Before Covid-19 two-thirds of people had been exposed to trauma in their lifetimes. These traumas can take various forms, whether it’s the loss of a parent at a young age, a divorce in the family, mental illness in the family, emotional or physical neglect/ abuse, and a couple more. Now as we live through Covid-19, for the first time in recorded history the entire world is going through a similar trauma at once. Across the globe schools, businesses, governments, and synagogues have all been closed at the same time and we’ve been asked to stay away from others in order to save more lives. However, we as humans are social creatures, relying on that shared connection to survive; this pandemic resulting in a tectonic shift of our daily routines.

The result of having multiple (4 or more) traumatic experiences as a child leads to a 3 times more likely chance to have heart disease, 3 times more likely to have lung cancer, 10 times more likely to develop a substance abuse issue and a 20-year less life expectancy as an adult. The more trauma you are exposed to, your risk for chronic disease grows exponentially.

These numbers sound scary and they are, but we know how to fix it.

Everyone needs therapy.

Now you may be saying “Of course he is saying that he is a shrink” and you would be right, but here’s why. As stress goes from acute to chronic and then finally to toxic the burden put on the body’s vital systems (nervous, cardiovascular, immune, and endocrine) is overwhelming. This long term taxation can cause memory, cognition and attention deficits; heart disease and strokes, autoimmune disorders, and obesity.

This sounds really scary and it is, but we know how to fix it.

Everyone needs therapy.

Now you may be saying “Ok Ok, I got it, stress is bad, but who has time for that now? Here I am by myself trying to manage an entire school experience for my kids while answering work emails on my bathroom floor because that is where the quiet is. Please ask this doctor where he would like me to schedule just one more Zoom call?!?” or even worse “So I lost my job, live by myself and haven’t been outside in a couple of days. I know that’s bad, what’s this guy going to tell me that I don’t already know.” But that is the wrong way to look at it and here’s why.

When fighting an invisible enemy that has forced us to retreat to our homes the mind is your most important resource. The greatest contribution we can give is to stay home and socially distance, which is a mental health challenge. To give perspective on how difficult this will be for those who live alone, solitary confinement is a punishment in prison. This pandemic is both psychological and biological in that one’s own stress can be passed on to the other people in the room in real-time. While anxiety is useful in that it has protected us for millennia by signaling your body to danger, the hard part is letting go of those feelings when they are no longer useful. We have a choice on what kind of mind we will have, it is a muscle like any other.

Therapy can help stop the spread by beating it at the source, the 12 square inches of real estate between your ears. In therapy, you can learn how you can bio-hack your body to stop the stress response (a 40-second hug), how to breathe the correct way (4 seconds in, hold for 4 seconds and release for 4 seconds), and how to smell your way out of a panic attack (yup, it’s true).

Like I said before

Everyone Needs Therapy