November marks another month of elevated stress, anxiety, depressed mood, and negativity among American workers. And this month’s Mental Health Index shows that women are finding it difficult to cope with the weight of the pandemic. In fact, they may be turning to substances in an attempt to cope. Between the start of September and November, women’s risk of addiction increased 65%. Depressed mood continues to be elevated in women—it is now 40% higher than before COVID-19. Also, women’s risk of sleep apnea is up 126% vs. February. The result? Physical and mental exhaustion. As these factors combine, it is creating an unhealthy scenario for women as they try to deal with stress, anxiety, and negative feelings brought on by the pandemic.
Men continue to battle mental health issues as well. Making it particularly difficult is the fact that men’s resilience has decreased.
There is some indication that mental capacities may begin to show improvement now that the November elections have passed.
Because stress, anxiety, depressed mood, and negativity have been elevated, concerns are high that working Americans may find the strain of the always taxing holiday season harder to cope with this year.
In all cases, businesses will see their workers continue to be impacted by COVID-induced stress, anxiety, feelings of depression and negativity in the final month of 2020.
Recent wave puts stress up since August, overall 16% increase in stress since February.
Conscious negativity is up since February, with a 6% increase just since August.
Increase in men’s anxiety since early September, peaked in early November.
Stress increased among working men from the start of August to the start of November.
Depressed mood has risen among women since February.
Increase in women’s addiction risk from start of September to end of November.
Your brain’s 85 billion highly interconnected neurons self-organize into four core systems — emotion, feeling, cognition and self-control. Each of these systems is measured by 12 key capacities, and they fluctuate continuously along a performance continuum from well-being to risk of a mental health condition such as depression, addiction, and ADHD.
Listen to Total Brain Founder Dr. Evian Gordan and Professor Anthony Hannan, PhD, discuss how to rewire your brain to better manage emotions, stress and anxiety. Listen to learn more.
Total Brain measures the 12 brain capacities that define your mental health and screens for your risk of common mental conditions. Contact us to learn how Total Brain can help improve the mental health and wellness of your employees.
Our emotions greatly influence all other brain capacities, which can also be impaired by mental conditions like depression, anxiety, and ADHD. Watch to learn more.
Emotional awareness helps us build relationships and trust. It impacts how well we read emotional cues in others and informs our behavior in uncertain situations.
Nonconscious negativity bias is our natural intuition formed by life experiences. It strongly influences our feelings, motives and decisions. And, it determines how effectively we communicate and collaborate with others. Watch to learn more.
Some interesting trends have emerged recently related to workers’ emotional capacities. One notable trend is that working Americans’ ability to accurately read others’ emotional cues is increasing.
Since June, working Americans’ emotional awareness has been increasing little by little. Emotional awareness among men bumped up another 3% over the past month.
The increased ability to recognize certain emotions in the faces of other people provides insight into the emotions Americans, themselves, are feeling. Research shows that if a person is experiencing a strong emotional state, their brain can more accurately pick out that emotion in the facial cues of others. This is because the emotion resonates with them. In other words, individuals who are happy are better at identifying happiness, while individuals who are sad can often correctly recognize sadness in others.
The Mental Health Index shows that anger recognition is up 7% in men, while women’s ability to recognize disgust has increased 8%. The takeaway is that men, themselves, are likely experiencing more anger while women are experiencing elevated levels of disgust.
Total Brain’s Founder, Dr. Evian Gordon, is joined by Dr. David Whitehouse for this podcast about the science behind emotions, feelings, and how they impact us all.
Listen as Total Brain’s Dr. Evian Gordon talks with Christopher Darwin and Dr. David Whitehouse about ways to successfully manage negativity during the pandemic.
Feelings are your conscious awareness of, and body’s response to, your unconscious emotions. For example, when you’re feeling stressed or anxious, your body will respond with changes in heart rate, breathing, muscle tension, and sweating. Feelings are triggered by emotions, and emotions are triggered by cues of threat or reward. Watch to learn more.
Stress is a response to an external “stressor” such as a work deadline, an argument with a loved one, the loss of a job, or a major life change. COVID-19’s impact on health and the economy is a substantial stressor right now. Also, the November election was a clear stressor. When external stressors are not resolved, stress becomes chronic and leads to anxiety and depression. Watch to learn more.
