By Dale G. Larson
The COVID pandemic precipitated a tsunami of grief and loss that sent psychological, social, and health shock waves surging through societies across the world. Americans, particularly, experienced skyrocketing levels of anxiety, depression, uncertainty, loneliness, and more than one million pandemic-related deaths.1,2
Compounding this trauma in America are several other events that have shaken our lives to the core—mass shootings, unprecedented severe weather events, political turmoil, economic insecurity, and difficulty connecting with family and friends.
Could we ever have imagined these events just a few years ago? And how do we deal with them now? An ideal response would be to make this a time for renewal—a time to recharge, engage in self-care, and restore emotional well-being.
One of the great paradoxes in life is that we find growth in loss. This paradox is supported by psychological research, which finds that positive psychological changes can follow significant stress or trauma.3
Pain and suffering do not abate entirely, but new personal growth can occur alongside them, expanding our capacity for living. Psychologist Norma Haan believes confronting life’s ultimate stressors makes us more tender, humble, and hardy.4
When we respond to pain and suffering with self-renewal, we accommodate other dimensions in our lives, and don’t pretend things are not that bad. We start gaining a greater sense of psychological control over our lives, to make sense of what has happened, and through courage and resilience we often even see positive meaning in our travails that allows us to grow despite our losses and traumas.
Treading this new terrain, we can find novel ways to think about life. We can pause and ask, “What is all this trying to teach me? How can I rebuild meaning in my life? What have I done that has worked best for me as I have coped with all the adversity of the past several years?”
Health care workers, teachers, children and adolescents, and bereaved persons have suffered greatly during these trying times. Health professionals—true heroes during the pandemic—are experiencing record levels of burnout and secondary traumatization. In a recent interview, Dr. Victor Dzau, president of the National Academy of Medicine, said that before COVID around 40% – and up to 50% of doctors and nurses – were reporting burnout, distress and anxiety; since COVID, the figures have risen to 70 to 90%.5 A major survey of health care workers has found similar increases in emotional exhaustion.6
What might their renewal look like? In more sustainable caregiving, it could include countering exhaustion with vigor and suffering as helpers with its restorative meaning. Finding balance, they could fulfill their purpose in their work and live a life aligned with their cherished values.
Today’s teachers—other heroes in our troubled times—are also enduring great distress. Many have been challenged by the grief and trauma their students and families have endured in the wake of school shootings, student suicides, or the death of a family member. All school professionals have to navigate these turbulent emotional waters and provide safety, support, and shelter for their students. K-12 teachers now have the highest burnout rate in the U.S..7 We must do all we can to support and recognize these heroes and enhance the support they receive from their organizations and society.
Our children and adolescents also desperately need renewal. Deeply anxious about their futures, they struggle to keep hope alive.8 In a recent CDC report, nearly 30% of teen girls seriously considered attempting suicide in the past year and more than 1 in 5 LGBTQ+ students actually attempted suicide in the previous year.9
The mental health of the next generation must be a major focus of national strategies. We cannot put the burden of self-initiated self-renewal and growth on them; self-renewal for this next generation calls upon us all to restore hope for them – the hope they need to face a new and challenging world. This is our charge, perhaps the most important one of all.
Bereaved persons have perhaps suffered most during the pandemic. In 2021 one in five Americans reported having lost a family member or close friend during the pandemic, with Black and Hispanic respondents most exposed to loss.10
How can we help friends and colleagues when we are reconnecting with them post-COVID? The first step is recognizing and understanding grief, whether the grief of others or our own. We now know grief is a normal response to loss, with most people emerging after the loss with a resilient outcome and often personal growth. However, every person’s grief is unique and not always surmountable, and does not follow the kinds of stages that Elisabeth Kübler-Ross described for dying persons.
We like stage models because they are so easy to remember and repeat—we are cognitive misers—but grief and mourning don’t really happen in stages. The process goes back and forth between coping with loss, then coping with new challenges.
Experiences of sadness, anxiety, depression, trouble focusing, fatigue, anger, and social isolation are typical at the beginning of the grieving process. What are some ways we can help bereaved persons grow through their losses?
Simply acknowledging the loss and expressing sympathy can be extremely supportive. We often don’t know how to respond when we learn of someone’s loss. Expressing friendship or empathy, or talking positively about the deceased’s life could be helpful, but other responses such as, “just move on,” or “time heals all wounds,” would be most unhelpful. Some good ways to respond can be saying something like “I am sorry for your loss,” “how are you doing?” or “This must be tough.”
