The Coronavirus and the massive impact it is having on economy and lifestyle is triggering all sorts of anxiety and fear. When life as people know it is severely disrupted, when income evaporates, when a mysterious disease claims thousands of lives and shut down cities, people are going to worry. It’s inevitable, and it’s natural, so how do you deal with fear?

Stop Telling People Not to Fear

When I hear people telling others, ‘Don’t fear the coronavirus,’ or ‘Act reasonably,’ or ‘There’s no need to panic, ’a part of me resists those well-meaning suggestions. I feel the positive intent behind them, and understand that in their own way they are trying to help calm the situation down and help people become less reactive, but in actuality, a big opportunity is being overlooked.

In times like these, and this is by no means the end of cataclysms that will be impacting our world in the coming years, people are going to fear. They are going to freak out, become terribly stressed, spiral into depression, and be swept by feelings of hopelessness and powerlessness. As well-meaning as it may sound, the antidote is not to tell them not to fear. Just as the antidote is not to tell them to see the silver lining, the ‘opportunity’ or ‘life lesson’ in the turmoil that is upending their lives.

Fear Makes Us Weak, Right?

What we need to be saying to each other, and helping people do for themselves, is to make time and space to lean into and be with the fear. From a young age, most of us have been taught to stuff our worries and concerns away, to put on a brave face, to mask our worries and act as though everything is okay.

To show fear is typically seen as a sign of weakness; especially for men. God-forbid a man should cry. Vulnerability is for sissies, so suck it in, pull up your bootstraps, tell yourself that fear is only false evidence appearing real, and get on with it.

This is a good time to change that old pattern of masking fear. We are entering a time when fear is going to overwhelm some people. And fear is going to motivate all sorts of behavior that ensures personal survival, often at the expense of others.

If we brush it over, make people feel less than for feeling it, or try to stuff it away in order to keep up the appearance that it’s all under control, it will have devastating consequences on mental health, which in turn will run its own rampant course through families and communities.

Fear Is Normal

Our challenge is that en masse, people are not aware of the ‘okayness’ of feeling fearful. Change needs to begin there, to be able to say to ourselves and others, “Hey, in times like these this worry, this anxiety, this wave of panic I’m feeling is normal. I’m perceiving a threat to my existence and there is a part of me that’s going to react to that out of concern for my survival.” That’s how we begin to lean into it, by giving ourselves permission to feel as we are feeling, without it needing to be different than it is, to fix it, or to make it go away simply because it’s deeply uncomfortable.

No Need To Fix It or Make It Go Away

It’s in those moments that space opens up in the mind, as we become an observer of our inner experience. Now we can speak to our fear, or let it speak to us. Just as importantly, we’ve also expanded our capacity to just be with the fear and pain we are feeling. This is an invaluable way to ‘deal with fear’ because as we expand our capacity to be with fear, we are better able to be with others who are also experiencing it, without needing to fix their pain or make it go away.

Can you just be with your fear? Can you be with another person’s pain?

Sit with it, observe it, dialogue with it, and then, if there is a readiness for it, invite in a new or higher perspective.

Allow Someone to Hold Space For You

Yes, at times the fear will feel overwhelming, the mind screaming in terror. It will help to then have someone to speak to, to share it with; someone who is capable of holding a space in which you can share openly all that is going on in you.

But stop telling people not to fear. Instead, learn and teach what it looks like to be vulnerable with each other, to lean into fear, to befriend rather than push it away. We all need to learn this, it’s a huge lesson in developing resiliency, and it will serve us mightily in the times of disruption still to come.