Anxiety is the internal reaction to stress. It is often accompanied by persistent worrying and fearing something bad will happen. Unlike stress, anxiety persists even after the stressor has been resolved. In severe cases, anxiety can lead to an anxiety disorder. Watch to learn more.
Feeling sadness, frustration, anger, loneliness, or grief often make up what is considered “depressive mood.” These feelings, however, lift after a few days or weeks. When these feelings persist over time, you can become clinically depressed. Watch to learn more.
Analysis of workers’ stress, anxiety, and depressed mood shows there was a clear increase around the time of the November elections in the U.S. All three brain capacities were higher during the first part of November than in recent months. The first measure of these three capacities following the election showed they all trended in the direction of improvement post-election.
The rise and fall of stress, anxiety, and depressed mood during and after the election was particularly apparent among working men. This aligns with scientific findings that show men tend to respond to stressors with problem-focused strategies, and therefore stress resolves for men when a problem is “solved.” In this case, the problem was the election, and stress began to fall among men when the election ended.
Listen to Total Brain Founder Dr. Evian Gordon’s podcast “The Role of Stress in Mental Health” with Dr David Whitehouse MD. PhD. Dr. Whitehouse shares how stress damages mental health and how you can reframe your reaction to stress.
Listen to Total Brain Founder Dr. Evian Gordon’s podcast “What Can People with Anxiety Teach Us?” with Dr. Heidi Hanna PhD. They discuss how feeling anxious is a normal part of a healthy life and how to practice stillness.
Your cognitive capacity determines how well you learn, remember, pay attention, and solve problems. It impacts how quickly you can complete tasks and how many mistakes you make while doing so. Chronic stress and anxiety can result in cognitive decline over time. Watch to learn more.
Stress and anxiety can hinder the way we form and retrieve memories. It can make you more forgetful. For example, you may find yourself forgetting where you left your phone, or have a hard time recalling names. Watch to learn more.
Increased levels of stress not only cause us to become more irritable, but also tend to impact our ability to focus. For example, it’s common for stress to cause people to make more mistakes. Watch to learn more.
Stress can negatively affect your ability to plan and complete tasks on time. When you’re stressed, concentration declines and the amount of time it takes you to complete tasks increases. Watch to learn more.
During the course of the pandemic, cognitive capacities in American workers have fluctuated. Cognitive abilities have certainly been impacted by the mental strain caused by COVID, and by elevated levels of stress, anxiety, and depressed mood. Shifts in these areas and workers’ efforts to adapt have caused cognition to bounce around slightly. So have outside factors such as mindset and behavior changes during the summer, and distractions up to and during the November election.
For now, cognition is at or near where it was in February. However, based on cognition’s tracked movement in 2020, we can expect to see cognition continue to be swayed by new developments related to the pandemic, and by other outside influences.
Listen to Total Brain Founder Dr. Evian Gordon’s podcast “The Brain — From Knowing to Doing,” with Chris Darwin, a great, great grandson of Charles Darwin. They discuss 5 concepts that impact how you process information and your ability to be a peak performer.
Our ability to control our behavior enables us to achieve goals, resist temptation, avoid acting on impulse, and maintain our mental and physical health. When under high levels of stress, people tend to become more negative and less resilient. As a result, they may lose the ability to self-regulate their behavior, which leads to a myriad of problems, including obesity, addiction, poor financial decisions, sexual infidelity, and more. Watch to Learn More
Resilience allows us to bounce back when something bad happens. It’s the ability to adapt in the face of adversity, trauma, tragedy, or other significant sources of stress. Resilience can drop quickly after an emotionally distressing event or a particularly stressful period in life. Watch to learn more.
Conscious negativity bias – the tendency to see the “cup half empty” rather than the “cup half full” – can rise in times of uncertainty and discouragement. It’s a disproportionate focus on problems rather than opportunity. And, it’s highly contagious. That’s why one very negative person can disrupt an entire group or team.
Social connectivity reflects the extent to which people proactively seek and gain enjoyment from social interaction. Social connection plays a powerful role in supporting our mental and physical health. Watch to learn more.
