A Silver Lining of Pandemic?

ASilver Lining of Pandemic? Keys to Styaing Resilient

by Dr. Joeseph Mercola

Becoming ‘Antifragile’ During the Pandemic

It’s important to note that there are multiple ways to harness a challenging time like a pandemic to make yourself increasingly resilient or, as Siim Land, whom I recently interviewed, puts it, “antifragile.” His latest book, “Stronger by Stress: Adapt to Beneficial Stressors to Improve Your Health and Strengthen the Body,” reviews the important concepts of hormesis and antifragility.

“Part of the reason I wrote the book was to help people become more resilient and more robust, because the world we live in is full of unpredictable challenges,” Land says.

“Pandemics and viruses are part of them, but there’s also other potential dangers like global warming or fluctuations in temperature, different kinds of physical challenges that have been a part of the human condition for eons.

The modern human has become somewhat more fragile towards those things, and this kind of goes to show why most people just overreacted to the coronavirus and were really scared.

The book itself was meant to create more resilient people in the face of these unavoidable challenges of life, because you can’t really avoid them. You can’t create this bubble society where everything is perfect. We all come across different kinds of stressors all the time.”

Time-restricted eating is one of Land’s favorite tools because it allows you to become metabolically flexible and insulin sensitive, which builds your antifragility. However, there are other methods for staying resilient during the pandemic as well.

Resilience Sends You on an ‘Upward Spiral’

Resilience is the ability to quickly recover from difficulties. It’s an innate toughness that allows you to persevere through challenging times, and it’s something often found among centenarians.

Even as times changed, those in the 100-plus crowd kept on living, adapting to and welcoming the new phases of their lives. It’s this fortitude and emotional resilience that has likely played a major role in their longevity — and it’s something you can harness as well, including during the pandemic.

Researchers with the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Positive Emotions and Psychophysiology (PEP) Lab have been looking into what’s making people happy and resilient, despite the pandemic. They note: 13

“Research has found that resilient people — people who handle life’s challenges especially well and who quickly bounce back from setbacks — do not somehow avoid negative states, delusionally thinking everything is fine.

Rather, even while feeling stress, anxiety, loneliness and depression, the resilient among us also feel love, gratitude, joy and hope. Our team’s research has also shown that resilience is not a fixed trait. It can be cultivated. Like an upward spiral, resilience increases as people experience more frequent positive emotional states.”

Keys to Staying Resilient

After surveying more than 600 U.S. adults about their experiences and behaviors of the past day, some clear trends were revealed. Positive emotions were associated with self-care, such as engaging in a hobby or relaxing, exercising or engaging in spiritual activities, such as prayer or meditation. 14

This isn’t entirely surprising, but an important finding was that people who were feeling the most stressed, lonely or anxious benefited the most from these positive, self-care activities. This reiterates how important it is to take time to unwind, especially if you feel you’re nearing burnout.

Spending time actively engaging with others also led

to more positive emotions, and this was true for both introverts and extroverts and was especially beneficial for people who live alone. However, the most positive emotions were gleaned from face-to-face, voice or video interactions — texts didn’t seem to do the trick, with the researchers explaining:15

“Interacting with others doesn’t seem to help much when you can’t actually see or hear the people you are communicating with. This was a useful wake-up call for us. We thought we were doing ourselves good by keeping up via text. But the evidence suggests that this isn’t as valuable as we thought. It’s much harder to establish a meaningful connection with someone via text.”

Passively browsing social media, such as scrolling through feeds, did not lead to positive emotions and instead was strongly tied to negative feelings and anxiety. On the other hand, doing good for others was associated with positive feelings — a finding that’s been proven in the past.16

To sum up their data, the PEP Lab researchers suggested the media stop touting the need for “social distancing,” when what’s really needed is physical distancing combined with social solidarity. In order to retain and find your resilience during the pandemic, increased connections are key, and they suggested the following five steps to help society “MARCH” together:

• Minimize passive scrolling through social media

• Accept negative emotion

• Really connect with people

• Care for yourself

• Help others

To help you accept and release negative emotions, the Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT) is another recommended tool for coping with COVID.

Mercola, J. “A Silver Lining of Pandemic?” Retrieved July 24, 2020, from https://articles.mercola.com/ sites/articles/archive/2020/07/23/silver-lining-ofpandemic.aspx

1, 2, 3 American Psychologist 2020 Advance online publication

4, 11, 12 Florida State University June 22, 2020

5 American Psychological Association, Stress in America 2020

6 American Psychiatric Association March 25, 2020

7 Campaign to End Loneliness, About Loneliness

8 PLoS One. 2018; 13(1): e0190033

9 The Journal of Gerontology, Series B October 26, 2018

10 Cigna May 1, 2018

13, 14, 15 The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill June 30, 2020

16 Nature Communications July 11, 2017

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