Last week, in the initial article of this series, I’ve looked into personal and community resilience, specifically during COVID-19. In this article, I am inviting you to take care of your most basic physical and emotional needs. In the follow-up articles, I will focus on other aspects of wellbeing: safety, networking/belonging, all the way up to application layer and financial/political aspects of resilience. 

Interdependence 

Abstraction layers are a useful simplification that allow us to analyse complex phenomena, like networking or a living organism, by separating elements into discreet “levels”. Reality is much messier, and everything is interconnected and interdependent. 

In the OSI model, the physical layer is a “fundamental layer underlying the higher level functions” that interacts with hardware. This corresponds to the basis of the “pyramid of needs”: physiological needs (human hardware!).  

“To pursue intrinsic motivation higher up Maslow's hierarchy, physiological needs must be met first. This means that if a human is struggling to meet their physiological needs, then they are unlikely to intrinsically pursue [higher needs].” 

Since health can be seen as a person’s condition with regard to their psychological and emotional wellbeing - just like the "physical layer" can be "material" (cables) or "ethereal" (WiFi) - I have further divided the chapters in this article to Physical Health and Mental Health. 

However, I will start with the sharing my personal experiences, hoping that it's going to help you to escape stigma, and to move towards openness; to see vulnerability as a strength and not as something to be ashamed of; to invite empathy, honesty and genuineness - and lead to healing and co-liberation in togetherness and solidarity!

SPS in TLA

Short Personal Story (SPS) in Three Letter Acronyms (TLA)

Since Y2K I have had RSI, which came back during COVID-19; so I did EFT, CBD, MBSR, ASMR & yoga.

I’ve self-dx with C-PTSD in 2017; in the past I’ve done CBT and EFT,  but what helped the most was NVC, EMDR and SSRI / SNRI (Zoloft)! 

I have family members that are ADHD, BPD, LGBTQ* and OCD, and sometimes I am myself one or all of those labels too! 

(check out the glossary at the end of this article)

Physical Health 

As humans, engineers have the same physical needs as everyone else; what makes our community specific, and different from the “mainstream” population, are some of these aspects that cause additional stress: 

• Since we work on maintaining "critical infrastructure” we might have a heightened sense of responsibility, accompanied with the fear of failure, since Internet shut-down can lead to public exposure of a "culprit" 
• We are passionate about our work, making no difference between the job and hobbies which leads to long hours online, and not taking enough time to rest, "reset" and recover 
• Having to be highly focused or paying attention to small details (e.g. coding)
• The technical community has a disproportionally high percentage of people on the autism spectrum (to be covered in Layer 5)

The good thing about our community is our openness to sharing (technical) vulnerabilities, so we might turn to the “mutual aid” to get help, rather than more traditional solutions.  

If you experience serious problems, please ask for support of medical professionals! 

For such smart people who run the Internet, it could be expected that we are also smart enough to keep our bodies healthy. And if not - the digital help is available, with the apps that can remind people to: 

• sleep
• drink water
• eat (at all, to gain muscle or to lose fat)
• breathe 
• sit still
• play 
• stretch
• run
• date
• cycle
• wake up
• relax
• calm down
• self-care
• imagine / visualize
• meditate

As an active participation practice, I invite you to mention a few of your favourite self-care apps or websites in the comments section.

If you prefer slightly less interaction, you can find some useful tips in these articles, to read at your leisure:  

• COVID@Home A collaborative guide to COVID-19 care translated into six languages (March 2020)
• "Build Your Resilience in the Face of a Crisis" in Harvard Business Review (March 2020)
• "10 Rules for Life Crystallized by the Pandemic" in ADDitude Magazine (February 2021) 
• "How Society Has Betrayed Mothers" (A.K.A. "This isn’t just another burnout") in NY Times (February 2021)

Staying SANE During a Pandemic

Even under "normal" conditions, mental health is a sensitive topic and during a year-long global epidemic, doubly so. I find it important to keep on learning, and principles of open knowledge are central to FLOSS and bottom-up Internet standards development. To be an efficient "sysadmin" of your own "system" and sharing of BCP is a must. 

I am not a doctor, but I have collected lots of resources, which include COVID-19 related mental health resources and general info about emotional healing and mental health. Advice listed below are curated based on my personal preferences: YMMV. 

Videos from Adjacent Communities  

• At MozFest: “AI and Mental Health: Revolutionary Reboot or the Rise of the “Digital Asylum”? (16 March 2021) 
• FOSDEM2021: "Mental Health & FLOSS" by Brendan Abolivier (February 2021) 
• At INEX meeting (Irish IXP members), Dr Tim Green (Clinical Psychologist) presented "Resiliency in a Pandemic - Coping with the Stress of Covid-19"  to outline the mechanics of how stress affects the body and mind (April 2020)
• DjangoCon US: "Healthy Minds in a Healthy Community" by Erik Romijn (August 2016)  

Articles

•  “How To Actually Effectively Cope With Your Covid-19 Anxiety" by Caitlin Johnstone (March 2020)
• “Pandemic Mental Health Safety Plan" by QueeringPsychology (April 2020) 

•  "Reimagining the Mental Health Paradigm for Our Collective Wellbeing" in Health and Human Rights Journal (June 2020)
• Geek Feminism and the health consequences (2014) 
• Interesting blog about Mental Health from Systemic/Activist perspective 

You can find many more by following #MentalHealthMatters on your favourite social media sites.

Below is a handy chart that shows how to recognise the signals that you are moving towards a less optimal state. It shows what to aim for when you are moving away from a crisis and towards thriving - and that there are phases in between too: 

Call to Action: Take Care

Please take care of yourself: of your physical and emotional health!

And please take care of each other!  

If you want to talk, you can reach me through trustedcontacts@ripe.net . 

"We need to take care of all of us, or else we’re all at risk,

and that means building global public goods, like

healthcare, food, housing, water systems, [and Internet] for the first time in human history. 

We really are in it together. "

— "The Upsides of a Pandemic", umair haque, March 2020

 

Glossary of acronyms

ADD: attention deficit disorder

ADHD: attention deficit hyperactivity disorder

A.K.A.: Also Known As 

ASMR: Autonomous sensory meridian response 

dx: diagnosed 

BCP: Best Current Practices 

BPD: Borderline Personality Disorder 

CBD: Cannabidiol

CBT: Cognitive Behavioural Therapy  

C-PTSD: Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder 

EFT: Emotional Freedom Technique ("tapping")

EFT: Emotionally focused therapy 

EMDR: Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (therapy) 

FLOSS: Free/Libre Open Source Software  

INEX: Internet Neutral Exchange Association

LGBTQ*: lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, questioning/queer, "other"

MBSR: Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction 

NVC: Non-Violent Communication 

OCD: Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder 

OSI: Open Systems Interconnection  

RIPE: Reseaux IP Europeens

RSI: Repetitive Strain Injury 

SANE: System Administration and NEtworking 

SNRI: serotonin-norepinephrine reuptake Inhibitor.

SSRI: selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor

Y2K: Year 2000  

YMMV: Your Milage May Vary