Letters from Lockdown 3: Covid-19 and Managing Fear

Thanks to life hacker and author Tim Ferriss for the inspiration to write this post. Any error or misrepresentation of Ferriss’ fear setting exercise is mine alone.

Today is Day 4 of Spain’s national lockdown. I’ve spent a lot of the last two weeks talking to various people in my life, both professional and personal, about fear. Covid-19 is awakening two broad types of fear: first, what if I or my loved ones get sick? Second, what if I lose my job? What will happen to my family, my small business, my livelihood?

To give you a sense of how these fears play out in daily life, let me share that I am part of the pediatric liver transplant community in Spain. For lots of reasons, the world of paediatric liver transplants disproportionately contains people below the poverty line, immigrants and other at-risk groups. Yesterday, on a group chat with parents of transplanted children, I discovered that several parents had already lost their jobs as a result of the economic shock of Covid-19. Many others on the chat run small businesses, like dry cleaners and locksmiths, that only have cash for the next two weeks.

These parents are scared. From a health perspective, they are petrified of the present, since their children are immunosuppressed and so potentially more at risk from the virus than regular children. From an economic perspective, they’re petrified of the future, wondering what’s in store for their livelihoods.

These fears may be felt more acutely in communities like the paediatric liver transplant community, but to a greater or lesser degree, they are infecting everyone.

I’d like to share some tactics for confronting fear, based on my research on innovation and the failure-phobic cultures that inhabit most enterprises, and inspired by the work of life hacker and author Tim Ferriss.

First tactic: give your fears a name. Paraphrasing the stoic philosopher Seneca, those fears that have the greatest hold over you are the ones you cannot name. You all know this kind of fear. It creeps around in the back of your head, wakes you with a jolt at 2 am, gnaws at you as you try to get through your day. Stop for a second and listen to the voice inside your head. What is it trying to tell you? Name the fear and you thereby disarm it a little.

In the context of innovation in business, people are afraid to try something new and look like an idiot in front of their peers, they’re afraid of losing their professional veneer of mastery, they’re afraid of appearing vulnerable in a business environment. All these reactions are normal and also get in the way of businesses trying new things. That’s one of the reasons why, after 30 years of innovation research, it’s still as hard as it ever was to get innovation going in a business of any size. People are afraid of failure.

In the context of Covid-19, perhaps you are experiencing the two fears I mentioned – fear for the health and financial wellbeing of you and your loved ones. More likely, there are related but more specific fears that keep you awake, like “What if we lose our house?” or “What if I am not able to visit a loved one if they get sick?” or “What if I lose it while trying to balance work and homeschooling my kids while schools are closed?”

There is an instinct to shut down this kind of dialogue in your head. But you might have noticed that trying to silence the fears rattling around under the surface only serves to make them louder. What if we tried the opposite approach?

In a Ted Talk by Tim Ferriss, Ferriss outlines a simple tool he calls fear setting, to explore your fears and thus take away their power just a little bit. I encourage you to watch the talk, it’s less than 14 minutes long.

Ferriss emphasises the use of fear setting to explore new initiatives, like moving cross country, changing jobs or asking someone out. In the context of Covid-19, our focus is less on exploring an exciting-but-scary new venture, and more on how to control the fears that the virus brings.

I think the first 3 steps of the fear setting exercise are particularly useful for the situation we are now in. Below is a summary of those 3 steps, contextualised for Covid-19:

Step 1: Define – Write down your fears.

• “What if I lose my house?”
• “What if a loved one gets sick and I am not allowed to be there with them?”
• “What if I lose my job?”
• “What if I lose it while trying to balance work and schooling my kids from home?”

This step is about stopping and listening to the voice in your head and writing down what you hear. Instead of shutting down the voice, write down what it’s saying. Just this small act can generate some relief. Okay, it’s out there. I’ve said it. I’m still here.

Step 2: Prevent – Write down what you can do to prevent the fear from materialising, or to decrease the likelihood of it happening.

Try to focus on the things you can control, not the things you can’t. A bride or groom worrying incessantly about whether it will rain on their wedding day is not productive, since they can’t control the weather.

When you start to examine the problem, you may realise there are more things you can do to prevent your fear from happening or decrease the chances that it will. Let’s examine the fears listed in the first step.

1.      What if I lose my house? Can you have a proactive conversation with your bank manager about your mortgage? Can you decrease expenditures now, to prepare for a potential downturn in your family economy?

2.      What if a loved one gets sick, and I cannot get to them? Can you write a letter to your loved one now, while they are in good health, telling them all the things you adore about them? Can you increase the frequency of your calls and prioritise them every day? Can you encourage them to take precautionary measures now to protect themselves?

3.      What if I lose my job? Can you proactively reinvent your job to be what is needed in your company right now? (Not everyone can. You cannot paint a wall virtually, nor give a massage, nor serve a beer nor build a house.) Can you update your CV now, just in case? Can you use this time, especially if you’re in lockdown, to acquire another skill? I have a few friends who have made an explicit decision to use this time to learn something new, like tackling a new language or getting a coaching certification. This might not be realistic for all, especially if you are in the category of the fourth fear, below.

4.      What if I lose it trying to balance work and homeschooling for days on end? Can you make a contract with your kids and/or partner to try for kindness and patience as much as possible? This works best for kids who are older, but you might be surprised at how little kids can accept an agreement that's clear and made with some solemnity. Can you designate times to be on and off work? Can you put a routine in place? Can you set aside time to have a virtual happy hour with your friends, to keep your sanity?

All these things might prevent you from losing it, so have a think now about actions you could take to decrease the chances.

Step 3: Repair – Write down what you would do to repair the situation, even a little, if the worst came to pass.

It’s important to say that Covid-19 is causing extreme grief and horrendous situations for the sick. In Spain as I write this, there are many people isolated in ICU rooms, unable to receive family visitors, who may die. Not everything can be repaired. Covid-19 is triggering stark situations.

In the case of economic fears, if you lose your house or your job, there is no question that it is going to be hard. What can you do to repair the damage? Move in with friends and family temporarily? Use the opportunity to reinvent yourself? Ask yourself, what have others done when they encountered this situation? Who out there has already faced this situation? What works? Adopt the same approach to explore how to repair the damage if you lose your job. Other people have been in this situation. What did they do that worked?

If you lost it with your kids, how would you repair it? Could you apologize sincerely? Ask your manager for some time off from work? Request a flexible schedule? Could you adopt a mindfulness practise for 5 minutes a day to keep your cool next time? Could you limit the sources of your stress, including news feeds and other media, as so many others have suggested?

Remember that this is an exercise in future-proofing yourself, whereby you think about all of this stuff ahead of time, before you need it. The trick here is to think through now what you might do to repair the damage caused by a worst case scenario. Ruthlessly examine your fears to shrink their power over you and to render you less paralysed.

As I said at the start, this post focuses on the first 3 steps of Ferriss' fear setting exercise because I believe they are the most relevant to the situation we are in. That said, crises have a way of focusing attention on what’s important. If the advent of Covid-19 is spurring you to make big changes in your life that you were putting off, examine the final three steps covered in the talk, which are more focused on doing something new. The final steps ask, what are the benefits of taking action? What is the cost of inaction 6 months down the road? What is the cost of inaction 18 months down the road? For those considering new ventures, I think the last two questions, in particular, are valuable and rarely examined.

In this time of personal and professional disruption, you might try out these tactics to overcome the voice in your head and instead, focus on your health, your family and your work.

Stay safe out there.