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How to Combat Stress-Induced Cravings and Overeating
Learn how to recognize stress eating, tell emotional hunger from physical hunger, and build healthier habits, one step at a time.
Stress eating is something many people deal with, especially during busy, emotional, or overwhelming times. When life feels out of control, it can be tempting to turn to food for comfort, even when we're not physically hungry. While stress eating can offer short-term emotional relief, it can make it harder to reach long-term health goals. Here, we'll explore why stress eating happens, how to differentiate between stress eating and real physical hunger, and go over practical steps that you can take to build healthier habits when it comes to emotional eating.
Understanding stress eating and its triggers
Stress eating — or emotional eating — is when we eat in response to our feelings instead of in response to physical hunger. Stress-related cravings aren't about needing nutrients or energy, rather, they're about seeking comfort or distraction from difficult feelings. Food can provide temporary relief when you're feeling overwhelmed, or bored. Over time, however, emotional eating can have negative health effects, including weight gain, digestive issues, and a lack of healthy strategies for coping with stressful emotions.
When you feel stressed, the body releases cortisol, a hormone that can increase your appetite and cravings for high-fat, sugary foods. These comfort foods can provide a quick energy boost while triggering the brain's reward system. That boost, however, doesn't last, and often leads to even more stress.
Identifying emotional hunger vs. physical hunger
One of the most important strategies in combating emotional eating is learning to recognize the difference between emotional hunger and physical hunger. Physical hunger comes on gradually, and can be satisfied by a variety of foods. After satisfying physical hunger, you'll likely feel nourished and satisfied, and it won't be hard to stop eating.
Emotional hunger, on the other hand, is more erratic. It comes on suddenly, and feels like it can only be satisfied with super-specific foods (often sugar or salt). Emotional hunger feels urgent, like it needs to be satisfied right away, and continues even after you've eaten a reasonable amount of food.
Mindful eating practices to reduce stress eating
Mindful eating is a simple but powerful tool to help reduce emotional eating. It's about paying attention to your hunger, your body, and the foods you choose, without judgment. When you eat mindfully, you're more likely to enjoy your food, recognize when you've had enough, and understand your emotional eating triggers.
Developing healthy coping mechanisms for stress
If food has been your go-to method for managing stress, you're not alone. Thankfully, there are many other strategies that can give you similar relief, without the side effects of stress eating.
Try these alternate coping mechanisms when emotions run high:
- Get moving. Exercise is one of the best ways to manage stress. A short walk, a quick yoga video, dancing to your favorite song, or even doing some quick cardio bursts (like jumping jacks) can help to release built-up tension.
- Talk it out. Call a friend or family member. Sometimes, talking through your feelings can make a big difference.
- Practice deep breathing. Sometimes, taking a brief pause between the urge to emotionally eat and actually engaging in emotional eating can be all it takes to help stop the behavior. Taking a few deep breaths can provide the pause that you need to center and reconsider eating emotionally.
- Journal your thoughts. In times of stress, writing down your thoughts can provide a healthy outlet for feelings that might otherwise lead to emotional eating.
- Engage in a hobby. Doing something creative — like reading, drawing, or gardening — can help you refocus.
Seeking professional help for emotional eating
Sometimes, stress eating can be too difficult to tackle alone. If you find that you're often eating in response to stress — especially if it's affecting your health, weight, or mental well-being — it's a good idea to reach out to a professional for help.
A mental health professional, dietitian, or therapist who specializes in emotional eating can help you:
- Understand the deeper reasons behind your eating habits
- Build self-awareness and self-compassion
- Look coping strategies that can help you manage emotions in healthy ways
- Create a personalized, sustainable plan for change
There's no shame in getting support. In fact, asking for help is a sign of strength. Working with a professional can help you gain the tools that you need to change eating habits for good.
Staying on track with your goals
Whether your goal is to feel better in your body, find non-food-related ways to manage stress, or lose weight, emotional eating can make it tough to move forward. The good news: even small changes can make a big difference.
