What is it about?
The researchers in this study wanted to learn from older Canadians' about how they were managing pandemic-related anxiety when national public health measures were lifted. At this time, if infected by COVID-19, they were most at risk for being hospitalized and/or dying from it. Surely this is a sobering thought. Returning to a social life in this situation would hardly be business-as-usual. What some 1300 older Canadians told us helped us create a blueprint of what hardly business-as usual looked like. We mapped out their anxiety symptoms to see which ones were most troublesome, and found three really stubborn ones. We added older Canadians' nominated coping strategies to this blueprint to help us understand which strategies helped them get a handle on this tricky trio.
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Photo by Scott Blake on Unsplash
Why is it important?
Anxiety is messy; it can make everyday often taken-for-granted tasks harder to do. People rarely experience one symptom of anxiety. Our findings tells us that anxiety symptoms can operate as a network, with a tricky trio spurring other symptoms on. Knowing and seeing this might help other older people better understand their own symptom experiences. Combining anxiety symptoms and coping strategies together in a single blueprint gave us a visual snapshot of the hard work that goes into not letting anxiety get the best of you. Managing anxiety is hard, not business-as-usual, work. This is precisely why practitioners and program developers will find our blueprint a helpful visual teaching tool.
Perspectives
Older Canadians helped us see the hard work that goes into managing anxiety. They were carrying on alongside a tricky trio of anxiety symptoms and trying up to 16 strategies that at times worked for them and against them. Older Canadians, once largely characterized as vulnerable, were quietly and capably showing us what thoughtful and concerted anxiety recovery work looks like.
Gail Low
MacEwan University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Anxiety symptoms and coping strategies used by older adults during COVID-19: A national e-study of linkages among and between them, PLOS Mental Health, April 2025, PLOS,
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pmen.0000304.
You can read the full text:
Resources
Design your menu for mentally healthy living in the later years
Knowledge mobility product associated with our parent project from and for older Canadians and contemporaries at large.
Factors Associated with Older People's Anxiety Symptom Positioning after COVID-19: Cross-Sectional Findings from a Canadian Sample.
A related open-access publication offering anticipatory guidance for mental health program planners and practitioners, and fruitful avenues of inquiry for researchers.
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
