Places Matter: The role of mental resilience in response to COVID-19

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The monkeys have taken over the zoo—or at least it feels like that some days. Maybe you’ve traded in your orderly office for a breakfast nook covered in old cereal and dried milk. Perhaps you went from managing a team of eight to teleconferencing in your flannel PJs while corralling your kids as their full-time teacher. Did your yearly vacation go from travelling the world to taking exciting walks to the mailbox and back?

Or maybe you discovered how essential you really are, standing on the frontlines of this pandemic, working long hours and feeling isolated from the familiar routines and comforting experiences that peppered your daily life. It’s stressful undergoing this much change. You may be feeling a very real sense of loss for the life you once lived. So what impact does this kind of stress have on your mental well-being, and how can you take better control of your situation?

“For all of us, we must reflect on those understandable experiences we’re having—loss, grief and fear—and find ways to turn them into growth rather than panic and terror,” Dr. Dan Siegel, New York Times bestselling author and clinical professor of psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine, says.

The role of stress and our response to it

What happens biologically when you are responding to stressful situations?

“In its most basic sense, stress is a physiologic response to a challenge. Your heart rate increases, you breathe more deeply, your muscles tighten and you’re getting ready for something intense to happen,” Siegel says. “But stress is good in the sense that it lets you deal with a challenge when something really meaningful is at stake.”

During the pandemic, many people are responding to something that is seen as being out of their control. But viewing potential threats as challenges—changing the subjective experience—can help reframe situations and allow for potential growth during times of uncertainty.

“In a threat state, there are four F’s associated with our reactions: Fighting, Fleeing, Freezing or Fainting. It’s crucial to transform those reactive states of threat into a receptive state of challenge. Situations can certainly be stressful, but they don’t have to be filled with panic and the mind has everything to do with that,” Siegel says.

For many people, it’s difficult to find ways to thrive in situations of prolonged stress and uncertainty. The constant need to react to new stimuli can be overwhelming. Siegel encourages thinking about ways to focus our attention and structure our responses by training our mind. He encourages us to build mental resilience.

“In the science of resilience, we’re at this amazing point where we can identify three things you can do with your mind to actually improve your well-being: focused attention, open awareness and kind intention. With focused attention, we can direct our attention back to where it needs to be—much like when we use focused breathing. Open awareness is the sense of knowing the differences in our subjective experience. Intention can be trained to be compassionate and kind,” Siegel says. “And when we practice addressing these pillars, there’s a positive physical and mental response. Stress hormones like cortisol are reduced, immune function improves, cardiovascular risk factors decrease, inflammation is reduced and much more.”

Siegel encourages spending 10 to 15 minutes per day addressing ways to focus your attention on different aspects of well-being like the five senses, your bodily sensations, the mental activities occurring in your mind and the relationship and interconnection between all things. To help explain the process, Siegel has developed the Wheel of Awareness diagram, a free resource available on his website.

Spaces impact our mental well-being

As we look to the future of buildings and returning to the spaces where we spend our lives, Siegel also stressed the interconnection of mind and the places we inhabit.

“When thinking of the spaces and places in our lives, it’s important to consider ways to integrate the COAL state of being—Curiosity, Openness, Acceptance and Love. Human beings are born with curiosity about the world, they ask questions and have an openness to their experiences which leads to an acceptance of new information, and it’s all framed and informed by a word we don’t use in science very often: Love,” Siegel says. “But having places where small groups can meet and collaborate, developing areas for individuals to have reflective time and building areas for larger gatherings can all work to foster the COAL state in people and improve mental well-being.”

Whether you work from home, in the field or at an office, COVID-19 has taught all of us that fostering mental health in the workplace is inextricably tied to public health and societal well-being. Reframing stressful events and working to focus your attention can shift your mindset away from dealing with the threat of uncertainty and help you seize the challenge of a new opportunity.

At IWBI, we’re committed to fostering prevention and preparedness, resilience and recovery in the wake of COVID-19. By bringing in experts from across disciplines, we are committed to translating research on how healthy places support healthy populations, now and as we prepare to return to work. For more information and evidence-based strategies for creating places to thrive, register for our regular Places Matter webcasts.