And hello to you and welcome to the Richard Nichols podcast, the personal development podcast series that's here to help inspire, educate and motivate you to be the best you can be.

I'm psychotherapist Richard Nichols and this is episode 180. It's titled, Dealing with the Coronavirus.

And if you're ready, we'll start the show.

Hey everyone, I thought I'd make an extra public episode this month,

as I've had a lot of emails from people asking for mental health

advice during all this coronavirus craziness, because it's over every website, every news channel,

every conversation you over here in a shop, it's on everyone's minds, and so it should be,

to a degree. Because being on your mind can be

helpful, but only in the right proportions. So, how do we deal with all of this? Well, first off,

let me mention suds. Not soap suds, I'm fed up of them, my hands are drying out as it is. Which is tip number one, actually, before I talk about mental health. Get some moisturiser, some hand cream and drink plenty of water. If you drink lots of water, you'll go through a wee a lot more and it'll remind you to wash your hands as well as hydrate your body. There's a tip. Anyway, suds. Suds, if you've not heard me talk about this before, is the

subjective unit of distress scale. Basically, on a scale of 1 to 10, how anxious are you feeling?

So I think it's okay to be somewhat anxious. Anxiety is helpful. It's an emotion and emotions are there for a reason. Fear is

rational. It motivates us to do things to take action, whether that action is to run away from a

saber-tooth tiger or just walk a little bit quicker for the bus because you're late.

If your brain says something's not right, then that's fine.

And you know what? Right now, things aren't right.

Things are different to how they normally are.

We do have to behave a little differently for a little while.

We've got to avoid touching things when we leave the house. If we cough or sneeze, we've got to make sure that we really do keep it to ourselves, not just putting our hand up, but properly covering your mouth and sneezing into a

tissue and putting it into the bin. Not like most blokes who just scrunch it back up and stick it in

their pocket like some

snotting crusted origami accident, we do have to be a little extra cautious at the minute,

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