The Process Of Psychological Recovery Begins While A Stressful Event Is Still Going On, According To Study Of Early Stages Of Coronavirus Pandemic

By Emma Young The COVID-19 pandemic has transformed all our lives. For those of us fortunate enough to avoid unemployment, our work lives have still changed drastically. So how long should it take employees to recover psychologically, and settle into a “new normal”? According to a new paper, published in the Journal of Applied Psychology, this process actually began very early on. This is among the first work to show that psychological recovery can start during a stressful experience. The pandemic has threatened workers’ wellbeing in all kinds of ways. As Eric Anicich at the University of Southern California and his colleagues point out, it has increased personal economic uncertainty (through furloughs and lay-offs and the prospect of more redundancies), constrained our physical movements and forced many of us to suddenly start working from home — as well as of course threatening our health, even our lives. All of these factors have challenged our autonomy, which is important for wellbeing because it entails feeling in control of our own actions, and seeing an alignment between our behaviour and our personal values and goals. (This particular aspect of autonomy is often referred to as “authenticity”). The researchers set out therefore to explore how the pandemic might affect both feelings of powerlessnesss and authenticity. They focused on workers — specifically on full-time employees of 41 community colleges on the West Coast of the ...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: Coronavirus Mental health Source Type: blogs