Lockdown again. I live in Vienna and Austria will go into lockdown for the 4th time tomorrow. For many, this decision came as a surprise and triggers intense emotions.

In the picture above I am in nature and enjoy the sun. Then I managed to get out of my carousel of thoughts. Before that, it can look very gloomy in my head when everything is spinning in circles:

• What is the lockdown doing to me?
• I feel passed out.
• I am concerned about the different opinions in my family and my friends.
• I am not allowed to work and therefore have no income.
• It doesn’t feel good that my everyday life is changing, becoming more stressful or unintentionally calm.
• I wonder if the other people are also insecure or just me?
• Is that OK to feel this way?

Do these thoughts and questions sound familiar to you?

You don’t want to read so many messages and still can’t get out of scrolling on social media. You are then fascinated by what is being written and who has what opinion. The comments on social media won’t let you go? Often you sit in front of the TV until late at night and are tired the next day, get up late and have the feeling of missing the day. Life seems to pass you by even more now. You have the right to use the time wisely and to advance something while you are sitting at home in lockdown. If you fail to do this, you are dissatisfied with yourself. And so you think about yourself every day. What you can do and what you can’t, how other people do it and you feel alone.

A lockdown is a change that we do not choose ourselves. It is prescribed to us whether we like it or not. How does that feel? Somehow externally determined, regardless of whether we agree to the measures or not.

We can choose how to deal with this situation.

Just as we always have a choice in life, how we react to external events. We cannot always influence these and actively control their course. The more we get into a storm of thoughts about it, the more we feel this chaos of thoughts. It feels real All fears, insecurities and fears seem more real and more present than they actually are. It’s just that we usually don’t notice it anymore. The wave of thoughts often becomes huge in unsettling situations and floods old patterns and topics back into our everyday lives.

What if we didn’t have to believe that thought?

If we could understand that these thoughts quickly become too much in stressful and exceptional situations, such as a lockdown, and seem to go in circles, then we could simply observe the situation and see what is happening to us. As we can often see with others. We can see from the outside that a lot is not as dramatic as the person is describing and feeling. With others, we know much faster that the next morning, or simply when the person feels calmer again, everything will look different. She has energy again and can think about solutions.

It’s a natural process that happens by itself when we let it happen.

It always works. But we often have no faith in this brighter, friendlier moment and immediately throw it away, filling it with new thoughts.

How about if you embark on the experiment of giving space to this moment every day? To give your own wisdom a chance to suggest something to you, to try something and do something differently. Follow these suggestions that come out of that calm mood within you. Or if you don’t really trust the whole thing, just watch yourself.

The better we understand our inner processes and notice what is happening to us, the easier it is to get out of a thought carousel or a negative thought loop.

In these moments, our brain tries to solve things that cannot be solved with more thinking, analyzing, evaluating and comparing. We get even deeper into the spiral. In such a case, find a place where you can calm down, take a walk or listen to music that cheers you up. Feel briefly within yourself what offers you as a solution. What idea comes to you before your thoughts start again and go around in circles again? Follow this impulse and observe.

This week I will deal with the topic of lockdown again and again on my social media profiles Facebook and Instagram . Simply drop by.

If you would like to look at your topics with me, book a taster coaching .