I lost my dad two months ago. He was 89 and suffered a brain haemorrhage. As difficult as it was to lose him, the hardest part for me was not being able to be with him at that time. Attending his funeral over Zoom was a rude reminder of the times we are in. I could suddenly and intimately feel the pain of so many others.

The prolonged and seemingly unending nature of the disruption and losses make us routinely feel disoriented, anxious and exhausted. It is directly affecting many individuals’ mental and emotional well-being, a trend particularly accentuated among the young.

Like the virus, this heightened uncertainty doesn’t look like going away in a hurry. Like we need the vaccine as protection from the virus, we need to learn ways to immunise ourselves from our inner emotional turmoil. Here are three ideas you can consider.

Build equanimity

To protect ourselves from the emotional roller-coaster, we need to cultivate a sense of equanimity – an anchor of stillness within us so the changing external scenery doesn’t easily affect us. Like the vaccine, this stillness doesn’t mean that we are not affected at all. It’s just that the threshold at which we experience emotional hijack goes up.

To build such equanimity, we need to deepen our emotional self-awareness. We need to learn what makes us happy, sad, insecure and excited; how frequently we move from one emotional state to the other; and what triggers these shifts. Ordinarily, we are on an autopilot mode where certain triggers produce a predictable reaction within us time after time.

When we are in touch with our changing emotional states, we can quickly catch ourselves starting to feel anxious, envious or angry. We can then choose to acknowledge those emotions and without judging ourselves, explore  alternate ways to respond in the situation. That’s how we can break the pattern of our repetitive and volatile emotional reactions.

Equally, with greater self-awareness, you may observe how you typically react in an emotionally disturbed state. For example, you may realise that if you had a stressful day, you crave junk food or gravitate to watching Netflix or browsing social media. You then go to bed late, sleep poorly and are less ready to deal with any volatility the next day. As you notice this vicious cycle, you can decide to stop mindlessly falling in its trap.

Be open

One of the reasons we experience emotional stress is our attachment to specific outcomes. My promotion this year; our move to a new home in the next six months; marriage of our 28-year-old in 2021. Anything that threatens that outcome is an immediate source of anxiety within us.

The way to deal with this is to open our heart to possibilities of whatever may emerge. Whether that promotion comes this year or the next; whether our 28-year-old decides to get married in a year or three. To be this way, we need to learn to let go of our attachment to fixed outcomes and trust the natural process of evolution.

Build resilience

Another reason we struggle to be at peace with the uncertainty of the future is we fear and hate setbacks. They make us uncomfortable and we want to avoid them at any cost. We can protect ourselves against this fear by learning to reframe our relationship with difficult circumstances. While they seem to be life-defining, are they really? Almost nothing is as good or as bad as it seems. More often than not, it’s a shade of grey and not as black and white as it initially appears.

Also, we usually underestimate our innate ability to deal with setbacks. We are more resilient than we give ourselves credit for. In fact, it’s in such situations that we often learn and grow the most. We simply need to get more comfortable with being uncomfortable. (Read: To build emotional resilience, bury these 5Ps)

I was recently with a friend who’s slowly recovering from a stroke. It was impressive to see him so calm and focus on the positives from the whole event. He described how it has brought into focus what’s really important to him in life, made him more disciplined about health and value relationships even more. That’s emotional vaccination in action!