In the last week, the coronavirus has escalated from a serious issue to a world pandemic. Governments are implementing never-before thought of travel bans, isolation practices, and extreme measures to try and control this thing. If you're not feeling at least a little bit afraid by now, you're in the minority. 

I'm currently stuck in Utila, Honduras, a place I never thought I'd be during a global crisis. While I'm on a relatively safe island with pretty good food security, the situation keeps getting scarier. The regulations are getting stricter with each passing day, and it's a big unknown around how badly this will escalate.

At this moment in time, the Honduran government has cut our island off from the rest of the country. The grocery stores have been picked over, with no news of when they'll send more supplies to us. Paper mask and glove-wearing military personnel are roaming the island, enforcing an 8 pm curfew, and dispelling large groups of people. You can go to jail if they catch you drinking, with fines if they find you in groups of over 30.

Although this island grows a bunch of its food and we might be completely fine (even way better off than some places), it's hard not to get caught up in patterns of fear about all of the terrifying things that could happen during this. However, being afraid doesn't help anyone; in fact, it makes things way worse. So what can we do when we get stuck in fear?

Take Time To Process

Nothing ever got solved by pretending it doesn't exist. What's happening right now is a big deal, so take the time to sit with it and feel whatever you're feeling. It's okay to feel freaked out or worried for a bit, as long as you don't let those feelings control you.

Take the time to think critically and get educated about what's going on. Stop listening to hype news that sells headlines by telling you how awful everything is. Read the science, listen to people who are experts, and do what they recommend.

However, once you've gotten educated and prepared about the situation, let it go. You control your thoughts; your thoughts don't control you. Once you know that there's nothing left you can do, there's no point in stewing about what may or may not happen. Letting your thoughts spiral is the best way to lose touch with reality, which can cause behaviors that will make the situation worse. At the very least, for yourself, if not others.

Move Your Body

When we get scared, we tense up, telling our sympathetic nervous system to create adrenaline and cortisol. The point of stress is to get our bodies prepared for fight or flight when we're in danger, and the biological response to stress should be a burst of energy that burns off stress hormones.

However, when we're in situations like this, our body doesn't get the chance to respond to our feelings of fear. There's no tiger we can run from, this virus is invisible, and stress won't help us fight it. So we close down, we hunch up, and our body creates even more hormones to compensate. The cycle that this creates makes our bodies feel even more uncomfortable and helpless.

The great thing about this is that almost any form of motion can remove these hormones from your body. I know we may all be stuck inside, but instead of just fear-watching tv, take the time to move. Do yoga, dance around, learn tai chi, follow a workout video. Doing anything at all will increase your sense of well-being, pump up your endorphins, and help remove your fear.

Help Others

When we feel afraid, our focus gets narrow, and we can only think about what's best for ourselves. That's fine if we're dealing with immediate danger (like the tiger), but bad when it comes to sustained issues. Problems like this require long term problem solving and community participation, so we need to get our brains out of fight or flight.

One of the best ways to move your brain out of its fear is to think about others. Start to focus on what someone more disadvantaged than you might need in this situation and then brainstorm ways you can help. Doing this not only will make your community better, but it will also make you feel less afraid.

Doing good is proven to help reduce stress and increase feelings of well-being. When we nurture others, it positively affects our physiology and releases oxytocin, the natural cure for fear. When we help others, we're also helping ourselves, and the whole community benefits as a result.

Be Grateful

The science behind gratitude is pretty compelling. People who have regular gratitude practices are proven to have more positive emotions, feel more engaged with and happy about their lives, show more compassion, experience less stress, sleep better, and have more robust immune systems. No matter how rough your current situation, there's always something to be grateful for. 

Gratitude is an affirmation of the world being a good place. It reminds us of all the beauty in the world, and all of the benefits we receive on a daily basis. It helps us block our natural tendencies towards negativity that ruins our happiness. When you're in gratitude, it's pretty impossible to experience feelings of resentment, anger, or fear.

It also helps us realize where goodness stems from, which is often our community. It strengthens relationships because it makes us understand how much other's support us. It reminds us to acknowledge other people, which in turn makes us feel more connected and benevolent to the world around us.

One of the best things to do when you're experiencing fear is to take some time to be grateful for what you have. Whenever you feel overwhelmed, turn your thoughts to all of the ways you're supported and okay. Spend some time writing them down or tell them to others. It will naturally remove the stress from your body, making you calmer, better able to problem solve, and happier about your situation.

Get Creative

We're currently in a situation, unlike anything we've experienced before. In all likelihood, this pandemic will not only lose us lives but also bankrupt many of us and tank world economies. It's hard not to get overwhelmed when thinking about the possible outcomes.

