write an article on how people help each other during lockdown
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Answer:It’s easy to feel, these days, that we’re swirling in a coronavirus-induced vortex of helplessness. In many regions, COVID-19 case counts are jumping dramatically. Health care workers face impossible decisions about who to disconnect from ventilators. And those of us who remain well must comply with “stay at home” orders, which anchor us in place as the needs of people around us keep growing.
Our first instinct may be to hunker down and protect ourselves and our immediate families. But to get through these times with our sanity and well-being intact, we may need to push back on this initial impulse—to turn outward, not just inward. Research shows that when we put a high priority on reaching out to others, our own mental and physical health flourish.
It’s a rare win-win proposition in a bleak landscape: In helping other people get through this crisis, you can help yourself in equal measure. “It’s a way of reframing your existence,” says bioethicist Stephen Post, “getting out from the negative vortex and feeling free to do something that is meaningful.”
Helping buoys the helper, not just the recipient
While we’ve never faced a foe quite like COVID-19 before, doctors and scientists have studied what happens when people pull together and help others after a setback. About a year after the 2008 financial crisis, when thousands of people lost their jobs and homes, Post and his Stony Brook University colleagues surveyed 4,500 Americans about their volunteering habits and their mental health.
In the wake of the financial downturn, rates of volunteering were higher than they had been the year before—and that bump came with clear psychological benefits.
Eighty-nine percent of people felt happier overall thanks to their helping efforts, and 78 percent reported that volunteering helped them better deal with disappointment and loss. About three in four volunteers felt less stressed. Many respondents reported making deeper friendships by connecting with other helpers.
“When people feel vulnerable, they can take their mind off the self and the problems of the self, and just experience the simple gratification of contributing to the life of another human being,” Post says. “That’s how people were coping.”
Helping also buoys us mentally because it directs our focus away from scary abstractions and back toward concrete, solvable problems. One of this pandemic’s defining features is the numbing parade of numbers—new cases mounting by the thousands, hospitals inching closer to capacity overrun.
Psychologist Paul Slovic has long contended that our brains check out when we consider the abstract fate of large populations: We aren’t fully equipped to process what it means when a small town’s worth of people dies each day. Concentrating on what individual people need, on the other hand, motivates us to help—and we then reap the benefits that come with that decision.
At the height of a pandemic, it seems especially relevant that helping promotes robust physical health, as well.
In a 2013 study of adults over 50, those who volunteered regularly were 40 percent less likely than non-volunteers to have high blood pressure years later. And incredibly, frequent volunteers have lower mortality rates across the board. A Stanford University team reported that, over an eight-year period, people who volunteered occasionally had a 25 percent lower risk of dying than those who didn’t help—while people who volunteered frequently were 33 percent less likely to die.
Creative stay-at-home helping ventures abound
But how do you help people when you’re stuck at home?
Social distancing and shelter-in-place restrictions do put some volunteer opportunities out of reach, especially for members of high-risk groups. However, motivated helpers have found plenty of creative ways to serve others remotely.
When doctors and nurses in the San Francisco Bay Area started running out of personal protection equipment (PPE), thousands of people donated surgical and N95 masks, face shields, antiseptic wipes, and other materials to Kaiser Permanente and other health care organizations.
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