Local Family Medicine Physician Dr. Ray Tidman believes laughter and checking in on one another can be beneficial in alleviating the stress caused by the COVID-19 outbreak.
“I just know that when folks have to change their lives a great deal there’s a lot of stress around that, and isolation is not a healthy thing so people need to try to keep their mental health up and keep a good sense of humor and check-in with each other,” Tidman said.
Current technology can provide multiple avenues to communicate with others while in self isolation, and Tidman suggests using it to do just that.
“We do have the opportunity, with all this fancy equipment and the smart phones we carry, to share a lot of jokes and humor and laugh a lot,” he said. “Laughter is an important thing in my life so I think it works well.”
Tidman also believes this time can be used as a learning lesson for protecting the high-risk population from other viruses in the future.
“Folks need to be pondering and thinking about how to protect the high-risk population going forward, because even after things come out of quarantine or come out of more isolation, we still will be carrying this virus around and its the at-risk population that we’ll have to protect for weeks and months,” he said. “So I think there’s a real learning lesson that we all need to go through. Its kind of like trying to turn the mirror around. We need to be able to know that we could be a carrier of a virus and that an elderly parent, or a friend or family member with other illnesses, like immunosuppression or cancer or multiple medical problems, need to be protected from the virus, so how do we not spread anything that we might be carrying.”
During this time of self-isolation and stress caused by the virus, Tidman says kindness is important.
“It’s a real challenging time we’re in, and folks just need to be nice to each other,” he said.