The Mental Challenges of Pandemics

Tuesday night on ESPN's SportsCenter with Scott Van Pelt I was watching Scott Van Pelt and Michael Phelps talk about how the delay of the Olympics would affect athletes in terms of their mental preparation and even their mental health. And the more I watched, the more I thought this was something that also affects golfers -- and not just about dealing with their games but with their everyday lives as well.

Of course it was too quickly to find a video of the discussion, so I started looking across the Web to look if I ought to discover something comparable that could assist the ones people suffering to find a 'mental game' for coping with the challenges this pandemic is throwing at us.

And I discovered this article at the tellfp.Com web page that seems to fill the invoice.

Just as a short intro, that is how TELL describes themselves on their challenge web page:

TELL is a now not-for-income organisation committed to providing global-magnificence, effective support and counseling offerings to Japan?S worldwide network as well as helping to address the us of a?S developing mental fitness care desires.

Since Japan was one of the first countries needing to deal with COVID-19, this article seems especially useful.

The article is simply called Coping with a Pandemic . It was written in early March and it covers all the different strategies for dealing with the emotional backlash of a pandemic. The article says

The 3 primary strategies for handling the emotional impact of an endemic are:

1. Education: Factual information about COVID-19 and current guidelines for prevention.
2. Preparation: Personal and family readiness.
3. Understanding common reactions to pandemics.

The first section covers some basic medical facts that you may or may not know.

The 2nd section has some useful suggestions on how to channel those uncomfortable emotions you and your family can be struggling with.

The third phase lets you realize how these conflicts may additionally show up themselves, so you can prepare for them.

Perhaps the most useful section is at the end, simply called How to Build Resilience. It's just some tips on how to head off some of the more common problems before they become too big to handle.

I hope this newsletter can assist some of you cope with the issues we are all facing but so that you can likely worsen before they get better. To use a golfing metaphor, I assume this article can help us all get a touch higher at 'taking our recreation from the range to the direction.'

And who amongst us can't use a little help with that?