How to Design a Post-Pandemic Life (For You and Your Kids)

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: Now, many countries around the world are trying to get back to pre-COVID life and navigating this just become perhaps a whole lot easier with the release of our next guest’s new book, “Restart: Designing a Healthy Post- Pandemic Life.” In it, Psychologist Doreen Dodgen-Magee lays out how we can create better relationships with ourselves, our friends and our tech. And here she is talking to our Hari Sreenivasan about it.

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HARI SREENIVASAN: Christiane, thank. Doreen Dodgen-Magee, thanks for joining us. In this book, which is almost like a manual on how to get into this post- pandemic life, one of the first ideas that you touch on is this notion of complicated grief. I mean, just kind of break that down for us.

DOREEN DODGEN-MAGEE, AUTHOR, “RESTART: DESIGNING A HEALTHY POST-PANDEMIC LIFE”: Complicated grief is tricky in that it involves the normal process of grieving so when a person experiences a traumatic or complicated loss, they’re going to go through the normal stages that we would imagine, sadness, kind of a difficult time not wanting to be in acceptance, being in denial. But complicated grief is a little tricky because frequently it involves human error and/or kind of a very high amount of regret. You know, we think, oh, maybe I could have done something differently or this could — I could have prevented this from happening. So, complicated grief adds this level of kind of personal agony in some ways or personal kind of an ambient sense of what if that adds to the already very difficult process of grieving. With complicated grief, sometimes you will find people stuck in things feeling a great sense of pain maybe in a part of the body that a person who has died may have felt. A lot of the same things that we would see with trauma. We’ll see a very easy kind of picking of the sense of loss whenever you’re in proximity of a situation was kind of associated with the person you’ve lost. So, now, for COVID survivors, perhaps whenever they go by a store and they’re someone not masked, that trauma, that complication and their grief some up. And it doesn’t just live in the past, it lives with them. So, their whole body is reactive in that moment and their essentially nervous system really pays a price. So, with complicated grief we see a lot more long-lasting mental health concerns and a lot longer grieving process.

SREENIVASAN: You know, I brought that phrase or that idea up first primarily because it seems like kind of by that definition, all of us almost globally, depending on where the pandemic has ravaged through the population, have some level of this. I mean, it is some sort of a — and I know the word trauma gets overused and I’d like you to explain the definition of that, too, and how that fits in to what we’re collectively feeling as we try to get to the next phase.

DODGEN-MAGEE: Yes. I think that is such a great point. And the way that psychologists think about trauma often is kind of like life before trauma is like walking through a field and you feel the green grass, you know, against your ankle and you see the blue sky. You’re not really thinking of anything, you are kind of just caught up in the moment. And you might see a small coiled object down on the ground and not think much of it. You keep walking and suddenly you feel a sharp pain in your ankle and you’ve got adrenaline coursing through your body. You’ve got cortisol bathing your system. You’re in kind of a hyper fight, flight, freeze or faint mode. And then, you look down and you realize that small coiled object was a snake. Well, your body has encoded that respond to small coiled objects. That’s kind of what trauma is. It’s this encoding in the system of a situation where you feel as though there is life-threatening or life altering experiences that are occurring. Then later, when you find yourself walking through, let’s say, a neighborhood and you see a small coiled object, your body immediately goes into that fight, flight, freeze or faint trauma space even though when you look down it’s a hose and you can clearly see it’s a hose but your body has associated this experience. And so, now, just like you said, we have all had our own unique traumas, whether that be, you know, changes in the workplace or changes for our children in their school settings, whether it be the loss of life or health due to COVID or long COVID. And so, we all are walking around sort of waiting for that small coiled object to trip us up. And whatever our story of COVID is, we likely have those points that are going to kind of create a sense of emotional dysregulation and make it more difficult for us to be kind of steady and grounded and able to communicate and relate well to others and with ourselves.

SREENIVASAN: So, what is the cost to us personally but also collectively if we don’t take time to process where we’re at?

