With Covid-19 now striking the President of the United States and his being in the hospital, this, I believe, should be focusing us even more on the power of this virus to alter lives. With all this change, it’s important to understand how our stress, anxiety and depression levels have been increasing.
In April, the National Center for Disease Statistics and the CDC launched an online survey to understand what people are experiencing. When they did this survey in 2019, they found that 11% of the respondents showed signs of anxiety or depression.
In the current survey, the researchers found that 33% of Americans felt symptoms of anxiety and 25% showed signs of depression. As you can see, this is a dramatic increase in these numbers. Since this survey was done in April, I’m certain that these numbers are even higher today.
Since I’ve been teaching and writing on Stress Management for almost 50 years, I know that getting your stress levels down can lead to reducing your anxiety and depression. While I’ve written a book on this called Manging Your Stress in Difficult Times: Succeeding in Times of Change, there are now many, many things you can do to lower your stress beyond wearing a mask and social distancing. From doing breathing exercises to meditation to prayer to walking, running, biking, taking vitamin and supplements, you can help yourself handle what’s coming at you.
Of course, if you need to, you might want to consider seeking professional help, since you can now use tele-medicine to talk to a mental health professional.
So…reducing your stress is up to you and we all need to start taking steps to take charge of our lives again.
No comments:
Post a Comment