Try these tips to stay focused and empowered as you work to change your eating habits:
- Celebrate non-scale victories. Even if you're trying to lose weight, you don't need to be focused on the scale 100% of the time. Notice times when you choose a walk over a stress-related snack, or when you choose to call a friend instead of engaging in emotional eating.
- Practice progress — not perfection. Setbacks are normal, and it will take some time to establish new eating habits. As long as you're working toward establishing new habits, you're on the right track.
- Set realistic goals. Practicing mindful eating once a day or learning a new stress management strategy once a week can help you move toward a healthier relationship with food.
We're here to help you create healthy eating habits, one decision at a time
Managing stress isn't about willpower or strict diets. It's about understanding your triggers, listening to your body, and giving yourself tools that help you make choices that support your health and happiness.
If you're working to overcome stress eating patterns, Evidation can help. When you download our free app, you'll be prompted to share the health data that you're already tracking. We'll use the information you choose to share to find insights and provide you with personalized, content-based insights that help you take the steps necessary to help you feel your best. Click here to learn more and get started with Evidation today.
Preliminary Results from our Second COVID-19 Vaccination Perceptions and Behaviors Survey
COVID-19 vaccines have been a source of hope and trepidation for many. We wanted to know how individuals felt about the vaccines
The release of COVID-19 vaccinations has been a symbol of hope to many people — -and a source of hesitancy to some. For our second survey on COVID-19 vaccination perceptions and behaviors (which we will refer to as “survey 2” throughout this blog post), we wanted to understand how people were feeling about the vaccines as people first started getting access to them. We launched the survey in January 2021, and are excited to share some preliminary results with you!
Participants
100,080 people (“participants”) completed survey 2. 54,701 have completed all surveys in the study so far. The mean age of survey 2 participants was 37.4 (standard deviation: 12.2 years). The majority of survey 2 participants identified as female (80.8%) and identified as white (78.0%).
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Vaccination Likelihood and Hesitancy
One of our main focuses for this survey was to examine how COVID-19 vaccination likelihood and hesitancy has evolved over time.
11.4% of participants had already gotten a COVID-19 vaccine when they took the survey, with an additional 0.6% reporting participating in COVID-19 vaccination trials:
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Overall, survey 2 participants reported being more positive about COVID-19 vaccination than they had been previously. 30% of participants reported feeling more likely to get a COVID-19 vaccine than they had been a month ago:
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People reported a range of reasons for their likelihood of vaccination increasing, with some common responses including:
- Feeling more informed about COVID vaccination overall (for example, “learned more information about it”, “just thinking and researching”)
- Feeling more confident about COVID vaccination safety as more data and research were released (for example, “more data on potential side effects”, “studies are getting better and more people are receiving it.”)
- Feeling more confident about COVID vaccination safety as they saw their friends, family, and community starting to get vaccinated (for example, “seeing those I respect get it”, “watching people I know get it with little adverse side effects”)
We saw a similar trend looking at the differences between reported vaccination likelihood in the first and second surveys; mean reported likelihood was 4.93 in survey 1 (median=5), and 6.53 in survey 2 (median=8.0):
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Although the majority of participants (51.5%) still report being more hesitant about COVID-19 vaccines than other vaccines, a higher percentage of survey 2 participants reported being equally or less hesitant than survey 1 participants:
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Vaccination Informedness
As mentioned above, one common reason people gave for their increase in vaccination likelihood was feeling more informed about the vaccines. Our data reflect this increase in self-reported informedness; in survey 1, only 27.1% of participants reported feeling “informed” or “very informed”, but 53.3% did so in survey 2:
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The most common pieces of information unvaccinated participants reported needing to know before deciding to get the COVID-19 vaccine were all potential side effects (62.7%) and possible long-term impacts of vaccination (58.9%).
We look forward to further investigating these current perceptions and behaviors and see how they change as more people become eligible for vaccination!
Next Steps
To understand how people’s perceptions and behaviors related to COVID-19 vaccination continue to evolve as vaccines become available more broadly, we will send additional surveys over the following months asking for Evidation Members’ perceptions and behaviors. The exact dates of these future surveys will depend on developments in the pandemic and COVID-19 vaccination, so stay tuned for more!