Ideally, simply being present and listening to a grieving person would be appropriate in most cases of loss. Don’t scratch where it doesn’t itch, but also don’t ignore or gloss over when someone is clearly affected by their loss, and has shared the loss with you.
As we all enter this next chapter in our lives, we are most likely to experience renewal if we acknowledge our losses while making space for new goals, a new sense of identity, and a new vision for the future.
To guide us in this quest, we can look to recent breakthroughs in positive psychology, neuroscience, and psychotherapy that are now revolutionizing our understanding of resilience, stress, and burnout, and the keys to self-renewal.
This growing body of research and clinical wisdom tells us we can exert significant control over stress and its effects on us, and can often attain significant personal growth from it.
These positive outcomes are now linked to an array of coping styles and stress-management practices that include stress hardiness, cognitive reappraisal, self-compassion, mindfulness, social support, integrating and transforming loss, physical activity, and finding meaning in our lives. I describe these in detail in my Research Press book, The Helper’s Journey: Empathy, Compassion, and the Challenge of Caring.11
All these evidence-based approaches to stress management and renewal might benefit you, but first analyze what has been most helpful for you in coping with adversity in the past. Whatever that is, do it regularly and do more of it.
It is important to remember simple, restorative self-care activities such as sleep, relaxation, vacation, social interaction, and time in nature. These activities can significantly reduce stress, promote better physical and emotional health, and open the gateway to positive emotions.
Another paradox emerging in our research is that compassion and compassionate acts can be a buffer against stress and lead us toward growth. Maybe it is not surprising that love, compassion, and healing conversations might be the real keys to self-renewal. We cannot do it alone. Together we can find a path into the future and make this a time of renewal for us all.
World Health Organization. (2022, March 2). COVID-19 pandemic triggers 25% increase in prevalence of anxiety and depression worldwide. https://www.who.int/news/item/02-03-2022-covid-19-pandemic-triggers-25-increase-in-prevalence-of-anxiety-and-depression-worldwide
National Center for Health Statistics. (n.d.). COVID-19 mortality overview. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/covid19/mortality-overview.htm
Addington, E. L., Tedeschi, R. G., & Calhoun, L. G. (2016). A growth perspective on post-traumatic stress. In A. M. Wood & J. Johnson (Eds.), The Wiley handbook of positive clinical psychology (pp. 223–231). Wiley Blackwell. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118468197.ch15
Haan, N. (1993). The assessment of coping, defense, and stress. In L. Goldberger & S. Breznitz (Eds.), Handbook of stress: Theoretical and clinical aspects (2nd ed., pp. 258–273). Free Press.
Thompson, D. (2023, February 23). Almost two-thirds of U.S. doctors, nurses feel burnt out at work: Poll. U.S. News & World Report. https://www.usnews.com/news/health-news/articles/2023-02-23/almost-two-thirds-of-u-s-doctors-nurses-feel-burnt-out-at-work-poll#:~:text=%E2%80%9CEven%20before%20COVID%2C%20about%2040,to%2070%20to%2090%25.%E2%80%9D
Sexton, J. B., Adair, K. C., Proulx, J., Profit, J., Cui, X., Bae, J., & Frankel, A. (2022). Emotional exhaustion among US health care workers before and during the COVID-19 pandemic, 2019–2021. JAMA Network Open, 5(9), Article e2232748. https://doi.org/10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2022.32748
Marken, S., & Agrawal, S. (2022, June 13). K-12 workers have highest burnout rate in U.S. Gallup. https://news.gallup.com/poll/393500/workers-highest-burnout-rate.aspx
Prinstein, M. J. (2022, January 28). US youth are in a mental health crisis—we must invest in their care. The Hill. https://thehill.com/opinion/healthcare/591777-us-youth-are-in-a-mental-health-crisis-we-must-invest-in-their-care/
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (2023, February 13). U.S. teen girls experiencing increased sadness and violence. https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2023/p0213-yrbs.html
Neergaard, L., Fingerhut, H., & Renault, M. (2021, March 11). AP-NORC poll: 1 in 5 in US lost someone close in pandemic. AP News. https://apnews.com/article/ap-norc-poll-1-in-5-us-lost-someone-pandemic-211cc9f31d859fb3a7c7c4d487ba65a9
Larson, D. G. (2020). The helper’s journey: Empathy, compassion, and the challenge of caring (2nd ed.). Research Press.