Kindness Can Relieve Pandemic Anxiety

The COVID-19 pandemic appears to have unearthed a raft of things to worry about, and relatively few of them are directly related to the pandemic. In most venues, indoors or outdoors, anxiety is more abundant than any viral matter. What to do? Judson Brewer, a psychiatrist and the author of “Unwinding Anxiety: New Science Shows How to Break the Cycles of Worry and Fear to Heal Your Mind,” offers some interesting advice to readers of the Wall Street Journal. Open your eyes, says Brewer. Open them wide, because wide open eyes trigger curiosity, which, curiously, can mitigate anxiety. Also, be kind to someone. “Simple acts of generosity can help us step out of constantly worrying,” says Brewer. “Worry feels contracted. Kindness and curiosity feel expanded. We can’t be contracted and expanded at the same time. They are polar opposites.”