Coping and Resilience: Farm Stress
Podcast Episode Summary:
The stress that comes from managing the ups and downs of everyday life in agriculture can be challenging. In this episode Dr. Judy Moskowitz, the original developer of WeCOPE and Dr. John Shutske, Professor and Extension Agricultural Safety & Health Specialist at UW–Madison Division of Extension help us understand how the skills of WeCOPE can help manage this stress.
Direct link to this podcast episode on the host site: https://copingbetter.buzzsprout.com/2093228/11802714-1-coping-resilience-farm-stress
Link to the full podcast series (all episodes on the host site): https://copingbetter.buzzsprout.com/
Transcript:
Ron Fruit:
Welcome to the podcast, Coping Better, Connecting Our Positive Emotions, where we talk about positive emotion skills in relation to farm stress. Today we’ll be discussing coping and resilience in agriculture, a foundation of the WeCOPE series. Our guests are Dr. Judith Moskowitz, Professor of Medical Social Sciences at Northwestern University, Feinberg School of Medicine, and a developer of the original WeCOPE Research, and Dr. John Shutske, UW Madison, Professor and Extension, Agricultural Health and Safety Specialist. I’m Ron Fruit. On the farm we talk about acres and bushels, yield, and the weather; but rarely do we talk about coping and resilience. Dr. Moskowitz says maybe we should.
Judy Moskowitz:
To talk about coping and resilience you first need to define stress; and stress is the perception or the understanding that what’s going on around you is more than you can handle. So it’s this idea that the things that are happening in your environment or in your life are more than you have the capacity to deal with. Coping is the things you do in response to that stress. So they might be adaptive things, like addressing the problem or doing something to get rid of the problem, or they might be maladaptive. We can think of lots of things that might be maladaptive types of coping. So resilience is this ability to bounce back quickly from the experience of stress or maybe not to have such a negative emotional response to stress. So when something difficult is happening in your life, if you either don’t have a lot of negative feelings about it, that would be resilience. So you’re resilient to the effects of the stress, or if you bounce back quickly from the stress, that’s also resilience.
Ron Fruit:
There are many unique aspects of agriculture that lead to stress. Dr. Shutske says that’s when we need to develop skills of resilience.
John Shutske:
One example is the weather. Too much rain, too little rain, it’s too hot, it’s too cold. Weather is something that directly affects the farmer’s livelihood and ability to make a living. Another thing that we wrestle with is the economics. Um, it could be that prices are too low. Fortunately, right now we’re in a good price situation. However, things are very costly and our input costs are very volatile. So those are things that could cost stress. In farming, also, in many cases, these are family operations. We might have older people in the family. We might be older; from a number of challenges in working with children, working across generations. And then there’s also that feeling in farming and agriculture that we need to protect our legacy. In many of our Wisconsin farms we might have a farm that’s been in the family for a hundred or 150 years.
John Shutske:
So what happens is when people are dealing with all of this stress, it does cause people to act certain ways, and some of those ways are not all that positive. For example, people under stress might say, I just need to put my nose to the grindstone and work harder, work more hours, not come in until 10 o’clock at night and start at six o’clock in the morning; and unfortunately, that can lead to all kinds of negative outcomes, negative emotions. People can get frustrated, they can get angry; and we also see a high rate of injury. We also know that people who are dealing with high levels of stress have negative health outcomes. Could be heart disease, high blood pressure, type two diabetes. And I think that the last thing that we just need to touch on briefly when we talk about farm stress is the whole notion when I’m under stress and when I’m having difficulty coping, I am much more likely to make bad decisions. And in some cases, those decisions can have bad outcomes. And then that just further exacerbates this vicious cycle of stress.
Ron Fruit:
That vicious cycle of stress creates a great opportunity to talk about, WeCOPE.
Judy Moskowitz:
The We Cope program is a set of skills that are the adaptive kind of coping that I talked about. So based on research in other samples, experiencing other kinds of stress, life stress, like we all experience these skills, help you experience more positive emotion even though your life might be stressful right now. So it’s this idea that you can experience both the positive emotions alongside the negative emotions and the WeCOPE skills, help you experience the positive emotion, which then help you cope better with whatever type of stress you’re experiencing. So, farm stress, older generation, farm stress, younger generation, farm stress, other types of life stress, they can work across all of those. They’re really for any, any human experiencing, any kind of stress.