If you’d like to get vaccinated, see this CDC page with resources to find appointments near you.
How Election Night 2020 Impacted Our Bedtimes
Do people stay up later on election night? Find out what we discovered.
Our Research, Analytics, and Learning team is exploring and analyzing data from our Evidation platform, where members contribute to research and help us uncover insights that could improve their health and the health of others.
During this year’s presidential election there was high voter turnout which included record-breaking numbers of mail-in ballots due to COVID-19. As we now know, this high volume of ballots required multiple days to count, so no final winner could be projected on Election Day. We decided to look at Evidation Members activity data to see what changes the election may have caused for our members.
We used Fitbit data contributed by Evidation Members, to explore sleep characteristics and schedules for the month leading up to Election Day in 2020. We looked specifically at the time that each member went to bed in their local timezone. Equivalent time periods in 2017–2019 were used for comparison. These periods were aligned across years based on week rather than calendar date, so that differences in weekend and weekday sleep cycles would line up. This also syncs the end of daylight saving time, which happened on November 1, 2020, the Sunday two days before Election Day, and temporarily shifts our sleep cycles earlier. Positioning the data in this way allows for appropriate comparisons of data across years.
So, did anything about our sleep change? This plot shows the average time Evidation Members started sleeping on the weeks leading up to and immediately after daylight saving time from 2017–2020:
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There is a clear weekly pattern: we go to bed later on Friday and Saturday nights, when we have a weekend day ahead of us. On daylight savings weekend we started sleeping slightly earlier as we adjusted to the end of daylight saving time, a trend which continues through the following week as we slowly adjust to going to bed later again. However, on Election Day 2020 this pattern was disrupted; bedtimes spiked up over 20 minutes from Sunday and Monday night.
You may also notice the interesting pattern of later bedtimes in 2017, leading up to daylight saving time. This lines up with Halloween night and games 6 and 7 of the 2017 World Series. We’ve examined the impact of the 2017 World Series on sleep in the past.
As we looked closer at our sleep data, we were curious to see if members on the East Coast stayed up later in their time zone than those on the West Coast while they waited for results, so we examined average bedtimes in each time zone. On election night, members on the East Coast stayed up the latest (11:51 PM), compared to members in the Central (11:39 PM), Mountain (11:39 PM), and Pacific (11:43 PM) time zones. Compared to the previous night, members in Eastern Standard Time stayed up 22 minutes later, Central Standard Time 20 minutes later, and Mountain Standard Time 23 minutes later, while members in Pacific Standard Time stayed up only 14 minutes later.
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Regardless of where we live, sleep is an important part of our health. Fortunately, later bedtimes due to the election were confined to Tuesday night. Bedtimes returned to normal after Election Day, as it became clear that election results would take at least several more days to be projected.
Did you stay up late on Election Day? If you have tips to reduce stress or improve sleep, we’d love to hear them.
Preliminary Results from our First COVID-19 Vaccination Perceptions and Behaviors Survey
We wanted to understand people’s evolving perceptions and behaviors related to COVID-19 and vaccinations.
We are all looking forward to the end of the COVID-19 pandemic and the disruptions it’s caused in our lives. A safe and effective COVID-19 vaccine will form part of the public health strategy to help us reach this endpoint faster. As many organizations work to develop and release such a vaccine, we wanted to understand people’s evolving perceptions and behaviors related to COVID-19 and vaccinations. We launched the first set of surveys in our study in October, and are excited to share some preliminary results with you!
Objectives
This study’s goal is to describe people’s perceptions and behaviors around the COVID-19 vaccine. For example, what reasons do people have for getting or not getting the COVID-19 vaccine? How likely are they to get it once it’s released? Has the pandemic encouraged people to get the flu shot? This study will investigate whether and how these perceptions and behaviors change over time, as COVID-19 vaccines are developed and released.
Methods
To describe people’s perceptions and behaviors, and how those perceptions and behaviors change over time, we are asking for people’s input through a series of online surveys. These surveys will be sent throughout the development and release of COVID-19 vaccines.
