Heard on Morning Edition – Is your to-do list overwhelming? Do the demands of family or work stress you out?
Or maybe it’s politics, climate change, or global conflict that are making you feel anxious.
It’s impossible to eliminate all of your stress, but science shows you can learn to manage it better.
Over the last 20 years, Judith Moskowitz, a research psychologist at Northwestern’s Feinberg School of Medicine, has been researching a set of eight skills and practices to help people increase positive emotions and decrease anxiety, even amid hard times.
And she’s developed an online course to teach these skills, a kind of master class in managing stress.
“People can absolutely be taught to have positive emotions, even when things seem pretty bleak,” says Moskowitz.
She has documented this in her studies of people going through tough situations, such as caring for a spouse with dementia or living with Stage 4 breast cancer and other health problems.
Moskowitz is now launching a new research study. She wants to evaluate how the skills in the course can help people with everyday stress, the kind we all experience in our day-to-day lives. She has opened the course and study to anyone 18 and older living in the U.S.
Study participants will take a survey to gauge their levels of anxiety and positive emotion before and after the course.
One thing Moskowitz realized early on in her research is that even when they’re going through hardship, people still want to talk about positive things, like seeing a lovely sunset or sharing a meal with a friend.
And the people who notice more of these bright spots tend to cope better …
