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Worriers Might Be Handling the Pandemic Better
Plus, how to make your worries actually productive
Worrying has become a routine part of many people’s lives these days. And while stress and anxiety are often categorized as irrational or unnecessary, it’s easy to understand why worry, in the scary universe of now, is ubiquitous.
When it comes to making decisions of any kind, there’s always some degree of uncertainty, but under normal circumstances, it’s limited. When you eat raw oysters, for example, you’ll either get food poisoning or you won’t. However, with this pandemic, there’s a great deal more uncertainty, and that creates a much more unstable scenario where you have to constantly weigh options that keep changing, notes Sonia Bishop, PhD, an associate professor of psychology and cognitive neuroscience at the University of California, Berkeley. Couple that with missing or inaccurate information, and you have a recipe for excessive worry. But, experts like Bishop say that in a time when worry is often warranted — and even protective — there’s a way to harness its value without letting it take over your life.
Specific, short-lived worry can be quite useful, especially when it comes to coping with a crisis.