So far, we’ve launched 2 surveys: one to understand the backgrounds of the people participating (for example, their demographics, where they live, whether they’re at risk for COVID-19), and one to characterize current perceptions and behaviors. We have started analyzing the data collected between October 9th, 2020 and November 11th, 2020. We won’t be able to understand how perceptions and behaviors have changed until we launch the next survey, but we can start to describe how people are currently feeling about the COVID-19 vaccine!
Preliminary Results
Here are some preliminary results from our first 2 surveys.
Participants
64,750 people (“participants”) have completed the first perceptions and behaviors survey. Mean age was 38.5 (SD: 11.7 years), and the majority of participants identified as female (79.7%) and identified as white (80.0%).
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All 50 states (plus Puerto Rico and Washington, DC) are represented:
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Vaccination Likelihood, Motivators, and Barriers
On average, participants were on the fence in terms of likelihood of getting the COVID-19 vaccine when it’s released (mean=4.93, median=5). The distribution shows a wide range of opinions, with the largest numbers of people reporting at:
- 0 (“Very unlikely”): 18.8%
- 5: 13.6%
- 10 (“Very likely”): 14.3%
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The most common reasons people reported for getting the COVID-19 vaccine were to:
- help protect their family, friends, or community (59.9%)
- lower their chances of getting COVID-19 (56.7%)
- lower their chances of having to go to the doctor or getting hospitalized due to severe COVID-19 symptoms (53.7%)
- feel more comfortable spending time with their friends, family, or community (55.7%)
The most common reasons people had to not get vaccinated were because they were:
- concerned the vaccine is being approved too quickly (61.3%)
- concerned about possible side effects (60.1%)
- not sure the vaccine will be safe (56.2%)
- not sure the vaccine will be effective (57.0%)
Relative Vaccination Hesitancy
Most participants reported feeling more hesitant about the COVID-19 vaccine than other vaccines (68.0%), with 24.9% feeling equally hesitant and 7.1% feeling less hesitant:
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Vaccination Informedness
We’ve also found that people don’t feel particularly well-informed about the COVID-19 vaccine in general. 19.8% of participants report feeling “Not at all informed”, 22.7% “Slightly informed”, 30.4% “Moderately informed”, 19.2% “Informed”, and only 7.9% “Very informed”:
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Pandemic Influence on Flu Shot Plans and Behavior
The CDC has stressed that getting the flu shot this season is more important than ever, to help protect oneself and others and to minimize burden on the healthcare system. Many participants seem to agree: of the 35,997 participants who had not gotten the flu shot yet (or were unsure), 20.2% reported being more likely to get it this season due to the pandemic:
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Of the 28,753 participants who had gotten the flu shot, 20.0% reported that the pandemic encouraged them to get it, and 9.1% reported the pandemic was the primary reason they did so:
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We are excited to continue to investigate these current perceptions and behaviors and see how they change over the coming months!
Next Steps
To understand how people’s perceptions and behaviors related to COVID-19 vaccination evolve over the development and release of vaccines, we will send more surveys over the following months asking for Evidation Member’s perceptions and behaviors. These surveys will be sent as big events happen around the vaccine’s development, like its approval or release. The exact dates of these future surveys will depend on when these events happen, so stay tuned for more!
8 Fresh Summer Ideas
Don’t let summer pass you by this year! We chatted with our team and consolidated some of our favorite activities.
Don’t let summer pass you by this year! We chatted with our team and consolidated some of our favorite activities.
- Connect with brainy folks all around the world with Atlas Obscura’s Trivia Night! Rally together a virtual team and participate for $7.
- Celebrate Blues Artist Mavis Staples and listen to other folk artists including Brandi Carlile, Jason Isbell, Ben Harper, and Phoebe Bridgers for a Livestream concert. Tickets cost $12. Tune in this Friday, July 31st at 8:30pm EST.
- Join host Saleem Reshamwala as he goes on global expeditions and learns from people around the world who are creatively working to make their communities better. Tune into this Ted podcast to transport to another world virtually in the absence of travel.
- Host a virtual book club with friends. The benefit of talking about your latest read via Zoom or video chat is that you can connect with friends across time zones.
