Both/and is a concept I often share with my therapy patients, but it’s especially relevant now if we’re going to bolster our psychological immune systems along with our physical ones. Both/and is how I can say to my son “I’m so glad I get to spend this extra time with you” when I walk past his remote classroom (i.e., the den). He’ll be going to college in the not-too-distant future, and although the reason he’s home with me is horrible, I’m still glad to see him. It’s both/and.

Read: The dos and don’ts of ‘social distancing’

Of course, it’s normal to feel anxiety right now, and while we need to allow ourselves the space to feel these feelings, we also need to give ourselves the space to let them go. Some anxiety is productive—it’s what motivates us to wash our hands often and distance ourselves from others when there’s an important reason to do so. If we weren’t reasonably worried, none of us would be taking these measures, and the virus would spread even more. But unproductive anxiety— unchecked rumination—can make our mind spin in all kinds of frightening directions. Instead of helping us to stay grounded in the present—I’m safe and making dinner; I’m snuggled up with my family as we watch this movie; I’m writing this column—our anxiety spins stories about the future that go something like I or someone I love will get deathly ill from the coronavirus.

This kind of anxiety causes us to futurize and catastrophize, both of which take up a lot of emotional real estate. It’s a vicious cycle: The more we worry, the more we try to control our worry with something tangible, such as information. But clinging to our screens for the latest update has the opposite effect because it serves as fodder for more futurizing and catastrophizing. A daily update makes sense. But bingeing on up-to-the-minute news is like stress eating—it’s bloating our minds with unhealthy food that will make us feel sick.

A few years ago, a patient of mine who was going through cancer treatment told me that she’d come to a realization: She could think about her cancer all day, about the uncertainty of what might happen, or she could feel her fear at times but also be present in her life right now. She could watch Netflix with her husband and have a dance party with her young children and belt out a song in the shower in between her moments of understandable fear.

Today, she’s cancer-free—for now. She’s aware that the cancer could come back. Is that cough just reflux or something else? Is this fatigue at the end of the weekend due to three birthday parties, a soccer match, and a child’s piano recital, or a possible recurrence? It’s on her mind daily, the way COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, is on most of our minds daily, but the anxiety no longer consumes her the way she imagined it would, because when she had cancer, she became a master at living in the mindset of both/and.