AAmerican people mental health collapsed during the first year of the pandemic. More than 36% of American adults experienced symptoms of anxiety or depression in August 2020, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for January 2021, the number was above 40%.
It’s not hard to see why. A scary new virus was spreading with no vaccines to stop it. Cities and states were in various degrees of lockdown for much of 2020, with many people forgoing special occasions and visits with friends and family. Isolation and fear were widespread.and people had every reason to feel very stressed.
But even as lockdowns were lifted, people got vaccinated, and life resumed its normal rhythms, many people continued to feel…bad. In an American Psychological Association poll published in October 2021, 75% of people said they had recently experienced the consequences of stress, including headaches, trouble sleeping, fatigue, and feeling overwhelmed.
Now, more than two years into the pandemic, many people have still not recovered. One reason could be “environmental stress” or “stress that is in the background, below the level of consciousness,” says New York-based clinical psychologist Laurie Ferguson, director of educational development at the Global Healthy Living Foundation, an organization non profit. that supports people with chronic diseases.
“Something is wrong, but we don’t record it all the time,” says Ferguson. “We are always a little bit out of balance. We function at a level where everything is fine and things are normal, when in reality they are not.
in a 1983 Article published in the magazine Environment and Behavior, researcher Joan Campbell described environmental stressors as those that are chronic and negative, cannot be substantially changed by an individual, do not usually cause immediate threats to life (but can be harmful over time), and are noticeable but often unnoticed. “In the long term,” Campbell wrote, these stressors could affect “motivation, emotions, attention, [physical] health and behavior”.
Campbell cited examples like pollution and traffic noise, but it’s also an apt description of this stage of the pandemic. In March 2020, the pandemic was a direct stressor, one that, for many people at least, felt urgent and overwhelming. Two years later, most people have adapted, to some degree. Most people are vaccinated, the news doesn’t carry the latest cases 24/7, and life seems closer to 2019 than 2020. But whether we are aware of it or not, we are Still taking the psychic toll than two years of death, illness, turmoil and uncertainty, as well as minor interruptions like changes in our social or work lives, says Ferguson.
Even environmental stress can have health consequences, as Campbell noted. Humans evolved to deal with short-term stressors, but we’re not that good coping with chronic stressexplains Laura Grafe, an assistant professor of psychology at Bryn Mawr College. Chronic stress has been linked to conditions including high blood pressure, diabetes, sleep problems, and cognitive and mental health disorders.
Constant stress can also compound the effects of other stressors. “Everything else looks worse with the chronic stress of the pandemic in the background,” says Grafe.
However, environmental stress doesn’t have to take all the joy out of your life. In a 2021 study, Grafe and their co-authors examined how pandemic stress and coping strategies affected sleep. His team found that a person’s quality of sleep wasn’t necessarily dictated by their overall level of pandemic-related stress, but by how well they coped. That suggests that stress itself isn’t necessarily the problem, it’s uncontrolled stress.
When stress becomes so routine that we stop acknowledging it, we are less likely to manage it effectively. As Campbell wrote in 1983, “coping is more likely to occur when the stressor is still new.” By the middle of 2022, many people have abandoned relaxing hobbies like bread baking, yoga, and knitting that they took up in the spring of 2020.
That’s why it’s important to develop sustainable coping strategies, says Niccole Nelson, a postdoctoral research associate in the department of psychology at the University of Notre Dame, who has also studied pandemic stress. “There is no single coping strategy that is inherently good or bad,” says Nelson, but it is often helpful to mentally reframe a stressor as less threatening. That’s hard to do with something as serious as the pandemic, but Nelson suggests trying it on a smaller scale: finding ways to appreciate the positives of working from home, for example. (Grafe suggests mindfulness exercises and cognitive behavioral therapy to cope with stress.)
Giving your brain new stimuli can also help during a prolonged period of stress, says Ferguson. Even small changes, like eating something new for breakfast or taking a different route for your daily walk, can introduce some healthy novelty. Physical activity is also a Proven tactic to reduce stressshe adds.
Simply noticing and naming your environmental stress can also be a big help, says Ferguson. “Even people who are ‘back to normal’ still have that environmental stress and they may not realize they’re a little more moody or a little less hopeful,” she says. “It’s subtle, in many ways, and harder to notice” than full-blown pandemic stress, but just as important to manage.
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