- Jump on the geocaching bandwagon. We recently heard from some Achievers that they’ve been geocaching with their family members for an active, outdoor treasure hunt.
- Make a box fort/cat castle for your cat children if you’re a cat mom or dad. :)
- Set up a socially distanced front yard hang! Dust off your lawn chairs and pick up some of your favorite snacks and head outdoors.
- Choose a road trip and safely travel to a closeby spot! Know you’re not alone in opting for a road trip as a staycation during these unusual times. Read up on some of the best road trips in America.
- Host your very own hot sauce competition with your “quaranteam.” Find some new hot sauces you’ve always wanted to try online and order them in to have a mini hot sauce competition. Pro tip: the Heatonist has some of our favorites.
- Channel your inner artist with a paint by number kit. Tune into a favorite playlist and enjoy a leisurely weekend art hour.
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Representation in Research Matters
We’re collaborating with BlackDoctor.org to ensure that the effects of COVID-19 are investigated in a representative population.
Historically, minorities have been inadequately represented in research studies. We’re committed to enrolling a more diverse and representative population in Evidation for studies.
We’re collaborating with BlackDoctor.org to ensure that the effects of COVID-19 are investigated in a representative population.
We, in partnership with BlackDoctor.org and Myovant Sciences, have launched Forward Momentum, a cross-sector coalition working to improve the lives of men with prostate cancer. Forward Momentum is committed to addressing the complex set of challenges that hold back the representation, information, and conversations that all men deserve. By bringing together organizations from diverse sectors and investing in novel digital initiatives, Forward Momentum strives to accelerate progress for men with prostate cancer.
Stay tuned for more updates from us on these research efforts!
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Hear from Us About the Future of Health
Evidation partners with the world’s leading healthcare companies and enables everyone to participate in research.
Our CEO, Deborah Kilpatrick, recently spoke on a podcast about the importance of everyday behavior data and the future of health. After working in the medical technology space, she joined Evidation Health in 2014. Evidation partners with the world’s leading healthcare companies and enables everyone to participate in research. We’re focused on helping people measure everyday activities. We’re also invested in connecting our community to opportunities that will help them better understand the conditions that impact them and their loved ones. Listen more on this podcast here.
Together We Can Achieve More
At Evidation, we’re focused on meeting people where they are and helping them along their health journey.
At Evidation, we’re focused on meeting people where they are and helping them along their health journey. Our engaged community of members represents 96% of U.S. counties and includes individuals across ages, ethnicities, and socioeconomic backgrounds. This community puts us in a unique position to learn from one another and contribute to meaningful health research.
With a mission of helping people participate in better health outcomes, we're committed to identifying opportunities that are inclusive of all and educating ourselves on the social issues that are impacting the world. To truly achieve our mission of helping people participate in better health outcomes, we recognize we have more work to do. Our commitment going forward:
- Provide our members with educational content around health and race curated by our team of researchers.
- Put in place more inclusive study opportunities for members to participate in.
- Do our part as a research company to participate in inclusive clinical research practices to ensure diverse and generalizable results through diverse participant recruitment and participation.
- Hold ourselves accountable by reporting our progress out to our members.
We’re committed to supporting long-term systematic change and stand in solidarity with our Black teammates, Evidation Members, and the entire Black community. We know this is only the beginning of the conversation, and we need to continue to fight for equality. We’ll continue to listen, educate ourselves, take action, hold ourselves accountable, and pledge to do our best to support all communities to participate in better health outcomes.
An immediate change we’re pleased to share is that Evidation Members can now donate their rewards to these charities:
American Civil Liberties Union
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Evidation Health and BARDA Partner on Early Warning System for COVID-19
On June 4th, Evidation Health announced a new effort to develop an early warning algorithm to detect symptoms of COVID-19 and to understand susceptibility to infection, funded by the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA), part of the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Here at Evidation, we’ve been identifying opportunities to contribute to COVID research. THe Evidation app is a product of Evidation Health, and has a community of over 3 million and members all around the United States. With an engaged research population representing a variety of zip codes and demographics, we’re uniquely positioned to help researchers and organizations conduct meaningful research about the pandemic.
