Building Resilience During the COVID-19 Pandemic: a Randomized Controlled Trial

"RASMUS stands for Resilience through mindfulness, self-compassion and self-care and is a German-language 10-week group resilience program with one training unit per week. The main content of the RASMUS is based on seven resilience factors, i.e. acceptance, optimism, taking responsibility, solution orientation, future orientation, role clarity, and network orientation including the aspects of mindfulness, self-compassion, and self-care.~RASMUS has been tested and certified according to the German Prevention Standard. The Central Prevention Test Center has awarded the seal of approval for the areas of exercise, nutrition, stress management/relaxation, and addictive substance consumption. Accordingly, this training program has been certified as a prevention course that is recognized by the German statutory health insurance companies. Furthermore, RASMUS can and is already offered as a (group) online course."

"Progressive Muscle Relaxation is a representative relaxation technique used in a wide scope of disorders. Developed by the American physician E.Jacobson in the late 1920s, it is based on the finding that anxiety states are usually accompanied by increased muscle tension, while in resting states the muscles are relaxed. By applying this technique, an individual learns how to relax several muscle groups in the body.~In the context of the current project, PMR is chosen as the active control condition because it is a broadly accepted and easy-to-implement relaxation exercise that can be offered as a (group) online course and does not include specific contents of RASMUS."