Jennifer King, assistant professor and co-director of the Center on Trauma and Adversity at the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences, wrote about navigating stress amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
In her piece, titled “The Pandemic Stress Hack That Just Might Keep You Going” and published on Medium, King explained how not all stress is a bad thing.
“In small, predictable doses, it helps us learn and grow,” she said. “It’s the sweaty palms, butterfly stomach you get before a big new thing: taking a test, doing a job interview, going on a date, playing in a championship game, (ahem) singing out loud on a Zoom call. When we face a challenge, the stress response system is activated, peaks, and then deactivates. We return to our baseline, whatever that baseline may be.”