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Blaming 2020 Is Bad for Your Mental Health
The false hope that the negative events of this year will get better in 2021 is an example of what psychologists call ‘magical thinking’
Fuck 2020. We’ve all thought it or said it aloud at least once or 100 times this year. Between the Covid-19 pandemic, the disastrous global effects of climate change, a swell of deep-seated racial injustice, and ongoing political tumult, this year has been marred by an endless barrage of negative news.
It’s difficult to absorb so much in such a short period of time. “There’s a lot of good research to show that unpredictability and uncertainty [are] the most surefire ways to get us overwhelmed, anxious, depressed,” says Cortland Dahl, PhD, a research scientist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison’s Center for Healthy Minds.
This false hope that the negative events of this year are caused by the year itself and will get better with the passing of it is an example of what psychologists call “magical thinking.”
To make sense of the chaos and uncertainty, our brains look for patterns, an easy way to explain what’s happening. “If there’s an easy shortcut to take, we take it, and that’s a helpful thing because that often gives us patterns that we can see in the world,” says Regine Galanti, PhD, clinical psychologist and author of Anxiety Relief for Teens.
One of those shortcuts: blaming it all on 2020.
Jelena Kecmanovic, PhD, a clinical psychologist and adjunct professor of psychology at Georgetown University in Washington D.C., compares blaming 2020 to setting New Year’s resolutions. Both are centered around the belief that the changing of the year itself can bring a better outcome. “When used sparingly, [this thinking] is not necessarily detrimental,” Kecmanovic says. “We all need a little bit of false hope from time to…
