Caring for Yourself While Caring for Others During the Pandemic: Self-Care and Stress Inoculation
The human stress response is important; it’s designed to alert us of danger and keep us safe. But COVID-19 has kept many people in an active stress response for nearly two years – far longer than our bodies and minds are meant to handle. Proactively taking care of yourself and managing stress are crucial aspects of staying healthy during this time. You can build your resilience by developing self-care techniques that work for you, like stress inoculation – a cognitively-oriented method of stress management that helps you prepare for upcoming challenges.
During this free, 60-minute webinar, we will explore:
- Types of stress, common stress responses, and pandemic-specific stressors that you may be facing;
- The value of self-care in building resilience; and
- The components of stress inoculation and how to use them to prepare for stressful situations.
This webinar will be recorded and available to the public within one week. We do not offer CEUs, but certificates of attendance will be available upon request after the event.
Meet the Speaker
Karla Vermeulen, Ph.D., is the Deputy Director of the Institute for Disaster Mental Health and an Associate Professor of Psychology at SUNY New Paltz, where she teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in disaster mental health, grief counseling, and developmental psychology. She also oversees the Student Psychological Resilience Project and the Advanced Certificate in Trauma and Disaster Mental Health program. In addition to teaching and research, she has coordinated the development and production of training curricula on disaster mental health for the New York State Department of Health and Office of Mental Health, the American Red Cross, the United Nations, and other organizations. She is co-author of Disaster Mental Health Interventions: Core Principles and Practices (2017) and co-editor of Disaster Mental Health Case Studies: Lessons Learned from Counseling in Chaos (2019), both published by Routledge. Her third book, Generation Disaster: Coming of Age Post-9/11 was published in August 2021 as part of the Oxford University Press Emerging Adulthood Series. More information is available at generationdisaster.com.