DODGEN-MAGEE: Yes, I think it is immense. So, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie talked about in her TED Talk, “The Danger of a Single Story” and I think that is really fitting at this time in history that each of us has our own story of how COVID impacted us. And it’s very likely, it’s human nature for us to assume that everyone else’s experience is just like ours. And so, if we were able, for privilege and have the ability to kind of weather this time without much consequence, you know, we have the financial resources, the space resources, the time resources, then very likely we’re going to expect it’s been the same for others and we’re going to be unaware of the immense loss for other people, of individual time and space, of money, of health care, whatever it may be. And so, it is so important that we widen our understanding and that we inform ourselves about what this has been like for others, we inform our single story with the very true and real stories of others to expand, again, our empathy and our graciousness as we do this really hard work of restarting. You know, we’ve all created a lot of habits in this time just to get through the time. We didn’t have a warning. You know, this is kind of like we started a marathon without any training and didn’t really realize we were running a marathon until the fifth mile. And then, we just started creating compensatory habits to get us through. And now, at this point in time, when we’re beginning to reopen, if we don’t take a good hard look at the habits that have gotten us through this time, we’re going to restart with those same habits in place that will not serve us. They certainly are likely not aligned with our values or with the ways in which we would like a healthy like to look.

SREENIVASAN: You know, when you talk about that home like line being blurred, I mean, here I am, I’m conducting this interview, sitting in my bedroom and a jacket and fortunately, shorts because I can, right. But — so, there have been tiny bits of upside. But I also wonder, as we try to reenter the workforce, what sorts of tensions are there going to be? Because I have figured out ways to multitask and be productive and run errands and do all kind of things and at the same time, I wonder if there’s an expectation creep that will happen when I get back to the office because I’m not actually going to be able to get all the same amount of things done in addition to all the other things that I am now.

DODGEN-MAGEE: And this is why I’m so passionate about this work and this book because I’m hoping that one way we can deal with that reality is by taking this kind of restart or do over very seriously. So, acknowledging the fact that we’ve had some beautiful benefits to working from home. We can take naps. We can do laundry while we’re in a meeting and, you know, we can be multitasking. You know, so, we’re seeing that for student, we are seeing that for employees. And unless both employers and individual employees and teachers and students take some time to really acknowledge, OK, here are the ways that I have acculturated and adjusted to this time. And it has had some profound benefits for me and many for my family. And now, as I make a change, I’m about to face a loss of some of those benefits. And so, I need to do the hard work of negotiating and navigating that, seeing that there are tweaks that I can make. So, I think, unless we do the work of really navigating and telling ourselves the truth that, yes, we have made some changes that have been pretty cool and great. And now, we’re going to go back to other things where we set ourselves up for kind of anxiety or depression or kind of burnout as we return to a grind culture that COVID really, really exposed as maybe not healthy.

SREENIVASAN: Well, right now, we’ve heard the statistics that 12 million people have left their jobs. And why do you think that is?

DODGEN-MAGEE: I think the pandemic brought us very close to understanding that we have very little control in life and that our time is limited. And I think many people came to see kind of the inequities in what they were spending their time on in their life and the length of their life in general and began to say, maybe there are other ways of living. I also think another thing that I hear consistently as I do this research is that people really did learn that they could live with a lot less than they thought they could. You know, they thought they had to be out and active at all times and suddenly, they were not able to and that there was something very clarifying about that. And if you (INAUDIBLE) through that, the slowing of pace, I think people were also able to get creative in ways that maybe they hadn’t been before in terms of finding both meaningful work and/or finding ways of doing life in such a way that they didn’t have to participate and grind culture in the same way that they were before.

SREENIVASAN: The pandemic has also shone a very bright spotlight on the disproportionate amount of work and load that mothers and women in households carry, especially if they’re working a job outside the home as well, right? And what are your prescriptions for moms and women in general, working women, to figure out how to take a break or catch a breath in this marathon? Because the structures while we might have recognized that, we haven’t as a society automatically changed policies in a way that reflects that recognition.

DODGEN-MAGEE: It is so true and it is — I am keenly aware of the consequences and repercussions of female identified people working self- care into their lives. Oftentimes they will pay a price for that. And yet, I also think that this is one of the most important things we have learned. And so, I hope to really advocate for things like policy changes, for things like legislative attention toward women and female identified individuals who are caregivers because the cost on them right now is so high. One of the biggest takeaways in the research for this book was that one of the most profound things we could do to restart well that would impact the trajectory of life over time would be for caregivers, people in caregiving worlds to be able to privilege and prioritize self-care. Because if they can’t give out of an empty cup and if they are the people who are caring for our most vulnerable, our children, our aging population, our — people who live with physical ailments or mental health diagnoses, I don’t have access to people who are grounded and emotionally healthy, our whole culture pays a price for that. So, finding — and the other thing, I think, happens that we are living in a time of great binary where it feels like we either have to do — you know, self-care has to mean a full-on retreat with no technology and eight massages or — self-care could be as small as a 10-minute practice every single day where we turn off our phones, walk entirely away from screens and go outside and stand barefoot in the grass or sit on a meditation cushion in our living room and do absolutely nothing. The Dutch call it niksen, which is spelled N-I-K-S-E-N, and they call it doing nothing deliciously. And research tells us that 10 minutes of mindfulness meditation or niksen practice or grounding practice outside can have the benefit of impacting us not only in terms of our emotional sense of wellbeing but actually changes the wiring in the brain and the gray matter and realization in the brain related to emotional regulation. So, even just integrating small forms of self-care can have a profound effect overtime.

