7 science-based strategies to cope with coronavirus anxiety

A Turkish study (April 2020) found lower state anxiety in 203 pregnant women compared to 101 non-pregnant women (Yassa et al., 2020b). A rare longitudinal study in Argentina confirmed significant increases in depressive, anxiety and negative affect in 102 pregnant women at 2, 14, and 47 days after the start of the lockdown compared to 102 non-pregnant women (Lopez-Morales et al., 2021). In general, elderly people have lower access to technology and social media, which can make it more difficult to compensate for lockdown-related changes and have adequate access to food, news, and social interaction (Martins Van Jaarsveld, 2020).

Now, you might say, “But, Brian, what about all those people that could be spreading the virus without knowing it? There were about 120,000 people known to have the virus out of the nearly 8 billion people that live on this planet. For example, earlier in the month, I had a moment of concern and looked up the infection statistics at the time. Stress is stress regardless of the source, and the tools to manage it are the same.

If you or someone you know has a mental illness, there are ways to get help. Download, read, and order free NIMH brochures and fact sheets about mental disorders and related topics. NIMH statistics pages include statistics on the prevalence, treatment, and costs of mental illness for the population of the United States. NIMH offers expert-reviewed information on mental disorders and a range of topics.

Psychometric Validation of the Coping Strategies Scale

In this study, we aimed to explain the interplay mechanism between stress, life satisfaction, and coping styles among university students. You can also find support and locate mental health services in your area on the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration website. Many people experienced symptoms of anxiety, depression, and substance use disorder during the pandemic. Both SARS-CoV-2 and the COVID-19 pandemic have significantly affected the mental health of adults and children.

Of course, no experimental research is possible when assessing the effectiveness of the preferred strategies for coping with the stress of a pandemic. The study design was cross-sectional, so we have obtained data about relationships between coping strategies and psychological well-being, not about the cause-effect dependencies. Based on the obtained results, it can be concluded that when confronted with the stress of the pandemic, the studied sample of young adults, as a whole, used adaptive coping strategies. It is worth noting that the negative correlations of self-blaming, behavioral disengagement, and venting were stronger, suggesting that these strategies are particularly maladaptive in coping with pandemic stress by university students. Previous research indicates that such problem-focused and active strategies as acceptance, planning, positive reframing, and active coping are adaptive and maintain mental well-being in stress transactions,14–18,22 also during the COVID-19 pandemic.31–33 This is confirmed by the results of our research.

• The World Health Organization (WHO) reported 619,161,228 confirmed cases of COVID-19, including 6,537,636 deaths, since the beginning of the pandemic in different countries with global vaccine doses of 12,723,216,322.
• Religious engagement emerged as a central resource alongside problem-focused and social coping, contributing to stress reduction and a sense of purpose (Alexandre et al., 2022; Caballero et al., 2021; Cheng & Chang, 2022; Couto et al., 2022).
• The differences in the frequency of using pandemic stress coping strategies depending on the place of study were less numerous.
• Building upon this integrative framework, the present study models coping as both a within-person (situational) and a between-person (habitual process).
• Staged multivariate linear regression analyses examined the relationships between SLEs and the two QOL domains, controlling for sociodemographic and pre-existing health conditions and testing for the effects of coping strategies on these relationships.

3. The Indirect Effect of Perceived Stress on Life Satisfaction via Coping Styles

Fig 2A illustrates the partial mediation model for the relationship between experiencing 4+ SLEs, avoidant coping, and QOL physical health. The final model revealed that only avoidant coping is a potential partial mediator in the relationships between the QOL physical health dimension and experiencing 2, 3, and 4+ SLEs, with reductions in the SLE coefficients with the inclusion of avoidant coping. Further, as shown in Table 3, we investigated if each coping strategy potentially mediated the relationships between SLEs and QOL physical health. Additionally, the only significant differences in the gender identity variable were observed in QOL psychological health, with those who identified as “other” gender identity reporting the lowest QOL and cisgender males reporting the highest QOL.

Based on reports of overall higher scoring in anxiety17 and depression18 in web-based compared to paper and pencil surveys, we chose more conservative cutoffs to capture moderate and above anxiety or depression. The key dependent variable was either a dichotomized measure NEJM article on mental health challenges of meeting screening levels of GAD and depression (binary logistic regression); or continuous GAD7 and PHQ2 score (linear regression). For COVID-19 related worries, all main and interaction effects were investigated using mixed models to account for within-person variance across items. We also explored differences in COVID-19 related stress and resilience between participants from US and Israel. Here, we applied an interactive online platform to measure resilience in a population enriched for healthcare providers. Tools have been established to estimate resilience, broadly conceptualized as healthy and adaptive functioning in the aftermath of adversity2.