Coping with Disaster

After a disaster you and your family will experience physical and emotional stress. Look after yourself and your loved ones as you refocus and repair. Here are some tips for coping with disaster related stress:

Get plenty of rest, water and healthy food.

• Manage your time, and do jobs one at a time, with reasonable expectations.
• Spend lots of quality time with family and friends.
• Establish a family emergency plan. Feeling that there is something you can do to prevent damage in the future can be comforting.
• Don’t be afraid to ask for support.
• Remember that it is normal to feel anxious about your family’s safety.
• Acknowledging our feelings helps us recover.
• Talk to someone about your feelings. We each have different ways of dealing with stress.
• It is common to feel angry at the people that caused you pain. However, nothing good is accomplished by violent or hateful words or actions.

SAMHSA’s Disaster Distress Helpline provides crisis counseling and support to people experiencing emotional distress related to natural or human-caused disasters.  Call 1-800-985-5990 or text TalkWithUs to 66746 to connect with a trained crisis counselor.

 

For mor information, go to Coping with Disaster.