Since we've never experienced this before, we're going to need to use creative problem solving to figure out solutions where conventional thinking has failed. It's time to play, dream, and imagine. It's time to innovate and move the world in exciting new directions. Imagination is the key to solving this, and it needs to start with everyone.

Spend some time thinking about what you want your future to look like. Draw it, write it, talk about it. Be positive; get excited about the potential. Don't limit yourself but think as far outside of the box as you can imagine. As an artist, I play with this all of the time, and it's one of the skills that help me turn the impossible into reality. I know that I can create anything from thought, but it has to start with the dream.

One of the greatest things about using your imagination like this is that your brain doesn't actually differentiate between your thoughts and your experiences. It is one of the principles of positive visualization. When you let your imagination joyfully run wild with potential, excellent physical responses follow. When we play with possibilities, we make ourselves happier with the potential of creating real change.

We Can Do This

I know that it's really scary for some of us right now. It's hard to be locked in our houses, hard not obsessively to watch the news. It's going to take some real self-work to be calm and productive about this. However, I do believe that the best way to get through this is by taking care of ourselves and remaining a community.

The whole world is our community right now, and we need to have each other's backs. If we do the work to dilute our fear and help each other, I believe that we can come out of this stronger.

There are a lot of people I've met who think that travel is a young person's game. It's something that you're supposed to do when you're 20 and figuring out yourself, but after that, you're supposed to stabilize and settle down. However, travel isn't just about having fun. Science proves that it's healthy for you in a variety of ways. 

Decades ago, public thought didn't grasp the link between diet and exercise making you healthy. Researchers are now saying the same things about travel adding to lifespan and capacity. As these benefits become more widely studied, t's not too far-fetched to imagine a time where doctors will prescribe a trip as a necessary part of a healthy life.

1. Travel Makes You Physically Healthier

You may not feel very healthy when you're throwing up in some foreign land from some lousy food you just ate, but travel substantially boosts your immune system. When you travel, you expose yourself to new bacteria that help you create stronger antibodies. When you move between different locations, you force your body to adapt to thousands of new bacteria, which will make you stronger in the long run.

When you're on the road, you're also proven to be less stressed. Studies have found that after only three days, travelers feel more rested, less anxious and in a better mood while increasing their overall activity and fitness levels. Some studies also show a compelling connection that in certain groups, this change in stress lowers the risk of heart attack and disease. These improvements don't immediately go away after returning home either but will add to lifespan and overall wellbeing.

Travelers are also more active and less stationary on trips. Because there has already been a buy-in to get to your new location, people are more motivated to get out and experience it. You're likely to walk more than you would at home, try a new sport, or engage in a physical activity like hiking or swimming. It's also more likely that these things become a part of your daily experience while traveling, and you're less likely to do sedentary actions like watching tv.

2. Travel Exposes You to Healing Properties

When you travel, you tend to visit sites that you don't have access to at home, and many of those have healing properties. Soaking in the mineral-rich waters of a hot spring, swimming in the salty waters of the ocean, or even just getting out into the sun can expose you to things that will add to your overall wellness. Getting outside exposes us to many properties that can heal, uplift, and rejuvenate. Health and Wellness Tourism has even become a huge part of the travel industry, with a resurgence of people pursuing health-related amenities. Resorts and spas have surged in popularity, as well as activities like yoga, fitness, and lifestyle retreats. Whether that's the focus of your trip or not, you're more likely to participate in a wellness activity while you travel than you would be at home.

3. Travel Creates New Neural Pathways

When you explore, you naturally have to problem solve and adapt to more situations. You have to meet new people, encounter new languages, deal with other cultures, and solve new problems. Neural pathways are created due to environment and habitat and are sensitive to change. When there are new sounds, smells, languages, tastes, and sensations, you're telling your brain to be more aware and to spark new synapses.

When you put your brain in different experiences, it is proven to increase your cognitive flexibility, creativity, ability to make connections and integrate ideas. It's has been shown that those who work and study aboard are more open and emotionally stable. So the more you engage with new environments, the more activated your brain will become, and the more likely you are to stave off brain degradation and disease.

4. Travel Creates Meaningful Social Experiences

Humans aren't meant to be isolated creatures. A crucial part of our physical health comes from having meaningful social connections with others. When we don't have functional interactions, it increases the chance that we'll feel sensations of loneliness, depression, and pessimism. When people stay home, they are more likely to do similar actions every day, which lessens the change of getting out of unhealthy patterns of isolation.

