Hey, there. How you doing? Do you remember when we used to just ask each other that question and quite often we just mindlessly reply fine. Well, fact of the matter is we're not fine. We're not fine now, none of us are fine. We, meaning the globe, humanity are all sharing a crisis. A crisis borne of, yes, a virus, initially the COVID-19 virus, but also everything that it's changing about our world, from the economy, the way we're going to interact with each other, to everything and I don't think there's ever been any group of humans living under more uncertainty. It's a scary time and we all feel anxious. I feel anxious. For me one of the things that helps me deal with my anxiety is some of the stuff I know about human psychology. I tried to put it in the play, so I can keep myself, I don't know, afloat, I guess during all of this functioning to some extent. So as I was thinking about this and occasionally talking to media outlets about some of these strategies, it dawned on me that maybe a really good idea would be to create a course. That's what this course is about, to just share some of what I understand and some of the strategies that I know about to help you manage your mental health during COVID-19. Well, let me start at the very beginning by saying this will not be a high production course. Like many of you, I am home isolated. I happen to have the computer. I have a lamp with no shade over there is my lighting system, this is my audio system. I've already learned to hold it away so it doesn't rub and make funny noises. So we're going to try our best with what we have. It's the information that I hope will come through and the strategies, those are the things that really matter here and so let's just do this together. I want to give you a sense of my perspective because mental health is one of these on topics where some people have a lot of, I don't know. Deep-seated senses of me, maybe it's not even a valid topic to think about it or anything like that and if I find a little bit of that confusing. So I want to share a couple of the ways I think about mental health because it'll be in the background of everything we're talking about here. So first of all, I really think that mental health is not different from physical health. You don't have to worry about your physical health but those who put in some time exercising worry about the foods they eat, think about getting their vitamins, sleeping well is part of good physical health. You'll see it's also part of good mental health. Some people choose to actively invest in their physical health through time and through the efforts that they put into things and those people are no doubt, better physically suited to meet physical challenges. Mental health is the same thing. So many of us do not or have not been in the habit of exercising, are doing the things we need to do to give us good mental health, but we need to now. I mean this is a huge mental challenge for all of us, we don't know when it's going to end, we don't know what it's going to morph into and this is a time when we have to be mentally ready. So my main idea of this course is to try to give you some really concrete notions of what it means to get mentally ready, what you can do. I really want you to think about this. There's this interesting interaction between our minds and our bodies and quite often it's our body that's driving because we don't really understand or haven't thought much about and certainly haven't tried to manipulate the machine with their mind. Very often the machine ends up manipulating our mind. So certain things trigger reactions in our body that can produce emotional states and then those emotional states can enter into our mind and really send us on a bit of a spiral. But the important thing is we can turn that around as well. So yes, the body can affect the mental state, the mind, but the mind can also affect the body. Just think about those gurus that we all heard about when we were young that could reduce their heart rate to almost zero by mentally taking control of their body. That's an extreme example but of course, they had to do a lot of practice to get there. Well, you can do something very similar when it comes to your anxiety and that's really what this is going to be about. So it's just about using your mind and your knowledge to control this machine before it controls you. So first of all, I should introduce myself. I'm Professor Steve Joordens. I'm a Professor of Psychology. I've taught psychology at the University of Toronto, Scarborough since 1995. I also have a full psychology course on Coursera here. But this course will not try to be a full psychology course, but rather we're going to focus on some specific issues that are relevant to COVID. Mind control. I'm going to use this term, and I don't obviously mean it in the way that some people think of it. We're controlling the mind of others. No, I mean you learning to control your own mind and through your mind, your body. So I'm going to try to talk about this. We can almost think of ourselves as jedis. Now we're going to try to do jedi mind tricks on ourselves. I'm going to talk about it in four general areas. So first we'll talk about understanding this anxiety response. What is it? Why do you feel the way you do? What's the mechanism, but also what's the purpose of that mechanism? It turns out that's very important to understanding how you can manage your anxiety response. So we'll talk about that anxiety response. I'm going to tell you a way you can actually shut it down, at least for short periods of time and which is a very important thing to be able to do. I'm also going to make you aware that these reactions or responses are triggered by stimuli in the environment. If we understand that relationship between the environment and our mental state, then we can actually manage our exposure to the stimuli. That's a really powerful way to manage our anxiety, is by literally managing whether we're exposed to things that make us anxious or not. So we'll talk about that a little bit, especially in week 2. Week 3, we're really going to focus on isolation, and many of us are finding ourselves in isolation. This weird notion, I will not use the word social distancing. I will use the word physical distancing because we want to socially, in fact, try to come closer than ever. So I'm going to talk about the role of things like, well, our social relationships and our structure and our lives and what we do in isolation, etc. We'll visit this whole idea of isolation and how we can get through that better. The whole purpose of this will be to put a positive spin on what's clearly a very difficult situation. But because we all are so admittedly anxious right now, we have the opportunity to take the time to learn about this response and how to control it and if we do that, that can breed mental resilience. In fact, I'm going to suggest to you that some of the exercises I tell you about, you also tell your children about these exercises and maybe do them with them because they have all challenges ahead in their lives. We have all challenges ahead in our lives. So yes, we all just right now want to get through this one. But by learning these strategies and techniques, they become tools you have in your back pocket and they can help you deal with things all through, life as it continues. So here's a very specific breakdown of the course in four weeks with three or four videos per week. Some of these videos won't be very long. Some could be 15-ish minutes or longer, but some could be as little as five minutes, quite honestly. We'll have some questions at the end of each video. I'll only let you reflect on what you just learned and think about it by prompting you to do so. We may also have an activity at the end that allows us all to share and connect with one another. We'll talk about that more probably in the actual announcements and discussion forums and such. So keep an eye there. As we're going through this course, we will be actively monitoring the discussion forum and so please ask any questions. In fact, you'll see that the very last point that I bring up here is an invitation to request additional videos. I'm trying to hit what I think are the most common issues that at least I've been asked about so far. But I know there's things, there's other questions that I'm not getting out and there probably is some relevant psychology. So as you go through, if you wish, I would do another even short video on some topic, we're going to invite you to request those videos and this may become a bit of inorganic course where it gets a little longer as it goes. If I am helping you, I'm certainly going to be helping myself by helping you because this is something that I can do and that's as you'll see, that's an important part of dealing with anxiety. So yeah, if I can help you guys by giving you information and perspective, I appreciate the opportunity to do so. So let's get at it. We're going to begin by really getting down to the nitty-gritty of what this anxiety response is and how to actually directly intervene. See you there.
