Words Matter. Why “Lockdown”, “Isolation” and “Social Distancing” Need a Reframe to Keep Us Healthy
How can crisis messaging be streamlined and simplified so that it’s void of contradiction, loopholes, and wiggle room — but not devoid of humanity?
Lu Hanessian, MSc
In a matter of weeks, we did the unthinkable. Hundreds of millions of us got the message to “Stay Home. Save Lives”, and heeded it. The phrase has challenged our notions of ‘normal’ in a pandemic that has changed all the rules.
If #MeToo defined a generation, #StayHome has confined it.
We are affixed to our screens for updates, holding our phones for dear life now — something many of us had been intentionally trying to re-negotiate before the world and our lives were irreversibly altered. We have no idea how to forecast with accuracy, how to plan so our lives depend on it, how to rearrange the deck chairs even as we feel like we are sinking.
In the absence of our routines and rituals, we are scanning for cues of safety. This crisis has forced us all to come back to our senses, to the nuances of what we’re hearing and seeing, to the language of fear and our narratives of grief.
Words matter. Messaging, slogans and hashtags catch on, and influence our experience. How can we create messaging for the masses that is urgent, inclusive, precise — and sensitive? How can messaging both sound the alarm and promote healthy coping skills?
We are all trying to piece together the story of a shock that millions of us continue to describe in a language of the surreal — disbelief, unimaginable, unfathomable — in tsunami terms — flooded, drowning, swept across — and in the unforgiving shorthand of mortal danger: cataclysmic, catastrophic, lethal.
But, the crisis language that has become part of our lexicon and current culture poses a challenge. There’s a fallout to using words and phrases that may be counterproductive to our ability to cope with such pervasive fear, uncertainty, and grief.
We must be particularly mindful of how and what we say in this crisis, what phrases we unwittingly colloquialize, to our peril, and what impact these can have on our psyche, physiology, community, and capacity for resilience.
Here are 4 now-familiar terms of the times, for us to re-assess and reframe for our personal and collective wellbeing:
1.“SOCIAL DISTANCING”: For the first time in history, the world is suddenly and singularly focused on a shared need. But, adopting the term ‘social distancing’ may have inadvertently created a level of stress in our nervous systems that can create sadness, anxiety, restlessness, fatigue, and a tension between what we know we’re supposed to do for each other and what we innately need from each other.
We are wired for connection. Research on loneliness reveals that it can shorten the lifespan. Positive social connections are central to thriving, healing, and building resilience in the face of adversity.
Stanford University professor of psychology Jamil Zaki has argued that “social distancing” needs a reframe. While it slows the spread of the virus, he says it “pushes against human beings’ fundamental need” for connection.
As we’ve become warily accustomed to uttering the oxymoron, the WHO has now changed the phrase to “physical distancing”. For our personal and collective health, we need to flip the script on this one. We’re practicing physical distancing while remaining socially connected.
Distanced living may feel closed in, but we can still show up for each other. We can stay open.
This is so difficult because it defies and denies our basic human needs. We’re built for bonding. Hugging changes our chemistry. Touch can boost our immune system. Being in each other’s presence has a co-regulatory effect on our nervous systems, our heart rate variability, our moods, and brain function.
Distanced living may feel closed in, but we can show up for each other. We can stay open.
2. “ISOLATION”: The word invokes an visceral sense of aloneness. Isolation is synonymous with desolation. Confinement with exile. Quarantine with detention. Our own interpretation and experience of isolation will affect our mental and physical health and those around us. The negative impact of reclusion can be especially intensified for those living alone, for the elderly, for those who don’t have the trusted scaffolding of social connections.
We can amend our own narrative, creating our own internal reframe, in order to produce more generative emotions, help us keep perspective, and promote community and mutual safeguarding, even as we keep our distance.
In effect, reframes like HEALTHY AT HOME, STAYING HOME FOR HEALTH, PROTECTING OUR COMMUNITIES, and STAYING IN/REACHING OUT offer the possibility for cognitive shifts that can positively impact our mind and body’s stress response.
Calming ourselves from the inside out is a practice that has positive effects on our body, as well as our emotional state and sense of agency. This is important at a time when millions of people feel a frightening sense of helplessness.
3. “LOCKDOWN”: “Lockdown” has a chilling effect, a kind of ‘shock’-down. Lockdown means “a state of isolation or restricted access instituted as a security measure.” Yes. It also refers to the “confining of prisoners to their cells, typically after an escape or to regain control during a riot”.
