Category: Stress

The ability to adapt to the new circumstances is the key.

Staying in touch with your emotions is a good way to deal with COVID-19 stress, research reveals.

It is natural to experience emotions like sadness, fear, loneliness and anxiety during the pandemic.

However, people who are psychologically flexible tend to do better.

Flexibility means acknowledging emotions, accepting them and taking whatever action is possible.

Continuing to do whatever is important to you — even if it is in modified form — is key to reducing stress.

For example, people in the study who called a family member or friend to talk it through experienced less stress than those who bottled it up and said nothing.

Dr Emily Kroska, the study’s first author, said:

“The goal is to try and help people become more resilient by remaining in touch with their emotions and finding creative ways to maintain or build upon relationships with people or activities that are important to them.

People who do that will generally not be as distressed, or anxious, as those who don’t.”

The study included 485 people in the US who described the difficulties they had faced due to the pandemic.

Dr Kroska said:

“Basically, we wanted to learn about the full sort of adversities that people encountered due to COVID-19.

We found everyone encountered some degree of adversity, which is quite sad but expected.”

People reported physical sensations like sweating and fear as well as problems making the rent, getting their groceries and living apart from loved ones.

The study revealed that people experienced less stress if they displayed psychological flexibility.

This is the ability to be open and aware of one’s emotions and how they are affecting one’s actions.

Dr Kroska said:

“If you are creative with trying to talk with your family remotely instead of in person, but you’re resentful about it the whole time and think it sucks, that’s going to cause more distress.

But if you’re willing to say, ‘OK, this isn’t what we were exactly hoping for, but we’re going to make the best of it,’ that’s the values and the openness piece.

It’s the combination that’s required.”

Being able to adapt to the new circumstances is the key, said Dr Kroska:

“People don’t want to be distressed, but they’re going to be during this pandemic.

Being flexible and continuing to do what is important to you even during these difficult times is important and is associated with less distress.

I think people are desperate for anything that will help them feel less stressed out.”

The study was published in the Journal of Contextual Behavioral Science (Kroska et al., 2020).

Research into previous mass traumas reveals the best ways of coping with stress of COVID-19.

Coping activities that increase the sense of control, coherence and connectedness are key to dealing with COVID-19 stress, new research concludes.

Typical coping activities include checking in with friends and loved ones, filtering news intake and planning daily activities.

All of these are ways of regaining control.

Planning daily activities, for example, helps reduce the sensation of drifting along without structure or purpose.

Other techniques that help regain control include making post-pandemic plans and journaling.

Feeling in control is one important way of coping, along with increasing coherence and connectedness, the researchers explain.

Increasing the sense of coherence means trying to make more sense of the world.

One way of doing this is to practice ‘acceptance-based coping’.

This involves using mindfulness to observe fears, anxieties and other emotional responses as they pass through the brain.

Finally, connectedness can be difficult to achieve given social distancing regulations.

However videoconferencing, telephone calls and social media can all help to keep in touch with others.

Even meditating by oneself, directing loving kindness towards the self can help increase the sense of connection to others.

Part of being compassionate towards the self is accepting that our own struggles are connected to others as we are going through the same thing together.

All these strategies have been found to help people deal with stress and bounce back.

These recommendations were inspired by research into how people dealt with other mass traumas, such as the 9/11 terror attacks.

Mr Craig Polizzi, the study’s first author, said:

“We also drew inspiration from our previous work with clients who have experienced traumas and how they have coped with traumatic events.”

People cope with traumas in different ways, so the strategies they use should be personalised, Mr Polizzi said:

“People are unique and the way they cope should be consistent with their needs and values.”

In the future, the research team hope to look at what psychological strategies people used to deal with the pandemic, along with their effectiveness.

Mr Polizzi said:

“It is also important to test the coping strategies we proposed in our article to see if people did use them to reduce distress during the pandemic, as well identify additional techniques individuals used to cope with stress to enhance recommendations for coping during future mass traumas.”

The study was published in the journal Clinical Neuropsychiatry (Polizzi et al., 2020).