- Chronic stress can increase the risk of certain mental illnesses, including anxiety and depression.
- Results from a recent study found that adaptive emotion regulation strategies and sleep both play a key role in reducing the risk for anxiety and depression among people who are experiencing chronic stress.
- This study utilized an event where people experienced a lot of chronic stress: the COVID-19 pandemic. However, management of chronic stress is vital, regardless of the source.
The COVID-19 pandemic produced a unique situation where many people experienced a time of chronic stress. Researchers are seeking to understand how such periods of chronic stress affect mental illness and what factors can help improve mental health.
A study published in the journal Cortex examined how adaptive emotion regulation strategies—or positive coping strategies—and sleep quality relate to rates of anxiety and depression.
The authors found that both components are helpful in reducing rates of anxiety and depression. However, in contrast to their hypothesis, they found that the effectiveness of emotion regulation strategies was not majorly dependent on sleep quality.
This study was a secondary analysis of data on sleep and mental health collected during the COVID-19 pandemic from the spring through the autumn of 2020.
The first priority of the research was to see if adaptive emotion regulation strategies are associated with better mental health.
Adaptive cognitive emotion regulation strategies are thought processes that help improve mental health in the long term. An example would be seeking to find positive meaning in an event or situation, known as “positive reappraisal.”
Second, researchers wanted to understand if adaptive emotion regulation strategies’ effectiveness depended on sleep quality. They looked at these factors within “the context of a naturally-occurring and chronic stressor, the COVID-19 pandemic.
Study co-author Emma Sullivan explained the key…
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