Conquering Your Anxiety: COVID-19 Edition with Vivian Zhang

As the province of Ontario enters another state of emergency and new stay-at-home-order, many
graduate students experience heightened levels of stress and anxiety in trying to adapt to this new
normal. In Grad Minds’ first workshop of 2021, “Conquering Your Anxiety: COVID-19 Edition,” clinical
therapist and registered social worker Vivian Zhang offers the community two approaches for changing
and hacking our biology: TIPP and ACCEPTS.

What is anxiety?

Anxiety is our body’s natural response to perceived stress and threat. It’s a feeling of fear or dread about
“what’s going to come next?” Stress is not necessarily a bad thing. Optimal stress levels propel us to get
things done; however, excessive stress for prolonged periods causes exhaustion and anxiety, leading to
eventual burnout. When our body perceives stress and threat, we go into an automatic mode with only
four responses: fight, flight, freeze, and fawn. These four automatic responses are bodily responses,
which means we have the opportunity to change our body, or hack our biology, so that we can move
from excessive stress levels to a more optimal level.

The TIPP Approach

• Temperature: Use cold temperature, such as an ice cube or a glass of cold water, to wake
ourselves up and reset our system. The cold temperature snaps us out of the zone of perceived
threat momentarily.
• Intense Exercise: Doing exercises, such as jumping jacks or walking up and down the stairs,
moves our body from the threat state to a calmer state.
• Paced Breathing: Practicing boxed breathing—breathe in for 4, hold for 4, breathe out for 4,
hold for 4, and repeat—calms down our body from the perceived threat state.
• Progressive Muscle Relaxation: Tensing our body and relaxing our body over and over, such as
squeezing and relaxing our fists, sends the message to our mind that we are back in control.

The ACCEPTS Approach

• Activities and hobbies: Spend time doing an activity or hobby you enjoy, or pick up a new
activity like learning ukulele, participating in online game night, or meditating.
• Contributions: Contribute to your community, such as making a nice meal for someone,
studying together, or donating to pantries. When we contribute to our community, our brain
releases oxytocin.

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 • Comparisons to create gratitude: Compare purely to create gratitude. We are designed to
survive as a species, and by actively choosing to look for the positive, we are working against our
nature. Try creating a “gratitude jar.” When something good happens, write it down on a slip of
paper and put it in the jar. When we are overly extended, we may not be able to think of things
we are grateful for. Having the gratitude jar there will help us in the moments when we are
looking to remind ourselves.
• Evoking emotions: When we are experiencing intense emotions, it is hard to come out of them.
We have the power to evoke a different emotion by looking at images, such as looking at cute
animal photos or watching a scary movie.
• Putting feelings away (for later): Putting away feelings does not mean avoiding them and never
going back to them. If we continue to avoid our emotions, they will build up like a pressure
cooker. However, sometimes we do not have the mental energy to process our feelings, and so
we put them away until we feel we have the time and space to revisit them.
• Thoughts: Sometimes, the moment is too intense, and we might want to distract ourselves with
thoughts. Our mind can only process one thought at a time. Try reading the words of a book
backwards, playing a memory game, reciting a poem or song lyrics, or counting backwards from
100.
• Senses: Our worries are about future-oriented thinking, and using our senses—sight, smell,
touch, taste, and hearing—helps brings us back into the present. Various activities can engage
with multiple senses, such as lighting and watching a scented candle, smelling and drinking
coffee, or listening and dancing to your favourite song.

Try adopting the TIPP and ACCEPTS approaches to hack our biology. The above material is adapted from
Marsha M. Linehan’s Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (DBT) Manual.

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