Building Personal Resilience During the Pandemic

Good morning!

According to the calendar, we are just about halfway through the summer.  I know it’s summer because it’s hot as blazes outside and all my digital references say today is July 17.  But other than those cues, what I experience every day seems just about the farthest thing from what I think of as summer.

We’ve been totally immersed in this pandemic for four months – six if you count all the preparation leading up to the day we began postponing all elective, non-emergency care to decompress the hospitals and made the decision to put many employees on temporary teleworking status.  That seems like a very long time ago.

After several weeks of shelter-in-place, our state’s social and business activity opened back up.  But it’s apparent that we got ahead of ourselves, and large public gatherings are out, movie theaters are out, and even having a nice meal at a restaurant carries a level of risk that many feel is too great to justify.

I recently had a “staycation,” which was great, but not the same as propping up on a beach somewhere with a good novel.  My son is wondering what his junior year of college is going to be like.  And the prospect of a fall football season is looking iffier by the day. 

Here at work, there is a pandemic overlay to just about everything we do.  Aside from the obvious stress that our clinical and support teams are under while caring for COVID-19 patients – and those heroic teams are always foremost on my mind -- we’ve canceled many events, with more cancelations on the horizon.  Most larger meetings have continued to be virtual, which is far better than nothing, but the virtual experience just isn’t as satisfying compared to in-person interaction.

In short, I miss my former life.  I have no doubt most of you feel the same.  And that’s why I wanted to talk a little bit today about personal resilience.

We’ve spent a considerable amount of time over the last couple of years focusing on “provider burnout” among clinical faculty and staff.  It seems apparent that the pandemic has the potential to take the real problem of burnout to a whole new level.  The loss of our former lives and lifestyles, if only temporary, poses a new threat to our mental and physical well-being.

All of these thoughts put me in mind of a presentation one of our psychology faculty made a few years ago.  Dr. Danny Burgess, director of the Center for Integrative Health and co-director of the Student Counseling and Wellness Center, described three pillars of personal resilience, all within our individual control.  They include:

Good nutrition:  Eating healthy foods, with appropriate portion sizes, and limiting indulgence of sweets, salty snacks and alcohol. 

Regular exercise:  Including cardiovascular-stimulating activity – such as an early morning or late evening walk through the neighborhood – four or five times a week. 

Adequate rest:  Seven to eight hours of sleep per night or whatever it takes for you to feel rested.

My takeaway from Dr. Burgess’ advice is that personal resilience begins with self-care.  Though it may seem selfish, you have to first be attentive to your own personal physical and mental health so that you can be the best version of yourself for others and for the challenges you confront.

An important corollary is that we really don’t have much ability to change our current circumstances, especially with respect to the pandemic, so there’s no point in wasting energy trying.  We can’t change what we’re going through, but we can make affirmative choices about how we are going to respond to it.

In my case, I have decided to use my platform as the leader of UMMC to take advantage of every opportunity I have, through every means available, to insist that if everybody engages in relatively simple actions – such as wearing face coverings, spacing six feet apart from each other and practicing good hand hygiene – we can “flatten the curve” to a sufficient degree that we won’t have to go on another lockdown.  This approach has been done in several other states and many foreign countries.  And it works, folks!

The other important defense against personal stress and burnout is a social network of family, friends and colleagues.  When you can share what you are experiencing with others, Dr. Burgess said, it has a “stress-buffering” effect.  Their advice and encouragement can also help you keep things in perspective.

Just this week, I ran across a website that promotes a positive attitude in the face of stress and burnout.  “Three Good Things” is a resilience activity developed by Dr. Martin Seligman, a noted psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania.  It invites participants to, once a day, every day, share three good things that happened to them that day.  Studies have reportedly shown that in just seven days this practice can improve satisfaction and a sense of fulfilment.

Our Office of Well-being is exploring doing a similar project here to build personal resilience, and also offers the RISE (Resilience in Stressful Events) peer response group and, in collaboration with the Center for Bioethics and Medical Humanities, the 55 Word Stories initiative that allows members of our community to express how the pandemic has affected them.

As has become only too apparent, despite our desperate wish that this all be over and our pre-pandemic lives be returned to us, we are looking at a much longer haul whose ending we can’t reliably predict.  So now, in mid-summer, it’s more important than ever that we attend to our personal resilience and well-being.  That’s all part of being #UMMCStrong.