The Marine Corps uses this term, as well as Shelter-in-Place (SIP) to protect lives and minimize exposure to a present threat or danger. A lockdown, in that sense, is meant for circumstances that can last a few minutes or several hours.
We are now into several weeks, slipping into months of our lockdown. The word ‘lockdown’ reinforces urgency in its missive, but it can also contribute to our cumulative anxiety, that builds as we stay locked down. The more time passes with no “all clear” in sight, the more our nervous systems suffer the consequence of a prolonged threat. Our brains change accordingly. We become more stress-reactive, less receptive. More hyper vigilant, less able to discern fact from fiction.
In the face of a prolonged threat, our brains change. We become more stress-reactive, less receptive. More hypervigilant, less able to discern fact from fiction.
This leaves us vulnerable to disinformation. Anxious under lockdown and affixed to our screens for updates, millions of readers have received fake news text messages, via services like WhatsApp, that the US National Guard was going to be deployed to enforce isolation measures.
We may all be in it, but we’re not all in it the same way. This is a crucial piece of our language to consider. ‘Lockdown’ means something entirely different for a vulnerable population living in terror of deportation, for those who cannot stay home, who have no place to shelter, for the incarcerated who society also deems “locked up”, for newly essential workers out of society’s shadows at last. For children. For students. For kids who have grown up in an active shooter drill era.
For our own wellbeing, it’s time for us to reframe the term. When we keep in virtual touch with family, friends, and colleagues, and they ask how we are doing, we might notice if our body and mind sense a difference in state when we try phrases like, “we’re hunkering down”, “huddling together”, “doing the best we can to make it work”, “we’re safe and sound”, “holding on to each other”, “taking care”, “practicing patience”, “staying present”, “laying low for now”, “in retreat but in touch” and “staying home…and hopeful” — even as we all dearly struggle.
4. “FRONTLINES”, “HEROES”: It’s easy to see how we can frame the virus as an enemy. But, repeatedly referring to medical workers at the ‘frontlines’ is a kind of injustice to health care professionals.
If a doctor is a hero, do we already accept, even expect, his or her ultimate sacrifice?
Understandably, we feel compelled to call health care workers out as ‘heroes’ — as a gesture of our profound encouragement, appreciation, and immeasurable gratitude. In a sense, we need to herald our health care workers right now because we are harvesting hope. We need and respect them, even as we shake our heads in horror at what they are forced to witness and endure every day. A collective standing ovation every evening warms our national heart, but it also begs the question: where is the PPE that will protect them?
Instead of putting doctors on the ‘frontlines’ and calling them ‘heroes’ — or floating the idea of a military flyover in their honor — let’s all demand that the government enact the Defense Production Act, get out of the way, stop enabling pandemic profiteering and price-gouging, and quit sending FEMA to docks and tarmacs to seize medical equipment that states have purchased for their own hospitals.
Let’s demand and applaud that.
We can inform ourselves without despair. We can tune in to media while preserving our own clear-eyed lens. We can change the message without losing the gist.
We don’t know how much longer we will be living in suspended disbelief, let alone displaced from a once familiar version of our lives. But, we have choices in how we expand our repertoire of thoughts, taming our what-if scenarios by listening to the longing and sorrow beneath them, taking care of our bodies by tending to our mind’s negativity bias.
We are all listening to the latest word from experts. But, that doesn’t mean we can’t consciously choose frameworks that allow us to both follow medical advice and give us the internal fuel to carry on. We can inform ourselves without despair. We can tune in to media while preserving our own clear-eyed lens. We can change the message without losing the gist.
Resilience research shows that we can cultivate hope as we navigate our survival, manage our fears, and thrive. We can be curious about how we make meaning in our own lives, with those we love, just by paying closer attention to the ways we are trying to make sense of the stories of our lives, day by day.
This is a crisis, our own lived experience, that we could have never imagined. Now that it’s here — now that we’re here — let’s harness the narrative power of our imagination as a deep inner resource that’s alive in us, to better understand who we are, what we need, how we choose to live, and let it guide us through, together.
Lu Hanessian, MS, is a stress and trauma resilience researcher and educator, an award-winning science journalist, media analyst, former NBC network television anchor and Discovery Health Channel host, founder of Mindful Media, and host of an upcoming podcast.