I write sometimes in these columns about thinking biases that can affect our decision making. Today I want to talk about a way of thinking that can undermine our resilience during hardship, as well as our ability to flourish and succeed.
Catastrophes happen in life. Natural disasters, tragic accidents, terrible illnesses, heart-rending betrayals, economic calamities, war, famine… Human history has been filled with these, and most of us have been at least touched by something catastrophic.
But a catastrophe is not usually the most likely scenario – if they were common, we wouldn’t think of them as catastrophes; they’d just be the kind of normal troubles we expect in life. There can be disappointments, hardships, struggles, and losses that hurt badly, requiring us to step up to challenges we would rather not have to step up to. These are not uncommon.
But a true catastrophe is rarely likely. When we expect catastrophe as a likely scenario, that expectation creates its own troubles, and they can run deep.
Yet our current media and political culture thrives on creating and maintaining an atmosphere of impending catastrophe. This is true across the political spectrum, and throughout much of the common space we share through internet, TV, movies, print media… The conversation that is mediated by every kind of media is filled with visions of catastrophe.
The very way that these threats are framed do not encourage us to think clearly, investigate deeply, or to search for practical solutions.
The way they are framed encourages us to feel terrified, enraged, and helpless. And this can undermine our capacity for success, happiness and well-being across every aspect of our lives.
This orientation is guaranteed to activate our primitive reactions of fight, flight, and freeze – reactions that are designed to give us a last-ditch possibility of surviving the mortal attack of a predator.
While these parts of our nervous system serve an essential survival function when needed, they are very rarely actually needed. They also undermine our capacity to think clearly, our desire and ability to seek understanding, empathy, and compassion for others, and our internal sense of well-being and basic trust.
Catastrophic thinking can undermine resilience, and increase our risk for anxiety, depression, and PTSD. It can also undermine our capacity for success: those who tend to not engage in catastrophic thinking also tend to be the ones who excel.
Consider the following descriptions (From Martin Seligman, Flourish) and whether they are: “Not like me at all”; “A little like me”; “Somewhat like me”; “Mostly like me”; or “Very much like me”:
- “When bad things happen to me, I expect more bad things to happen.”
- “I have no control over the things that happen to me.”
- “I respond to stress by making things worse than they are.”
If your answers tend toward “very much like me,” then your beliefs about hardships, challenges, and potential threats are likely to be harming you.
Not the hardships, challenges, and potential threats themselves, but your beliefs about them.
If this is the case for you, and you’re faced with what feels like a catastrophic situation, let me offer something that could potentially lead you to a path out of this:
- Define the worst-case scenario in personal terms – how the scenario could affect you personally; then see if there’s one action you could take that would make that scenario a little bit less
- Define the best-case scenario; then see if there’s one action you could take that would make that scenario a little bit more
- Define the most likely scenario; then see if there’s one action you could take that would allow you to cope more effectively with that scenario.
Doing this can help you to frame your situation in a way that gives you access to your strength and resources, and to problem-solve more effectively.
But how can we deal with potential catastrophes that could affect the whole world? It’s hard to imagine anything that could actually lead to a best-case scenario with the kind of global disasters we’re continuously bombarded with through the media.
(You might notice that these scenarios are almost always things we have no real control over personally: they’re too big, or too far away, and so the main action we’re usually sold is that we need to give someone, or some group, more power, so that they can solve it.)
If you’re in despair and can’t fathom how anything good could emerge from the latest impending doom, let me give you an example of a legitimate global catastrophe that never materialized (for a more detailed rendering, see Matt Ridley’s important book, The Rational Optimist):
In the 1960s, Paul Erlich published a bestselling, and very influential book, “The Population Bomb”. In it he described a scenario of mass famine and resulting horrible death of a significant portion of the human population. This was fundamentally a re-stating of Robert Malthus’s 1798 “Essay on Population,” which predicted that food supply could not keep pace with population because of the finite productivity of land.
Erlich and Malthus were right. We should indeed have come to a point where mass famine and horrible death from starvation was inevitable…
Except we didn’t.
What happened? Innovations.
We found a way to solve the problems we were facing. We had already been discovering more abundant sources of fertilizer that were maximizing crop production. First in around 1830 from huge accumulations of bird guano, then in the early 1900s through the innovation by Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch which enabled them to produce inorganic nitrogen fertilizer using steam.
These discoveries and innovations helped food production keep pace with the dramatic increases in population.
But then about the same time as Erlich’s doomsday book was published, and while the beginnings of another mass famine in India seemed imminent, a man named Norman Borlaug discovered a way to grow wheat that produced three times the capacity of previous wheat crops.
This was at the heart of what has come to be called the “Green Revolution,” and earned Borlaug the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970.
It’s why an intractable existential problem that obsessed many enlightened people during the 1960s and 1970s has become a non-problem (though Erlich himself is still holding out hope that we may yet still be doomed).
When we’re inundated with messages that we are headed for catastrophe, what’s not included is how we as a species continually triumph over these threats.
What’s also not included is all the many times when catastrophe was predicted, but never materialized, because the data was wrong or incomplete enough that the predictions were unfounded – like the impending ice age I remember worrying about in the early 1970’s; or the “coming financial collapse” that led some people to live like hermits for decades, hoarding their resources and constricting their lives.
But somehow we don’t hear much about those predicted catastrophes that never happened. Instead, the media, politicians, and anyone else with a vested interest in the perceived end of the world simply move on to the next potential catastrophe.
If you have troubles that you have the power to resolve, by all means lean into those problems and do what you can to solve them. But when you’re pummeled with doomsday visions by a ruthless media or self-serving politicians, please remember the catastrophes that weren’t – and treat those current prophets of doom with the clear eyed skepticism they deserve.
Don’t let catastrophic thinking interfere with your resilience, or your success.
PS: I’m currently expanding my life coaching practice. Go to my website to sign up for a free 30-minute initial conversation.
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