Stress Busting

As a San Francisco-based postdoctoral researcher in the 1990s, social psychologist Judith Moskowitz worked on a study examining the stress levels of men caring for their partners with AIDS. Moskowitz called it some of the most extreme stress one could imagine, an unrelenting blend of caregiver stress and bereavement stress tightly wound together.

But as Moskowitz asked men about the taxing situations they encountered and the coping mechanisms they employed to counter the emotional upheaval, something unexpected happened. The men expressed a desire to discuss positives in their lives. Even facing intense mental pressure, they found silver linings and moments of joy they wanted to share.

The experience set Moskowitz on a path to investigate how people experience positive emotion amid stress to emerge happier, healthier, and more grounded individuals. Assessing the literature, she compiled a list of eight skills with demonstrated ability to combat stress and stimulate positive emotion, such as gratitude, mindfulness, and self-compassion.

Moskowitz pulled those skills together and developed an interventional framework that remains central to her work today. Over the course of multiple weeks, facilitators – either in person or online – train individuals on one stress-busting skill at a time and encourage practice. Soon after, they introduce another skill and repeat the train-then-implement process.

After capturing positive results with her initial trial group comprised of individuals newly diagnosed with HIV, Moskowitz began adapting the intervention for other groups, often by request. Over the last two decades, she has served as the principal investigator on several National Institutes of Health-funded projects applying her positive emotion intervention to defined groups of individuals encountering stress, ranging from dementia caregivers and healthcare workers to young cancer survivors and high school students.

“We know these skills work, so I’m always excited to bring this program to a new group who can benefit,” says Moskowitz, professor of medical social sciences at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine. “Our job is to figure out how to teach these skills to people so they can take them up as habits.”

 Evolving a compelling program

Since arriving at Northwestern in 2011, Moskowitz has continued to look for ways to bring her work to different populations and heighten its accessibility. Her team has, for instance, developed and tested a self-guided online version of the program and more recently created a train-the-trainer model working with gun violence prevention workers in Chicago as well as medical students at Northwestern.

“It isn’t possible to have a completely stress-free life. That’s why skills like these are so important to have in your coping arsenal – to help you deal with whatever stress comes your way,” Moskowitz says.

In the lead-up to the 2024 presidential election, National Public Radio (NPR) reached out to Moskowitz about bringing her “toolbox” to its listeners. More than 11,000 people enrolled in the NPR Resilience Challenge, which armed people with the positive-emotion skills to cope with stress. Of those, nearly 4,000 supplied pre and post-intervention data to Moskowitz’s group and on every measure – positive affect, meaning and purpose, life satisfaction, depression, anxiety, and social isolation among them – participants improved significantly over the five-week initiative. It was a startling result given that 70 percent of the participants identified as Democrats who found themselves on the losing end of the race for the White House.

“Though the majority of the participants were highly stressed by the election, we found that people who practiced the skills in our program improved significantly on every outcome,” Moskowitz says. “It was another piece of evidence demonstrating the effectiveness of our program.”

Building resilience in youth

While Moskowitz’s work over the last 30 years has largely, though not exclusively, trended toward adult audiences, she sees particular value in adapting her efforts for youth and adolescent populations, where rates of anxiety and depression continue to climb. She hopes she can provide young people with foundational skills to combat stress throughout their lives and achieve enhanced well-being.

Recently named a faculty affiliate with Northwestern’s new Institute for Adolescent Mental Health and Well-Being, Moskowitz welcomes the opportunity to expand her efforts with youth and implement the program in novel ways, from leveraging text messaging and social media to even virtual reality. She’s particularly excited by the possibilities of bringing her program into high school classrooms – something she has not done since arriving at Northwestern in 2011 – and expanding partnerships with other researchers and providers focused on adolescent health.

“The need to help youth navigate stress is absolutely there, and I see a lot of creative ways we could get programs like this into their hands,” says Moskowitz, who is confident the new institute will help her strengthen connections with adolescent mental health experts and identify potential collaborations.

As a social psychologist, Moskowitz admits her training did not prepare her to have a direct impact on individual’s personal well-being; that is the clinical psychologist’s domain. Nevertheless, Moskowitz’s research program has unlocked a dynamic opportunity to uplift lives, which she continues to embrace as motivation.

“When we’re looking at the data and talking with participants, we’re learning these skills help people,” she says. “That this research can positively impact people’s lives continues to drive my team and pushes us to refine and expand our efforts to bring these positive emotion skills to everyone who might benefit from them.”