model, that you roll like dice, introducing an element of randomness in the questions.