Interview with Elizabeth Addington
Health psychologist Elizabeth Addington, Assistant Professor in the Feinberg School of Medicine's Department of Medical Social Sciences, works to enhance people's ability to manage stress, increase their positive psychosocial experiences, and improve their physical health and quality of life as Associate Director of the Positive Psychology & Health Investigation Group Lab.
Recently, she sat down with Associate Director of Inclusive Teaching Veronica Womack to discuss the power of cultivating positive emotions and self-compassion as well as how individual resilience can enable continued work toward making systemic change.
Hi, Liz. Thank you for agreeing to be featured in our newsletter. My colleagues and I have been thinking about how we can build instructor vitality into everything we do, from the programs to the consultations, and noting that when instructors think about being compassionate towards themselves, it’s like they're modeling how the students should be towards themselves and with each other, which we think is really important right now. So, to start us off, what would you like us to know about research on resiliency and coping strategies?
First, thanks for having me, and thanks for bringing this focus to the work that you're doing at the Searle Center. I can say that Judy Moskowitz originally developed this program of positive emotions skills several years ago, and we have tested them in a number of different audiences. We know, from our research, that people who have more positive emotions in the midst of stress have better psychological and physical health and well-being than people who go through stressful times and are not able to still maintain some amount of positive emotions and experiences.
We've been teaching a variety of skills that people can use in their day-to-day lives to build more positive experiences and more positive emotions, and we have different combinations of skills that we use. We've taught it in different ways with groups: one-on-one with a facilitator and a self-guided online format. We've worked with people going through all kinds of stressful experiences in life, whether it's a health condition like chronic pain or taking care of a loved one with Alzheimer's or another form of dementia. We have worked with people working in stressful jobs, primarily with medical students and health care workers, especially during the COVID pandemic. We're also working closely with a community organization here in Chicago to help their staff who work in violence prevention learn these skills so that they can stay more resilient in their jobs, too. We have learned from a lot of different people and have explored different ways of teaching people how to practice these skills to be more resilient.
At the Searle Center, we are highly familiar with the great work that your team and Dr. Judy Moskowitz are doing at Feinberg the School of Medicine around resiliency. We know that in the past year, instructors have grappled with teaching students who are deeply impacted by current and ongoing stressful events on both the national and global level. Based on your research about coping strategies that promote resilience, what might be the characteristics of a resilient instructor in the university classroom?
It's a great question. These are really such stressful times for so many people, and I want to acknowledge first that resilience doesn't mean that we're not affected by stress. Our lab studies the benefits of positive emotions and how they contribute to resilience, how they can improve people's health and well-being even in the midst of stress. Learning to have more positive emotions doesn't mean that we won't still have negative emotions. During stressful times, it is normal. It's natural. It is appropriate to feel some negative emotions, so a resilient instructor will still feel things like worry or sadness or frustration or anger.
The difference is that a resilient instructor won't get completely bogged down by those negative emotions. They'll also be able to still enjoy the pleasure in their life, even small ones like the colors of the sunset or a friendly bus driver. And in the classroom, they can still recognize the strengths in their students, even those who might be struggling. It's important for us to be intentional about noticing these positive moments.
As humans, we have a tendency to look out for the negative. This negativity bias is meant to protect us. So, it can be especially strong in tough times where we notice that we're seeing all the negatives and really focusing on all the negative. But if we can remember to also make room for the positive, those moments can really buoy us. It doesn't mean that we'll be happy and cheerful all the time, but having a couple of moments of peace, a feeling of accomplishment from finishing even one thing on our To Do List, or a sense of pride and connection when students are showing up and engaging with new ideas in the classroom. That can really bolster us.
Thank you for that. It's like you're carving out time for those micro-moments to really be present with the students and acknowledging their insights and growthh. In the book Unraveling Faculty Burnout: Pathways to Reckoning and Renewal, the author, Rebecca Pope Rourke, noted that the pillars of burnout resilience are around your purpose, your compassion for yourself and others, deepening connections with your peers, and pursuing realistic balance. Do these pillars happen to be reflected in your findings about coping strategies and resilience, and if so, how?
I have not read this book, but it's on my list now. So, without having read it and just seeing the pillars though, I would say they definitely connect to what we study. The second pillar of practicing compassion for self and others reminds me of two of the skills that we teach in our program which are self-compassion and acts of kindness. We know that helping others benefits the helper too. Even in small ways, most instructors are helping other people multiple times a day. But we might not give ourselves credit for it. So, letting ourselves feel good, even for just a moment, about helping a student or a colleague or someone else in our lives, or just kind of casually someone we come into contact within the course of our day... letting ourselves notice that we've helped them and feel good about that can give us a small but important boost.
