Lessen Your Stress

Judith Moskowitz understands that people feel anxious right now. And her No. 1 priority is to help everyone turn down the stress level. 

For decades, Moskowitz has studied how positive-emotion skills help us cope with stress. She developed a toolbox of eight skills, including practicing self-compassion and savoring positive events, that have been proven to reduce anxiety, boost your mood and improve well-being. 

“People can absolutely learn how to increase their positive emotions, even when things seem pretty bleak,” says Moskowitz, vice chair for scientific and faculty development in the Department of Medical Social Sciences at Northwestern’s Feinberg School of Medicine.  

There’s clearly an appetite for stress reduction tips. When Moskowitz partnered with NPR in September to share her toolkit and invite listeners to enroll in her Resilience Challenge course and research study, the response broke the internet. The surge in participant registrations overwhelmed the server — before Morning Edition’s “Stress Less” story even aired. 

The online, self-guided study asked participants to learn eight skills (see “Stress Busters”), practice them nightly and fill out brief daily surveys over the course of five weeks. The course had reached capacity — 20,000 registrants — by November.  

“This topic resonates,” Moskowitz says. “No matter what you’re going through, life is hard. These skills can help you. It doesn’t make the negative emotions or stressful feelings go away, but it helps you build the psychological resources to continue coping with whatever comes along.” 

Moskowitz, who is also the director of research at the Osher Center for Integrative Health at Feinberg, first realized the power of positive emotions when, as a postdoc in the early 1990s, she worked with men who were caring for their partners who had AIDS. “We were doing an observational study, and the caregivers were talking about the stress,” Moskowitz recalls. “This was before AIDS treatments were effective, so their partners were dying.”  

She and her colleagues followed the caregivers throughout the care and bereavement processes — two of the most stressful human experiences — and asked them details about the stress they were feeling. 

“The participants started saying, ‘Well, you’re not asking me about the good things,’” says Moskowitz.  

That “brilliant” insight, she says, inspired the researchers to begin asking about the positive moments in the caregivers’ lives. “And in almost every single interview — and there were hundreds of them — the men said, ‘Yeah, there was a beautiful sunset’ or ‘I was able to make my partner a meal he could enjoy.’ 

“That set me on the path to looking beyond what is stressing people out. We found that even under extreme stress, people have moments of positive emotion.”  

Her team has tested the positive-emotion toolkit in randomized controlled trials with people experiencing serious illness, as well as with health care workers during the pandemic and those caring for people with dementia, among others. “We know these tools are effective,” Moskowitz says. “We see statistically significant increases in positive emotion compared to control groups. Our work now is focused on delivery and implementation of these skills.”