How Not to Get Overwhelmed by the Pandemic

(RNS) — Robert J. Wicks, a psychologist and professor emeritus at Loyola University Maryland, is an expert on resilience, self-care and the prevention of secondary stress — the pressures we experience when reaching out to others. His book “Perspective: The Calm within the Storm” addresses how both first-responders and the general public can deal with these topics. As the COVID-19 crisis strains our ability to overcome anxiety and grief, we reached out to Wicks for some much-needed context.

This email interview with Wicks has been edited for clarity and length.

The uncertainty of this pandemic is medical, economic and emotional. What do you mean by perspective and how do we keep it?

A healthy perspective is a portal to resilience. That is, it helps us avoid unnecessary suffering and enables us to better embrace the joy and support around us. It does this by alerting us to pick up our emotions so we can stop, reflect and review our thinking, which can become distorted in a crisis. For example, we can react in extreme ways. Some panic, others fall into a sense of minimization and denial, still others project the blame onto some thing or person or foreign nation in order to maintain a distance from the reality that exists.

You frequently cite religious thinkers in your work. What does religion have to say about keeping perspective?

Buddhists speak about it as the “unobstructed vision” and Hindus, in the…