Personal factors of psychological well-being preservation during the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

The article studies the factors of psychological well-being preservation in a pandemic situation.
There are analyzed the changes that were made in life, the vision of the future, value and
semantic priorities, practices of uncertainty and danger overcoming.
Within the qualitative methodology, it is used the method of thematic narrative analysis.
The time of the study is April-May 2020.
The following personal factors of psychological well-being preservation in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic are identified. 1) The ability to adequately, carefully assess the quarantine situation, which is demonstrated by 45% of respondents. 2) Temporal competence of the individual, ability to understand the causal links between past, present, and future, which is shown by half of the respondents (for the rest of respondents, it is difficult to understand these connections). 3) The ability to choose a way to preserve psychological well-being in accordance with the value-semantic characteristics of life, which are manifested in the personal landscapes; common landscapes during the pandemic include the pragmatic one (22%), the existential one (21%), the self-development one (19%), the communicative one (17%), and the societal one (14%). 4) The ability to apply the practices of negative states overcoming in accordance with previous experience of behavior in difficult life situations; despite this, 37% showed an unwillingness to notice their negative states, and lack of coping practices; the most commonly used were the creative and leisure copings (22%), copings of commonality (16%), and hyper loaded activities (13%).
It is shown that pandemic times can be a period not only to preserve but also to increase psychological well-being.
By assimilating the traumatic experience, a person forms readiness for the necessary changes in his/her own present, sees the future more panoramically, and constructively chooses the further vector of life creation.
The social significance of the study is seen in the possibility to develop targeted preventive measures, taking into account different ways of assessing pandemic risks, attitudes to the future, leading values, self-help practices.