UNE’s Arabella Pérez joins Maine CDC’s Dr. Shah, state experts for panel on emotional health during pandemic

Arabella Pérez, D.S.W., M.S.W., LCSW, assistant clinical professor in the University of New England School of Social Work and Trauma Informed Certificate coordinator, recently offered her expertise at a statewide panel about emotional wellbeing and mental health.

The virtual panel, “Emotional Well-Being During a Pandemic,” was held Thursday, Jan. 27, and served as an open forum for people to connect and explore strategies to cope with stress, burnout, isolation, and emotional fatigue amid the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

The event was hosted by the Maine Community Action Partnership, and the UNE Center for Excellence in Public Health (CEPH) was a collaborative sponsor of the event. Nirav D. Shah, M.D., J.D., director of the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), gave opening remarks. Additional panelists included Erik Eisele, E-Covid project director for the Maine Department of Health and Human Services, and Ellsworth High School junior Abigail Young.

In her time, Pérez gave a brief presentation discussing ways to support our “emotional hygiene” in the “Age of Overwhelm.” According to the psychologist Guy Winch, Ph.D., emotional hygiene is defined as “being mindful of our psychological health and adopting brief daily habits to monitor and address psychological wounds when we must sustain them.”

Pérez explained that, to have good emotional hygiene, it is important to befriend our emotions instead of shutting them out. Rather than engaging in activities that help us avoid negative feelings, she said, we can accept emotions as they arise, understand them and what triggers them, manage reactions to them, and adjust and learn from them.

“What you can do is notice your emotions, acknowledge they're there, and have an opportunity for a new experience in your body that contradicts the fear and the helplessness and hopefully signals to the body that it will be OK,” Pérez told the virtual group. “Accepting the emotion is not a passive action — you're actually engaging with the emotion, bringing it to the forefront, and finding a way to manage it.”

Pérez mentioned such enhanced emotional awareness can help us be more compassionate with ourselves, which can have added social benefits.

“By engaging in acts of compassion, we stimulate the prefrontal cortex, which improves our decision making, inhibits our negative emotions, and decreases instances of depression,” she said.

*Pérez is introduced at 29:30.