New fears due to health emergency

With the health contingency, people realized how vulnerable we are and this has led us to have feelings of hopelessness; anxiety, depression and sleep disorders have been accentuated, said Diana Brito Navarrete, from the Laboratory of Psychophysiology and Neuropsychology of the UNAM.

The COVID-19 pandemic forced human beings to radically modify their daily lives; in this phase, other fears emerge different from those of a year ago, such as the fact that despite vaccination there is a risk of contagion, especially due to the appearance of new variants of the virus. Anxiety is generated in the population by the desire and "desire" to return to normality."

What happens when fear and uncertainty arise? There is a feeling that emotions are intensified and they are usually the most unpleasant ones, such as anger or sadness, and in doing so the emotional system generates a decrease in logical and reasonable processes, as well as a feeling of empty spaces of information.

During the conference "Emotional disorders generated by confinement and the pandemic", as part of the "Information and Health" Conference of the Institute of Library and Information Research of the UNAM, the academic pointed out: it is important to reconcile with this time of pandemic and confinement to continue since in this way people will be more adapted, protected and with less risk of suffering some emotional disorder. For this, it is necessary to evaluate what kind of losses have been had (temporary or permanent), to know how much can be recovered, or to assume what will not return.

According to Brito Navarrete, it is important to recognize how the person feels, to then help others, through the use of spaces of trust in which reflections are shared on the integral formation of everyone, which favor the construction and reinforcement of values and, above all, teach how to lead emotionally healthier lives. In the educational field, it is essential to have emotionally intelligent teachers, who can meet the challenge of educating, who through their experiences can teach how to recognize, control, and respectfully express emotions. The classroom climate, generated by the teacher's performance, will impact learning.

High levels of stress for a prolonged period are detrimental to learning capacity; therefore, they must take into account the emotional and mental state in which the students are to provide them with tools to restore their emotional wellbeing. The university professor emphasized that to emotionally mobilize students it is necessary to listen to their concerns, promote tasks at home in which they can express feelings and thoughts through different resources (such as writing), and organize collaborative activities to promote social interaction at a distance.

She recommended writing down emotions to get to know them, illuminating each one with a color, identifying in which part of the body they affect, and graphing them; that is, in what percentage they are felt.

"Part of emotional education involves the planned and systematic development of skills of self-knowledge, self-control, empathy, communication, and interrelation. This item should be placed transversally in educational, teaching, and professional programming since it is useless to have a lot of knowledge if it cannot be taught or applied properly. Let us be sensitive to what is happening in our homes so that we can all emerge stronger from this crisis," she concluded.