I had a long chat this morning with a counsellor from the Caltech Staff and Faculty Consultation Center. The last three months have been A LOT, for many of us. I wanted to share what I found helpful. This post is for anyone else new to managing anxiety.

There will be nothing new here for people who have dealt with this before. And I don't know if any of this is helpful long-term yet. But, it was helpful even in the moment to have more information, and to feel like there were possible solutions, so I wanted to share them.

(I specifically enjoyed how the counsellors at Caltech, who must deal with a lot of stressed scientists, were like "Okay, let's break this down. It's SCIENCE. Here's the chemistry. Here's the biology. Here's how you hack them.”)

1. Validation. Everyone is over-loaded. There's an actual freaking pandemic happening. Everyone is over-stimulated with bad stressors and under-stimulated with good stressors. Everyone is scraping by.

2a. Your body is having a physiological reaction to this heightened stimulation (allostatic load). There are tigers everywhere. You can only handle so much stimulus and stress before your bucket begins to overflow, and your 'frustration barrier' drops to non-existent.