Previously submitted to: JMIR Mental Health (no longer under consideration since Jan 12, 2023)
Date Submitted: Jan 12, 2023
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Awe as a Practice: Awe Training for Mental Health in Community Members and Healthcare Professionals During the Covid-19 Pandemic
ABSTRACT
Background:
Background:
A downward spike in mental health often marks periods of widespread trauma. With the extreme demand on the healthcare system caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, professionals and community members felt the psychological toll, with depression and anxiety in U.S. adults rising steadily nationwide [1]. Fostering awe, a social emotion with well-documented mental and physical health benefits [2], emerges as a potential method to alleviate this prolonged distress.
Objective:
The current study suggests learning about the emotion of awe and encouraging people to find it in everyday life may be beneficial toward improving mental well-being.
Methods:
We recruited a sample of community adults (N=269) and a sample of healthcare professionals (N=145). During the 23 day study period, participants completed 4 Zoom workshops where they received information about the emotion of awe and its benefits, along with a daily practice of recognizing things in their daily lives which inspired awe. Daily surveys and pre-post measures were collected.
Results:
In the healthcare sample, the pre-session and the post-session surveys suggest that the daily experience of awe may have contributed to decreased depressive symptoms (t(120) = 6.49, P<.001), anxiety symptoms (t(120) = 7.53, P<.001), and burnout (t(104) = 2.91, p = .004). In the community sample, the pre-session and the post-session surveys suggest that the daily experience of awe may have contributed to decreased depressive symptoms (t(218) = 10.44, P <.001) and decreased anxiety symptoms (t(218) = 12.84, P<.001).
Conclusions:
These promising results on depressive and anxious symptoms in two different samples (healthcare professionals and community members), and burnout in healthcare professionals may support the development of this practice into a potent intervention in the future.
Citation
Request queued. Please wait while the file is being generated. It may take some time.
Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.