Being more understanding and compassionate towards those around us and towards ourselves also increases feelings of connection and kindness. This doesn't mean that accountability goes out the door, but if something goes wrong, we can approach it with compassion and say something like, “Wow, that class or that lesson did not go well. I don't feel great about that, but I've been overwhelmed lately.” Or, “I tried something new, and it didn't work out. We're all human, and that happens, but is there one thing I could do in the next class to clear up the main point from this lesson?” Or, “Is there something that I can learn from this experience that could help me improve on it next time?” Those are some examples of how we might approach ourselves with compassion in a moment that didn't go well.
We also know that what's highlighted in the pillars, like connections and relationships and having a sense of meaning and purpose in our lives, are all really important for our well-being. One of the key points that I'd encourage people to think about is, "how can you recognize and pursue these connections in small ways in your daily life? What's one simple thing you could do to connect with a peer this week?" For example, is there a colleague you want to message? Say, “Hey, we made it through the fall term. High 5.” Or did someone post something on LinkedIn that you could celebrate or relate to?
The same idea can apply to these big, deep terms like meaning and purpose. It's really easy to get caught up in the stress or the busyness of our days and miss out on connecting to our meaning and our purpose. But can we take a moment at the beginning of a class or at the end of the day to think something like, “This job or this course is really important to me, and I'm grateful that I get to share it with these students today.”
I really like what you are saying. Just noting that we are in a helping-based profession, and we have the benefit of doing things that make us more resilient towards these stressful moments or upcoming stressful moments. We just have to bring more attention to when we are being helpful. It’s like we have some privilege that we could really build off of because of the work that we do.
Yes, yes, absolutely. And we have ready access to these things in our day-to-day lives. It's just a matter of kind of putting our focus there and being somewhat more intentional, somewhat more consistent about staying in touch with those things in our day-to-day lives. That is a really helpful starting point, and that will set a foundation that we can keep building on. More positivity, more positive relationships, more positive emotions, more strength and resilience in our lives.
I love it. So, at the Searle Center, we recognize the importance of building positive relationships and learning environments. This includes faculty-to-student and peer-to-peer relationships. Based on your research, what might instructors do to cultivate or enhance meaningful relationships that will further support one’s resilience.
Drawing from our lab's resilience toolkit of skills for increasing positive emotions and experiences, I'd consider looking out for strengths that you see in students and peers—and be specific. Did someone have a really creative idea, or were they resourceful or helpful in a certain situation? Did they crack a good joke or speak up on an important topic in a meeting? Take just a moment first to notice it for yourself. Name it as specifically as you can, and then you can acknowledge it to the person.
It can be really small. Again, I'll emphasize that the point of these things can be really small, but still powerful. It might be just a quick comment or quick message of “Hey, thanks for that moment of humor in the meeting today. I really needed a good laugh.” Or a note in your grading like, "great job connecting these two ideas together. This is really insightful.” Something to really see and acknowledge the other person for the strengths that you're seeing in them.
Our team also builds these skills into short games. Sometimes at the start of our meetings, we might play a game like “Gratitude Popcorn,” where each player names something that they're grateful for and then pops it to the next person to share. When something doesn't go well, we might have a lemons-to-lemonade competition where we try to come up with as many reasons why it's not as bad as it could be or as many silver linings to the situation that we can name. Sharing these kinds of experiences helps to deepen our connections and build resilience in ourselves and for the team as well.
These are all things I honestly have not thought to do or to suggest for to other instructors. So, this is going to be so beneficial to our audience. That was my last question. Are there any other things that are coming up for you that you might want to share with people or any misconceptions around resilience that you would like to clear up?
I think there's just one more point that, to me, is really important to acknowledge in the midst of all of this. And that's that you know the world is hard. Life can be really stressful, and there are a lot of things that we've seen increased attention to, especially over the past several years in terms of system-level constraints, and I mean that about all systems in our society to a certain extent. There are things that need to be changed for all of us to help make all of our lives better, and so our focus on how we can, as individuals or as groups of individuals, focus on these small experiences to build more daily positive emotions is just one part of what's important.
The idea is not that it's all about the individual just coping and just doing whatever you can to get through a situation or through a system that is not working well or is not designed to support and uplift everyone. It's about how can we use these positive emotion skills to help ourselves, in the midst of that, to help ourselves stay resilient, to help ourselves stay, stay strong so that we can also keep working on the bigger picture, the kind of greater system-level changes that we also want to see in our world.
That's just so important. It's like, we're doing these practices that build resiliency on an individual level to inform the bigger picture and stay in “the game” so that we can make those bigger changes.
That's right. And it's not because the sole responsibility is on the individual; it's because we take these individual actions and share them with our communities, with the teams of people we work with, our colleagues, our students. The more we are doing this, the more we can stay resilient and keep working on the bigger changes that are needed.
This interview was lightly edited for clarity.