Getting marital stress under control is crucial to your long-term health. “It’s not simply coping with the situation, but it’s turning difficult times into a growth experience.” One day in March, you woke up and your entire life had changed — your work was disrupted, your loved ones’ health suddenly in peril, your movements restricted, your home turned into a pressure cooker. This study was supported by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) grants K23-MH (RB), R01-MH (REG, RCG), R01-MH (RCG), and the Lifespan Brain Institute of Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and Penn Medicine, University of Pennsylvania. We thank participants of covid19resilience.org for their contribution to data generation. To conclude, we present data collected from a large convenience sample in the acute phase of the COVID-19 pandemic, when the majority of the sample was bound to a “lockdown” with severe social distancing.
Potential Moderators of Coping and Psychological Distress
For instance, our maladaptive coping focused exclusively on substance use and did not capture other relevant strategies such as avoidance, rumination, or self-blame. These may include cultural norms, structural barriers, or environmental conditions that influence coping behavior but were not directly assessed. Although the hybrid model helps differentiate within- and between-person effects, causality cannot be firmly established as unmeasured confounders or bidirectional relationships may influence the findings. For instance, strong kinship ties, faith-based practices, and collective cultural values may promote psychological resilience in ways that are not fully captured by standard survey instruments or clinical assessments .
: Modeling Resilience as Reflected in T1 to T3 Reductions in Distress
In Colombia, where religion has strong cultural prominence, NEJM article on mental health challenges studies by Plata et al. (2023) and Meza (2020) document both the intensification of individual faith practices and the rapid adaptation of communal celebrations during the COVID-19 crisis, underlining their importance for stress management. Multiple-group confirmatory factor analysis confirmed measurement invariance across groups, supporting valid comparisons. For instance, the status of functional brain networks may not only provide valuable predictors of the probability of response to an intervention but also reveal neural mechanistic effects of successful treatments. According to Ingram and Luxton (10), the diathesis can take the form of genetic, psychological, situational, or biological traits or factors.
The global pandemic revealed just how critical resilience is to survival. When you equip your leaders with the tools that can help them fend off stress and burnout, you can build a culture that values resilience and gives employees permission to take care of themselves and recharge. To help manage pandemic stress, we encourage leaders to think more intentionally about the role that gratitude plays in their lives. Researchers have found gratitude to be related to many forms of wellbeing, including higher self-esteem, boosted physical health, better sleep, and greater life satisfaction. To help manage pandemic stress, we encourage leaders to incorporate at least one of these 8 practices into their daily routines. It’s one way to examine the culmination of the unique, pervasive, and intrusive nature of the pandemic in people’s lives.
- The Satisfaction With Life Scale (SWLS) is a short 5-item scale developed by Diener et al. to assess global cognitive judgments of one’s life satisfaction.
- To test whether the within- and between-person effects of coping behaviors significantly differed, the Wald test of coefficient equality was performed.
- Over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, long present negative societal attitudes such as xenophobia have been further exposed (Abidin & Jing, 2020).
- This study has several limitations including a reliance on self-report measures; a cross-sectional design with data collected early in the pandemic such that we could not observe changes over time in stress, coping patterns or symptoms; use of on-line platforms to collect data rapidly (Cheung et al., 2017); and that the two samples combined here used different measures of depression and anxiety symptoms.
- Coping strategies can have either protective or damaging effects on mental health.
Further, Minahan et al. found that avoidant coping mediated the relationships between pandemic-related stress and psychological outcomes, including depression, anxiety, and loneliness. A study conducted during the pandemic by Shamblaw et al. , however, has suggested that some emotion-focused coping strategies, such as the use of emotional support, may be related to well-being. This study contributes to the emerging literature on the psychological impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic by shedding light on individuals’ experiences of SLEs, utilization of various coping strategies, and current QOL during this traumatic global event.
We believe that such efforts will enhance the cultural and psychological validity of faith-informed interventions for addressing crises. The observed gendered patterns of coping suggest that such efforts must also be sensitive to prevailing norms of emotional restraint, particularly among men. Conversely, men were more prevalent in emotionally restrained or self-sufficient profiles, which align with literature on masculine coping norms that emphasize independence and emotional control (Hamid et al., 2023). The limited use of religious coping in this group reinforces the idea that although faith is culturally salient, it is not universally adopted across all subpopulations (Hvidtjørn et al., 2014). Men in this group may rely on stoic or self-contained strategies that eschew overt emotional expression or spiritual recourse.