Disappointment and uncertainty are inevitable. But we don’t have to turn them into suffering. mentalhealth
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A lot of people are feeling this way as the quarantine drags on. There’s so much we are missing from our old lives—graduations, weddings, family get-togethers, religious celebrations. There’s so much uncertainty about what we can expect in the coming weeks and months. But disappointment is very similar to another unpleasant emotion: regret. It’s easy to confuse the two. They both involve wishing something better had occurred. Many psychology experiments have thus treated them synonymously, and, indeed, people often process these feelings in a similar way: through rumination and counterfactual thinking.
Error 2: Confusing uncertainty with riskWhy does my friend spend so much time consuming information about the coronavirus? She isn’t a scientist, and doesn’t work on anything related to the pandemic. Still, she visits the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center every day to see if the curve of cases and deaths is flattening. She watches hours of news in which experts are interviewed about the pandemic’s trajectory and when they think life will return to normal.
It’s natural to try to convert uncertainty into risk by gorging ourselves on available information. So we watch 24-hour news channels where hosts interview people with only marginally more knowledge than we have. We scour the internet for predictions. We look at the Dow Jones Industrial Average as if it were the zodiac. Surely, we think, if we just knew enough about something, we could accurately assess how much we're at risk.But all of that is an exercise in futility.
These steps can help you manage living with uncertainty, as well. Start by acknowledging that you do not know what is going to happen in this crisis. Next, distinguish between what can and can’t be known right now, and thus recognize that gorging on all the available information will not really resolve your knowledge deficit—you won’t be able to turn uncertainty into risk by spending more hours watching CNN, because the certainty you seek is not attainable.
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