Why A Spiritual Environment During COVID-19 Is Important!

COVID-19 and Spirituality

Going through adverse life events can help us learn how to cope with life’s challenges. We learn how to overcome them, learn from them and grow.Spirituality is a resource that supports adaptation and resilience to improve quality of life, especially in times of Crises. Crises, emergencies, and disasters happen, often on a smaller scale, however when major crises happen there is a psychological toll that is characterized by change during and after a crisis. With major crises such as COVID-19 there’s a high level of uncertainty, and complexity that affects us differently. Our reaction can affect the way we process information,and act on. Depending on our understanding and processing of information, we might revert to more basic or instinctive fight-or-flight reasoning. In such chaos we seek to find peace to reduce the psychological impact of this crisis. Unfortunately, during this time of crisis there are more questions than answers and to reduce anxiety, we seek solutions to cope with these situations and one way of doing so is through our spirituality.

Spirituality generally is expressed through religions,that creates a sense of connectedness to self,others and a higher power. For example spirituality provides many coping

mechanisms such as expressing empathy for others and self and by giving us the ability to cope and adapt when faced with hardship and life stressors, while maintaining normal psychological and physical functioning. During crisis people often feel various forms of hopelessness and helplessness, where nothing can be done to make the situation better. Our spirituality plays a big role in keeping us grounded and refrains us from mentally and physically withdrawing from reality, while equipping us with strong abilities like coping, self-efficacy, optimism, patience, tolerance, adaptability and having and maintaining good relations with others. With these abilities we maintain an optimistic worldview by keeping things in perspective. Although the outcome is unknown, our spirituality keeps us optimistic about our future.

Works Cited

Hunter-Hernández, Migda, et al. “Missed Opportunity: Spirituality as a Bridge to Resilience in Latinos with Cancer.” Journal of Religion and Health, U.S. National Library of Medicine, Dec. 2015, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4961247/.

https://emergency.cdc.gov/cerc/ppt/CERC_Psychology_of_a_Crisis.pdf

https://www.mentalhealth.org.uk/sites/default/files/impact-spirituality.pdf