The questionnaire was distributed to the intervention groups to estimate students’ perceived stress before and at the end of the stress-coping program. The fourth key strategy is seeking and asking for help (e.g., social and family support, strengthening one’s religious faith by adopting a positive interpretation of events, etc.). This is defined by a person’s conscious or unconscious efforts to avoid dealing with a stressor to protect themselves from the difficulties that it brings. In this session, we taught individuals how to express their negative feelings, such as fear, anxiety, and depression. The second involves controlling stressor-related emotional responses using emotion-focused coping methods directed toward managing emotions.
3 Analytic strategy
The first step is to recognize the signs that you’re stressed beyond a normal level. Kiecolt-Glaser’s research shows that stressful events can cause the NEJM article on mental health challenges body to burn fewer calories at rest. Short-term stress can even help you perform—you’re more able to ace an interview or meet a project deadline.
Participants and Methods
Second, coping is viewed as responsive to the demands of specific stressors and therefore can capture responses to the wide range of stressors presented by the COVID-19 pandemic. This model has generated extensive research to identify adaptive and maladaptive ways of coping with controllable and uncontrollable stressors ranging from acute and chronic illness, economic strain, war, and parental mental illness (e.g., Compas et al., 2017). Second, measures of coping have typically been relatively brief and may not capture the full range of strategies that may be relevant to successful adaption to the pandemic (e.g., Gerhold, 2020; Shamblaw et al., 2021; Shechter et al., 2020). The COVID-19 pandemic has triggered an increase in symptoms of several psychiatric disorders, particularly depression and anxiety (Gao et al., 2020; Xiong et al., 2020). The current study addressed these important research gaps to provide the basis for evidence-based resources to enhance resilience in adults during the COVID-19 pandemic. These COVID-19-related stressors place individuals at risk for symptoms of depression, anxiety, and other psychiatric disorders.
- Weak stability over time (i.e., across two waves of the COVID-19 pandemic) was found for perceived stress, life satisfaction, task-oriented coping, and emotion-oriented coping style, while moderate stability was found for avoidance-oriented coping style in Model 5.
- INSERT Table 2 Hybrid models estimating between-person and within-person coping behaviors and mental distress associations.
- In that sense the expected gender differences we observed support the validity of our data26.
- For instance, while connecting with others usually helps reduce loneliness, it could also heighten distress if emotional support was unavailable 5, 6.
- People are resilient and have coping skills they use every day.
Latent variable indicators and statistically non-significant paths are omitted for parsimony (see Supplemental Table 2). Final structural model for Resilience as Decreases in Distress Over Time To facilitate comparison between timepoints, T1 PTD items were re-scored to a 0–4 scale, omitting “1 (“slightly true”)” responses.
While the validation process ensured the reliability of the instrument, our focus was to explore how coping strategies clustered into distinct psychosocial profiles, how these profiles varied across sociodemographic subgroups, and how religious coping was integrated within each configuration. Drawing on Lazarus and Folkman’s transactional model of stress and coping and grounded in the Colombian context where religion holds strong cultural significance, we analyzed data from 5,559 participants using a psychometrically validated coping strategies scale with an approximate response rate around 62.1%. However, given the small numbers of individuals (10%) that scored above the clinical cutoff scores for clinical depression or anxiety assessments collected by the authors during the pandemic, longer follow-up times may be needed to fully confirm this statement.