When you travel, it forces you into situations where you have to connect with others. Even if you're alone traveling or backpacking, it puts you into scenarios where the only way to solve specific problems is to meet people and make new friends. You will also be encountering other travelers who will be in a similar state of openness to connection. Engaging in this process will increase your confidence in human interactions.

Travel also deepens the connections with those around you because peak experiences make for more intense and lasting memories. It will also make you less biased as you connect with others who are different than you and increase your skillset for communication and conflict resolution. All of these things are lasting skills that will improve your quality of life, even after your trip is over.

5. Travel Broadens Your Perspective

Travel helps you broaden your view of the world and yourself. By putting yourself into new situations, you have to learn to live outside your comfort zone and find the beauty in different circumstances. While this may make you uncomfortable at times, it allows you to transform how you understand the world.

Studies even prove an increased chance of epiphanies while traveling. There is also an increased ability to problem-solve issues we otherwise have been stuck on. When you're in the middle of a problem, it's often hard to detach yourself from it enough to come to any resolution. By separating from a familiar environment, you gain psychological distance from a situation at hand. Getting away from where you live is important because it's often the only way you can achieve a new perspective.

Travel Helps You Live Longer and Better

With all of these aspects combined, travel is one of those rare things that not only increases your life expectancy but also increases your quality of life. When you take a trip, even if it's short, it boosts your immune system, heart, brain, capacity, connections, and mood, keeping your body healthy inside and out. All of this means that travel increases your chance of living longer and having more fun doing it.

Want more travel content? Follow me at @jodithesharp for daily updates! 

I’ve gone through a lot of transformations in my life. I have lived enough lives for seven people, and each new direction and trajectory has taken a lot of work, focus, and commitment. The process of my life has been full of twists and turns, change, re-organization, and temporary chaos.

When I look back on my life, there’s one thing I often forget about transformations; the amount of pain I feel during them. I often see past transmutations as the divine plan and growth that they were, but I rarely remember just how much pain I was in at the time. But when I go through the next stage of change I'm reminded that pain is a huge part of the process, and it’s easy to question why so much agony is necessary.

There’s a reason that the symbol of transformation is the butterfly. There is a massive amount of struggle the butterfly has to go through before it metamorphizes into that beautiful creature we love.

It is a long and painful process, but not without reason. When a caterpillar enters its chrysalis, its entire structure has to be broken down and turned into goo so that the wings that were forming on the inside of its body can break free. The molecules of this soup are then reformatted into an entirely new framework that looks completely different than it was before. This process can take up to 21 days, which in the span of a butterfly's life, is a very long time.

The final emerging process takes hours and if you were to watch it you might feel the desire to help the butterfly out with the last steps of getting out of its shell. It looks so uncomfortable and you might think that it would be helpful to spare this poor creature the slow and tedious pain.

But if you were to do that, you would be removing the creature before the vital fluids in the chrysalis finish forming the wings. The process of breaking free gives the wings the final shape and strength to fly. If you took the butterfly out prematurely, the final result would be a creature that’s deformed and crippled, not able to fly or go out into the world as the beautiful butterfly it was meant to be.

Much like the butterfly, any sort of personal transformation has to take the same steps.

Firstly, ideas and beliefs you thought were “truth,” have to be completely broken down. You have to let go of a dream, a way of being or a connection, often without knowing what’s coming next. You have to let your past desires become goo, and this process will always run the gamut of emotions. The ability to let go of something that was so valuable to you in order to accept a new and different vision will often cause a lot of pain. It’s important to feel the grief around this because if we’re not honest about the real difficulty, we shut down to the world around us and can’t be open to the next phase.

After breaking down your past beliefs, you need to then go through the process of growing something; of breaking those new wings out from somewhere deep in your body. You need to create and attach to a new idea for your life. This will take a lot of experimentation, seeking and discomfort as you go through the process of figuring out what’s right for you.

The final process will be breaking into your direction. You’ve decided what you want, but you’re starting at the beginning of something new. This will take commitment as you learn a new skill, engage in a new relationship or start implementing a new belief. It will be a lot of hard work at this stage, and you may be tired of the work and pain you’ve been going through. But if you don’t push through this last process, then just like the butterfly, your new dream will become crippled and malformed. But if you really commit to this new process, this phase will be where you make your new direction strong and viable.

At the end of all of this pain and hard work, you get nature's true gift; you get to fly into your new direction open and free, more beautiful than you were before.

I’m not sure why nature has decided that metamorphosis needs to be so painful. Maybe it's a way to ensure that those who level up really want it. All I know is, if you don’t fully engage with it and be present and open during the stages, then you’ll be missing out on the next incredible shape your life will take. And I don’t know about you, but I would like to fly.

Follow me daily at @jodi.sharp.art