In both October and November, the Mental Health Index has highlighted multiple threats to working men’s mental health. Decreased resilience is one example. From the beginning of August to November, resilience has decreased among working men by 6%. As men become less resilient, they are also struggling in other mental capacities. Therefore, it isn’t surprising that men’s stress and conscious negativity have both risen in recent months.
Conscious negativity is also elevated in women. Women are currently 12% more negative now vs. in February. This negativity is likely related to the recent rise in addiction among working women.
The pandemic is far from over, however, positive reports show that a vaccine may become widely available in the near future. In theory, this development may help curb some of the negativity in U.S. workers. This will be something to watch in the coming months.
Listen to Total Brain Founder Dr. Evian Gordon’s podcast “Social Connectivity in the COVID-19 Era,” with Dr. Shelley Carson PhD, a Harvard-trained psychologist. They discuss why social connectivity and social support is important for stress mastery, especially during these uncertain times.
COVID-19 is causing more Americans to screen at risk for certain mental disorders compared to before the pandemic.
When chemicals from drugs or alcohol hit the brain’s reward receptors in bursts, it triggers a response similar to a highly pleasurable event. As the person repeats and increases substance use, the receptors degrade to the point that they cannot respond to un-intoxicated pleasure in the same way as they once did. The brain gets re-mapped to seek pleasure through intoxication rather than healthier activities, and as this new mapping takes hold, addiction is born. Watch to learn more.
Depression is more than a bout with the blues. When feelings of sadness and hopelessness persist and worsen, you may be clinically depressed. Some people are predisposed to depression based on genetics and the brain’s chemical makeup. Chronic stressful life situations can also increase the risk of developing depression if you aren’t coping well. Watch to learn more.
Persistent and excessive worry are common indicators of general anxiety disorder. People with this condition have an inappropriate triggering of the fight-flight stress system that can make it difficult to control worrying or stop the worry cycle. As a result, they overthink, lose sleep, and agonize more than seems warranted for the situation. Stress is a common trigger for anxiety and if it becomes chronic it can lead to an anxiety disorder. Watch to learn more.
People who have social anxiety disorder have intense fear of being judged negatively or rejected in social situations. They often worry about being perceived as stupid, awkward, or boring. It can significantly impact your ability to socialize and communicate with other people. Watch to learn more.
Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a mental health condition that’s triggered by a traumatic event. Most people who experience a distressing event may temporarily have trouble coping. However, they get through it with time and self-care. When symptoms persist for months and years, interfering with daily life, you may have PTSD. Watch to learn more.
Stress and anxiety may cause sleeping problems. Having an anxiety disorder compounds the problem. Sleep apnea is a condition in which breathing repeatedly stops and starts while sleeping. Watch to learn more.
Women’s risk of addiction increased 65% from the start of September to the end of November. Alone, this increase is troubling. However, it is even more concerning because women’s increased risk of addiction appears to be interconnected with several other factors that are detrimental to women’s health. For example, the sizable increase in women’s risk of addiction, paired with women’s elevated feelings of depressed mood (40%) indicates that women are struggling to find healthy ways to cope with the strain of the pandemic.
In terms of men’s risk for mental health disorders, next month’s data will be particularly telling. Some of the disorders in which men’s risk had been rising for months, such as depressive disorder and PTSD, appeared higher at the start of November and lower later in the month. This could potentially signal that risk peaked in these areas and is going to begin to decrease. However, it is too early to know for certain which direction these areas of risk will take. We will be keeping a close watch on this next month. Stay tuned.
Listen to Total Brain Founder Dr. Evian Gordon’s podcast “How Genetic Brain Information Can Empower You,” with Anu Acharya BSc MSc MS. The podcast touches on how our genes impact our disease disposition, and it explores why understanding our genetics and knowing ourselves better can lead to improved mental health and performance.
Listen to Total Brain Founder Dr. Evian Gordon’s podcast “What Can People with Depression Teach Us?” with Dr. David Whitehouse MD, PhD. Depression is excessively prevalent and growing in our society. They discuss how to maximize the functioning of our brain and minimize the threat of depression.
Listen to Total Brain Founder Dr. Evian Gordon’s podcast “The Hurricane of Addiction,” with Dr. David Whitehouse MD, PhD. They discuss how easy it is to fall under the power of addiction — especially during these uncertain times — while addressing how to restore and reconnect your brain pathways to survive.