You could exchange letters with family and friends, Neupert suggested: Having mail to look forward to every week is both low-cost and low-risk. Then build up to giving yourself things to look forward to weekly (a catchup call with a friend) and monthly (trying out a new recipe, or the release of a new album).
LOOKING FORWARD TO WORKING WITH YOU MOVIE
Start small, Waugh said, by giving yourself something to look forward to tomorrow, like mulled wine and movie night with your roommate. “But joy is the thing that protects you and makes you able to bounce back and persist through challenges and hard times.”īut there are ways you can infuse anticipation into here and now. “A lot of the work I do is targeted toward the Black community and I think about racial trauma and how critical it is that we are resilient to stressors and it’s so easy to not prioritize joy,” she said. To prioritize happiness is to prioritize survival, Caldwell-Harvey said, especially now. The goal here is to maintain agency over what you can with concrete actions in a time when so much is out of your control rather than ruminating over what the end of the pandemic will look like. But you should also be purposeful in making plans before feelings of hopelessness and despair set in, since depression can lead to hopelessness and a lack of interest in pleasurable activities. By peppering your days and months with happiness-inducing activities you can look forward to, you can stave off depression and be more resilient against stress, she said. “You need to be intentional about chasing joy,” Caldwell-Harvey said. Even though we might not know when the pandemic will end, having a future experience to look forward to, like an extravagant wedding, can boost our mood during this stressful time. In Waugh’s studies, he found that when people had something positive to look forward to following a stressful event, like giving a public speech, they rebounded from that stress quicker than those who didn’t have something positive to anticipate. This can be as simple as stocking up on pantry staples so you don’t have to worry about crowded trips to the grocery store. “There is a clear benefit that we know about during this pandemic: being able to look ahead and make future plans can help reduce the stress that we're all feeling right now,” she said. In her recent research, Neupert found that people who planned for the future, a process called proactive coping, were less stressed when it came to the pandemic. Uncertainty is stressful and upsetting, according to research, but planning for the future gives you a sense of control, Shevaun Neupert, a professor of psychology at North Carolina State University told VICE.
Planning for the future can help combat stress in the present.
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