As we enter another week of social distancing and isolation, how are you faring at home? Is there a ‘right way’ to hang the toilet roll, or a wrong way to load the dishwasher?

Here, life coach Vikki Rimmer, who runs Eynsford-based Press On, gives some tips on how to stay calm and keep the peace while carrying on during lockdown.

1. Compassion and kindness.

If there’s a problem at work, a problem at home, do you flee? Are you the first one into the lifeboat? Does kindness and understanding go out of the window? While this may sound a bit soft, it’s a proven scientific fact, that being kind is good for you. Being kind actually releases all sorts of feel-good chemicals in your brain. A useful meditation for now is the ‘compassion meditation’. Compassion for yourself and for others can

be life-changing. Whole religions are based around the idea! It’s good to practice this first thing in the morning, when you wake, or last thing at night. Firstly, think of a time when you had real compassion or nurturing love for something or someone. Maybe it’s a time when someone needed you and you were there for them, you helped a loved one, or held someone and comforted them. Get in touch with the feeling you had - that strong and lovely feeling of compassion. Cover yourself in this feeling and really breathe it in. Spend a couple of minutes doing that. Then take that feeling, and in your mind, share it with someone you love, send it out to them. And repeat. Next, take that feeling and share it with someone that you’re not very connected with, just someone you met once (maybe they served you coffee or sold you a ticket). And finally, send that feeling out and share it with someone you haven’t had a great relationship with. Feel how it feels to share that compassion and understanding. Building our compassion skills can help start every communication you have from a point of calm.

2. Understanding.

We all have different maps of the world. Psychologists and behavioural scientists have discovered that we all have our own independent way of seeing the world around us - our own A-Z’s, if you like. We make our individual maps thanks to our upbringing, our beliefs and experiences. And in turn, these beliefs become ‘truths’ for us. The maps we create for ourselves can be rich and amazing or they can be limiting and destructive (depending on the way we respond to things that happen to us). It’s important to remember that we all have different maps. Your map of the world is different to your partners, and it’s different to your child’s too. When we understand this, we can begin to let the other person off for loading the dishwasher with the knives pointing up, or for always leaving the bed unmade. If you are responding in a calm way but your partner isn’t, it’s important to understand that their experiences have been different to yours and they’re just ‘seeing’ this differently. Simply understanding that can be very freeing for the relationship.

3. Seeing/hearing/feeling things as they do.

We all use our five senses when trying to understand our environment, but it's interesting to learn that we all, again, have our own unique way of processing the world around us. Some people 'see' things clearer, some 'hear' things louder and some 'feel' things more deeply. To improve communication and to avoid arguments, it helps to work out which of these senses your partner uses when they talk to you. An easy way of working this out is to notice the language they use. If your partner says frequently “I see what you mean” or “Let me show you”, “You need to see it from my viewpoint” then chances are they are very visual. If you can mirror the sense they use, you will find it easier to form a common bond and reassure each other.

This works particularly well when trying to reassure a child. Listen to the way they describe the world - are they feeling their way through it? If they are, then using lots of ‘feeling’ language when you explain things to them can really help.

If you want to learn more about these skills during this time and learn some specific exercises to help eg. how to deal with difficult relationships, how to positively affect our health, then I’d recommend Dr Phil Parker’s NLP Skills two day course. This course is usually run in London but is now available online via philparker.org/ There are also lots of free resources and podcasts here to help with relationship issues and help in finding calm states and relaxation.

Find more tips from Vikki, who is an NLP specialist (neuro-linguistic programming) here.

For tips on beating anxiety during lockdown click here.

See how others are coping with our photo comp Snapshot Kent.