On June 4th, Evidation Health announced a new effort to develop an early warning algorithm to detect symptoms of COVID-19 and to understand susceptibility to infection, funded by the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA), part of the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
“Many infected individuals are asymptomatic but still able to spread the virus, making efforts to prevent and slow transmission of COVID-19 difficult,” said Luca Foschini, Ph.D., Evidation’s co-founder and chief data scientist. “This initiative will use novel behavioral and physiological data to more effectively identify when and where people may contract COVID-19, and can potentially enable real-time interventions to limit spread and monitor outcomes.”
The analysis, performed in collaboration with non-profit 4YouandMe, will use de-identified data generated by self-reporting and wearable devices to track symptoms of COVID-19 in those at particularly high risk, including health care workers and other first responders, in order to better understand susceptibility to SARS-CoV-2 infection. One potential outcome of this work is an early warning algorithm to help individuals better understand and monitor their respiratory disease symptoms and take precautions against their spread.
“The ability to self-monitor and be informed of health status will empower Americans in their decisions to help slow the spread of this pandemic and improve health outcomes for people with COVID-19,” said BARDA Acting Director, Gary Disbrow, Ph.D. “This pilot study is not only an early step in demonstrating the utility of models developed using person-generated health data but also may provide data to better understand the varied symptoms of COVID-19.”
This program follows Evidation’s work with BARDA to monitor individuals for respiratory infections, such as influenza. Evidation’s existing research on influenza utilizes person-generated health data and population-based models with the goal of improving real-time respiratory infection monitoring at the individual and population level. BARDA is contributing a $720,000 award as part of BARDA’s COVID-19 Rapidly Deployable Capabilities program to identify and pilot near-term innovative solutions for COVID-19. Support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is from the $250 million the foundation has committed to address the COVID-19 pandemic.
How Evidation Members Rallied Together Through COVID Pulse Survey
Through this challenging time, we we've been inspired by our members who responded to many questions with great empathy and creativity as they have adapted to new routines
We’ve been continuing to monitor sentiment in the community around the coronavirus through an Evidation Survey called COVID Pulse. Since kicking off the survey on March 12th right after the coronavirus was declared a pandemic, we’ve been sending out a weekly survey to our members.
We wanted to quantify participation and interest and share some of the latest trends from our most recent surveys. After we released the first survey, we received over 120,000+ responses in five days from over 20,000 United States zip codes. The highest percentage of responses came from the age groups in the range of 30–39, followed by the 18–29 age range, and lastly, the 40–49 range. Though, we did see representation from members ages 18–80+! We’ve been pleasantly surprised by the number of members who have continued to check in week over week to share their sentiment surrounding coronavirus. In fact, 11% of survey respondents have completed all five COVID Pulse Surveys to date and 22%+ completed four out of five COVID Pulse Surveys.
Most recently, we saw that over 85% of respondents said that if social distancing and stay at home orders were lifted today, they would know what to do to reduce chances of contracting the coronavirus. We also saw that members would continue to take the necessary precautions even if social distancing guidelines and stay at home orders were lifted. Over 60% would continue to stay at home and maintain social distancing behaviors. Additionally, nearly 70% said they would continue to start to wear protective equipment (for example a face mask) in public settings. For those who responded in locations where shelter in place has been lifted, only ~25% of respondents said that they were attending small social events.
Through this challenging time, we were also inspired by our members who responded to many questions with great empathy and creativity as they have adapted to new routines. In fact, when asked about their concerns if they were to be diagnosed, 75% of respondents expressed concern over getting others sick in their worries. This fear was followed by 60% of respondents expressing their worry over the physical discomforts of getting sick. Regarding ways to minimize changes to physical and mental health, we’ve seen an uptick in individuals sharing the importance of maintaining whatever routines possible, avoiding or taking breaks from the news, and a continued connection through video chats with friends and family. In fact, maintaining connection through social media scored high for Evidation Members as a method to socialize with others. Both last week and this week, 70% of respondents said they used social media to socialize with other people.