By Richard Morgan, Vogue, April 13, 2021
A year into the pandemic, as virus concerns slowly move to the background amid the vaccine rollout, our undiagnosed parallel pandemic of anxiety, burnout, depression, stress, and trauma will hit hard front and center (for some of us, it already has). So Vogue caught up with Dr. Nadine Burke Harris, an expert in toxic stress who in 2019 became California’s first-ever state surgeon general and, by extension, one of the most powerful public health officials in the country. She’s just what we need now: a Fauci for a post-vaccine America. We discussed the #1 antidote to stress, parenting and partner debt, exactly what to do when the world is ending, and how to feel normal in these starkly abnormal times. This conversation has been edited for clarity.
As an expert on stress, trauma, adversity, and burnout, you must get people sharing their stress with you and asking the biggest question I’ve heard throughout this pandemic: Am I handling this okay? Am I okay? Who have I become? Am I normal?
For most people the answer is you're having a normal response to an extremely abnormal situation. I like to help people understand, for example, how the body responds to stress—things like
difficulty sleeping, changes in mood,
changes in appetite. I heard people were gaining something like an average of two pounds a month through the pandemic. The
‘COVID-15’ is a normal and predictable response to a stressor on this level. Even more challenging is that so many of the outlets from so many of our usual routines have been disrupted. The gym is closed. Church. Girls’ night out. Playing basketball with your pickup team. Even just hanging out with a loved one or a family member and being able to
hug it out. There’s such a profound disruption not only to our routines, but also to our
relationships. So, it’s really important for folks to understand that, number one: It’s not just in your head. There are really concrete reasons why a lot of people are feeling significantly more stressed. There was just
a research study that came out in February from Kaiser Family Foundation that the number of people reporting being anxious or depressed went from 11 percent—in January to June 2019—to now, because of the pandemic, in January 2021, it was 41 percent. So that's just a massive jump. It’s not just in your head. There are real stressors. There are real reasons why so many people are feeling more stressed, more anxious, having trouble sleeping, putting on weight or for some people
losing weight. What's really important about stress is that people understand that there's a lot that we can do about it.
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