SREENIVASAN: What about kids? I mean, you have prescriptions almost from little kids to big kids, adolescents. And — but they have gone through this pandemic with us. At times, they have been kind of put on the back burner because so much of our own lives were up in the air. How do you begin to equip parents with some understanding and some empathy for what might be going on in their child? And how do you kind of phrase those questions? How do you get that conversation going?

DODGEN-MAGEE: First thing I can tell parents is that research tells us that children who feel as though they have had an effective kind of parenting experience and who are — who report self-success and that others around them report that they launch well, the one thing they know about those kids is that their parents, at least one of their parents or caregivers, has done one important thing to make something their own narrative or to take care of their big emotional feelings. And what that means is that, parents who are tending to their own overwhelm and stress in this time before they come before their children are going to have children who do better in this time. Parents need to make sure that they are getting their emotional needs met, that they are somehow being grounded and that they come toward their children really seeing who their children are, not necessarily assuming that their children are going to learn or be helped in same way they are. Too often, parents think, you know, if a child is anxious, they want their child to just feel better. So, they try to either help their child avoid a situation or they help their — they kind of try to pep talk their child out of their feelings. And the best thing we can do right now to help children is help them actually identify the feelings that they are having, to give them some tools and some vocabulary so they can understand, oh, I’m feeling scared or I’m feeling relieved that I don’t have to go to school, and that letting all feelings be OK within a home. We tend to think that there are negative feelings and positive feelings. Well, right now, all feelings are normal. It makes sense for a child to feel scared or angry that school is opening and closing, that mom and dad are, you know, less patient than they used to be. And so, we can create homes where all feelings are OK and then, we give opportunities for children to work through their feelings rather than try to talk them out of them or help them avoid them. That leads to resilience and grit and that gives them tools that they will take from this time to be able to handle difficulties throughout their life. And that is massive. You know, we were facing even before the pandemic, a real glut in resilience and grit in children. And this is an opportunity to help them develop both, by helping them understand, yes, this is a very scary, overwhelming situation, this is a situation where we are all in touch with how little control we have over the world and yet, the one thing we can control is dealing with the things inside of us that come up as a result of learning how to cope.

SREENIVASAN: Collectively, I don’t know what the right word is, but there seems to be a combination of fatigue and grief and anxiety and you just see nerves kind of fray. I mean, you see these viral videos all the time, school board meetings just deciding to go bananas over vaccine mandates or people behaving horribly outside of a restaurant or, you know, I just wonder what is it that we can individually do to kind of collectively calm ourselves?

DODGEN-MAGEE: I think we need to take some consistent and regular breaks from our screens. And the reason I say that is because not only do our screens feed us more sensationalist information that then confirms our biases and makes us more reactive, but constant engagement with screens also makes us less able to come back to center, be emotionally regulated, be empathic, literally communicate from a sense of groundedness. The second that we could do is expand our empathy. And empathy is one of the things that psychologists really felt like were — was on the decline even prior to the pandemic. Many people speculate that that has to do with social media, spaces and that becoming a primary place where we connect and where we can lob information grenades or emotional grenades and not have to deal with the real consequences to people when they receive them. But we have this decline in empathy that make it such that we have begun privilege personal autonomy and freedom, this idea of freedom in such a way that really others don’t matter. And so, if we could find ways of expanding our empathy, you know, empathy doesn’t mean selflessness. It means being grounded in a sense of self but also being able to leave every encounter respecting the way in which I acted and the way in which I was toward others, so taking the high road. I think those two things, break from screens as we can, practicing grounded being and then, communicating out of that kind of a space and then, providing opportunities to expand our empathy. And that means getting out of our comfort zone.

SREENIVASAN: Psychologist Doren Dodgen-Magee, and the book is called “Restart: Designing a Healthy Post-Pandemic Life,” thanks so much for joining us.

DODGEN-MAGEE: Thank you so much.