The Emotional Well-Being in Times of CoVID-19 is a study by Dr. William Pelham and colleagues at the University of Toronto on the effect of emotional trauma on the development of new memories. The research was part of a broader study on how trauma can affect learning and memory. As it turns out, there is a lot of evidence that stress does indeed change the way that our brains work. And that’s one of the reasons that PTSD can occur as well. If you have too much stress because of your homework, you can always get yourself a custom dissertation writing help.
According to Cognitive Processing Theory, the brain learns to adapt to stress by associating negative experiences with events that it perceives as threatening. It also learns to associate those events with the body’s primary response – to heal, to fight, to flee or to mourn. So, rather than feeling bad about the fact that the event has caused you to suffer, the brain is trained to feel bad about the event itself. This is why those who have endured traumatic events find it so difficult to recover: they had developed such ingrained stress reactions to the events that recovery was next to impossible.
In the case of PTSD, the trauma to the mind is a traumatic experience of the mind – a stressful event. But, as the researchers note, the brain responds in ways that can be problematic. It is hard to deal with trauma when you have not learned to cope with stressful events. So many people do not think that PTSD will occur if they have been in a particularly stressful life. They just know that the brain is trained to react in certain ways, not that it responds in a specific way in all circumstances.
A traumatic event can have lasting consequences, but it also has lasting effects on the mind. Those who experience trauma tend to have a distorted view of reality and their surroundings. They may even believe that all of their senses are being fooled – or that they are somehow cheating on their senses. They may even think that there is something wrong with them. They may go into denial about what actually happened to them.
The damage to the brain can even extend beyond the psychological. It can cause physiological changes, such as slowed heart rate and accelerated breathing. The brain’s chemicals may be altered in ways that could contribute to depression, irritability, or a low appetite. The brain’s sensitivity to pain may be decreased. In short, the body’s normal responses may be impaired and the person’s reaction to stress may be impaired in ways that make him or her feel more vulnerable.
This all adds up to what the researchers describe as a “cognitive wound” that is caused by a traumatic event. If you’re suffering from a trauma, the mind has become used to the event and is not capable of changing the mind. What is needed is to train the mind to learn how to process what is going on in the brain. This is where cognitive-behavioral therapy comes in.
Cognitive-behavioral therapy involves trying to identify the triggers of your current state of emotions and thinking techniques that help to change your thought patterns so that you can respond to the trauma in a way that reduces the stress. It is not about taking on the trauma as a problem and trying to cope with it. Rather, it is about helping you develop ways of thinking and feeling about the event and coping with it so that the memory of the event does not take over.
When this is done, the memory of the traumatic memory is no longer as strong and it is not likely to trigger your emotions and feelings about it. By using cognitive-behavioral therapy, you can improve emotional well-being in times of COVID-19 and make it so that you are able to fully function in social situations without having to experience overwhelming fear and anxiety.