John Shutske:
One of the things that I find very valuable when I start talking about WeCOPE with the farming audience or the farming population is a WeCOPE skill or strategy called expressing gratitude. And that can oftentimes be combined with noticing all the things that are around us that we really have the right to be grateful for. We are working in nature in many cases. We have this unique opportunity that a lot of people in other industries don’t have to work with their family. Now, in, in some cases that’s not always a positive, but in many cases it is. We’re working, like I said, with multi-generation farms where we’ve been left this precious legacy that we should be grateful for. And then the other part of gratitude is not only noticing all of these things, noticing the beauty that’s around us, noticing our family, but also finding a way to express it.
John Shutske:
Some people just simply tell a loved one. Maybe when they wake up in the morning, it’s something that they’ve seen, that they’ve heard, that they’ve observed. For some people it’s putting a post on Facebook maybe with a picture of a beautiful sunset, or that new calf that’s been born in the last, you know, 12 hours. Yes, you spent six or eight or 10 hours in the barn, but you also have this new being that’s been brought onto the earth and being able to express that. Some people also find value in journaling about the things that they’re grateful for. I also noticed noticing. So part of that is just being alive and aware of the world around you. Some people also talk about savoring, and that includes finding ways to capture the moment, extend it, amplify it so that you are able to share it with other people. And we know, again from Judy’s research that these are things that are very helpful for people’s wellbeing and helps them to cope more effectively.
Judy Moskowitz:
One of the skills that John touched upon with his description of gratitude and savoring and noticing positive events was something we call positive reappraisal, which is noticing that life is stressful or that something is, is causing you stress right now, but also noticing that there might be something good about it. So in the agriculture context, the weather’s been horrible, but my job is flexible and that I can take a three day weekend. Um, was one example we were talking about. So it’s the ability to notice the good things that often come alongside the more difficult and stressful things.
Ron Fruit:
During those moments when you’re thinking about everything a new week will bring, Dr. Shutske believes a roadmap may be really helpful.
John Shutske:
I like to talk with people about setting a goal or two, purposely spending, uhm, I usually say 20 or 25 minutes, like on a Sunday afternoon. If it’s football season, maybe it’s right before the Packers game starts or after church or after Sunday dinner. Thinking about first of all, what are the one or two goals that I wanna focus on in the next week? If I can make it through this next week, what would be something that I would feel really good about? So what’s that one goal? Number two, what are the actions that I need to take on Monday morning or even yet on Sunday night to get things started? What is that first action that I can do to overcome the little bit of inertia that I might feel? Also thinking about resources might be people, it might be information, it might be a conversation I need to have.
John Shutske:
It might be a little bit of research that I need to do on the internet. And then finally, when we get to the end of that week, how will I know that I’ve been successful? How will I measure it? And if you think about it, focus, action, resources and measurement, and it spells out F.A.R.M. It’s kinda like a smart goal, but it is something that we find that when we have that little bit of a roadmap for the future, for that next week or for that next two weeks, it really does help alleviate people’s stress as they move out of Sunday and into Monday
Ron Fruit:
And into that next busy week. You might look at WeCOPE as tools in a toolbox.
Judy Moskowitz:
We created this package of skills or this set of tools for people to cope better with stress by having more positive emotion. We intentionally include multiple skills in this toolbox. Not every skill is gonna be something that people like. They’re not a magical package that has to be practiced together. The key is really finding one or two of these skills that you like and that you’ll do and that you’ll take up as a habit. That’s what’s gonna work and help people reduce their stress rather than there are 11 skills here and I have to learn them all and I have to be perfect; and it’s not that at all. It’s like find a skill, find out how you can work it into your day, how you can practice it, and then that’s the one that you should take forward to help you cope better.
Ron Fruit:
Dr. Moskowitz has found one go-to skill as of late to be very valuable.
Judy Moskowitz:
My go-to skill, especially since Covid has been self-compassion, because I think a lot of us, although we’re all experiencing a lot of stress, if we’re not as bad off as someone else, we maybe feel like we don’t deserve to feel bad. And I think the first thing, the first step for all these skills is to have self-compassion and know that everyone is stressed, everyone is suffering to some extent, and that everyone is suffering. Everyone is experiencing stress to some extent, and that’s okay. And that there are things that you can do to cope with that stress. So you really have to sort of give yourself permission to feel the stress and to to help have that compassion toward yourself.
Ron Fruit:
Thanks to our guests, Dr. Judith Moskowitz and Dr. John Shutske for sharing their knowledge and experiences with us. If you are interested in more information on positive emotional skills, please check out all seven episodes in Coping Better, Connecting our Positive Emotions.
Credits: Coping Better; Connecting with Our Positive Emotions is a product of a generous grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) National Institute for Food and Agriculture (NIFA) through a partnership with the Wisconsin Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection (DATCP) and is adapted from the original WeCOPE curriculum, a ROTA grant funded program through the U.S. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA).