Coping with Stress and Loss During the Pandemic

How has the COVID-19 pandemic affected your work and life? All going into the winter time, there's always stress I feel like because people kind of came out of summer and they were dealing with back to school or work changes, holidays in the Jewish community, in the general community, Thanksgiving, and don't forget it's football season. So, you know, healthy choices of food is a challenge. And again, getting that physical activity. We held a healthy tailgate party last year to try to help and support people making those food choices. And it's interesting because they go hand in hand healthy food choices and stress, they can go. And how do you deal with stress? So, you know, preparing for that by having some education available, things like the Healthy Child Gay Party and giving support in our events are also good. Also, we're having things that give people some support in their emotions. So So some of the things that we've been having right now are loss, just in general. And so it's in every season. But this is the time where we're having something for our community to memorialize loss. And this year in particular, there's been a lot of loss. And so we're having a special candlelight type of ceremony at night, hearing from inspirational speakers. It's a perfect time of year to go into that and to just get everybody's stress level down a little and have a platform for people to talk about this and to help deal with it. Then they'll leave space to deal with their own selves of their healthcare and to deal with themselves as well. So we need to be cognizant that people need all kinds of ways to deal with what they're facing in life. And so we try to help in that way, kind of like the back door. In the fall, we can think about preparing for winter. I find that when we work with our community that we're staying in present tense. We're so busy with what we're dealing with with back to school and the holidays during the fall that we're not thinking as much as about what's coming. So I think after these are all finished, you know, as Thanksgiving comes, it's a time to kind of segue into winter. So talking about Thanksgiving as a perfect opportunity, there's a lot of food choices again going on there and diet is something that's so important. How do we have a healthy Thanksgiving? How do we get some activity in there and segue right into preparing for the winter in the same breath.