Through the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, many individuals suffered excessive stress. Folks couldn’t work and confronted monetary nervousness, they felt lonely and remoted, they nervous about catching a virulent disease or giving it to somebody they liked, and their psychological well being suffered.
For researcher Erin Fekete, of the College of Indianapolis, the unfolding pandemic was a possibility to reply a longstanding query about the easiest way to manage in moments of struggling. Will we get extra reduction by reflecting on our ideas and emotions about what we’re going by way of, or from turning our minds to the constructive issues in our lives?
It’s a good query, as analysis suggests each approaches might assist us address troublesome feelings. Expressive writing, the place you replicate on distressing ideas and emotions, has been found to decrease our stress and result in higher psychological and bodily well being. Gratitude journaling, then again, may also assist us feel happier and less depressed.
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To match the practices, Fekete examined them with a gaggle of 79 members throughout the early days of COVID (between April and June 2020), when lockdowns have been frequent. Folks first reported on their bodily well being, their psychological misery (nervousness, melancholy, and stress), and their constructive and destructive emotions. Additionally they rated how remoted they have been, how a lot the pandemic had created financial hardship for them, and the way grateful they tended to be—all issues that may impression their psychological well being.
Then, they have been randomly assigned to both an expressive writing or gratitude journaling observe and prompted to jot down for 5 to 10 minutes every single day over every week. (A management group was not given writing directions in any respect.)
On the finish of the week and one month later, individuals have been once more requested about their misery, their constructive and destructive emotions, and their bodily well being. The individuals who wrote about gratitude skilled a major lower in stress and destructive feelings in comparison with the opposite two teams, and these results lasted for no less than a month after. Even accounting for individuals’s ages, degree of isolation, prior gratefulness, and monetary hardship, gratitude writing was considerably extra helpful than expressive writing.
“Although expressive writing stands out as the gold customary for writing interventions, gratitude and different types of writing could also be simply as efficient or more practical,” says Fekete. “No less than on this research, writing about experiences in a constructive method appeared to assist individuals reframe issues and allowed them to manage a bit higher with the stress of COVID.”
Fekete says she was shocked that expressive writing wasn’t extra useful to individuals, given previous analysis. However, she provides, it’s potential that COVID was such a singular expertise and so out of individuals’s private management that expressive writing was not as effectively suited to the scenario.
“COVID was very unfamiliar, very unpredictable, and really traumatic. So, maybe writing about it really exacerbated some individuals’s feelings as a substitute of assuaging them,” says Fekete.
Surprisingly, neither gratitude nor expressive writing considerably affected individuals’s temper, nervousness, or bodily well being. However, says Fekete, that is perhaps as a result of members weren’t experiencing many issues with these so early within the pandemic. “There might not have been loads of room for enchancment there,” she says.
Do her findings indicate we should always all flip to the positives (and never delve into our destructive feelings) after we’re underneath stress? Fekete can’t say for certain, as her research is only one of only a few evaluating the 2 practices. Additionally, whereas the members who engaged within the workouts benefitted, some individuals dropped out, suggesting writing is just not for everybody.
Fekete wish to see extra analysis exploring easy methods to tweak writing practices to raised go well with the second and other people’s wants. For instance, she’d wish to redo her experiment in a unique stage of COVID when individuals perceive the dangers higher, to see what would possibly greatest relieve their stress. And she or he’d wish to experiment with practices higher matched to particular person preferences.
“Permitting individuals alternative within the varieties of interventions they interact in may very well have a greater impact in selling constructive well-being,” she says. “It’s vital to have a match between the particular person and the exercise, and which will differ primarily based on individuals’s persona traits or the tradition they’re from.”
Nonetheless, she and her group are excited to see that such a brief, easy observe might assist relieve stress underneath circumstances as troublesome as a worldwide pandemic.
“Throughout a really constricted time, this intervention was on-line, comparatively straightforward to implement, cheap, and reached all kinds of people that benefitted,” says Fekete. “I believe these outcomes are promising for the long run.”
