Do people have advice on how to be more emotionally resilient in the face of disaster?
I spent some time this year thinking about things that are likely to be personally bad in the near-future (most salient to me right now is the possibility of a contested election + riots, but this is also applicable to the ongoing Bay Area fires/smoke and to a lesser extent the ongoing pandemic right now, as well as future events like climate disasters and wars). My guess is that, after a modicum of precaution, the direct objective risk isn’t very high, but it’ll *feel* like a really big deal all the time.
In other words, being perfectly honest about my own personality/emotional capacity, there’s a high chance that if the street outside my house is rioting, I just won’t be productive at all (even if I did the calculations and the objective risk is relatively low).
So I’m interested in anticipating this phenomenon and building emotional resilience ahead of time so such issues won’t affect me as much.
I’m most interested in advice for building emotional resilience for disaster/macro-level setbacks. I think it’d also be useful to build resilience for more personal setbacks (eg career/relationship/impact), but I naively suspect that this is less tractable.
I think it is useful to separately deal with the parts of a disturbing event over which you have an internal or external locus of control. Let’s take a look at riots:
An external part is them happening in your country. External locus of control means that you need to accept the situation. Consider looking into Stoic literature and exercises (say, negative visualizations) to come to peace with that possibility.
An internal part is being exposed to dangers associated with them. Internal locus of control means that you can take action to mitigate the risks. Consider having a plan to temporarily move to a likely peaceful area within your country or to another county.
Do people have advice on how to be more emotionally resilient in the face of disaster?
I spent some time this year thinking about things that are likely to be personally bad in the near-future (most salient to me right now is the possibility of a contested election + riots, but this is also applicable to the ongoing Bay Area fires/smoke and to a lesser extent the ongoing pandemic right now, as well as future events like climate disasters and wars). My guess is that, after a modicum of precaution, the direct objective risk isn’t very high, but it’ll *feel* like a really big deal all the time.
In other words, being perfectly honest about my own personality/emotional capacity, there’s a high chance that if the street outside my house is rioting, I just won’t be productive at all (even if I did the calculations and the objective risk is relatively low).
So I’m interested in anticipating this phenomenon and building emotional resilience ahead of time so such issues won’t affect me as much.
I’m most interested in advice for building emotional resilience for disaster/macro-level setbacks. I think it’d also be useful to build resilience for more personal setbacks (eg career/relationship/impact), but I naively suspect that this is less tractable.
Thoughts?
The last newsletter from Spencer Greenberg/Clearer Thinking might be helpful:
https://www.clearerthinking.org/post/2020/10/06/how-resetting-your-psychological-baseline-can-make-your-life-better
Wow, reading this was actually surprisingly helpful for some other things I’m going through. Thanks for the link!
I think it is useful to separately deal with the parts of a disturbing event over which you have an internal or external locus of control. Let’s take a look at riots:
An external part is them happening in your country. External locus of control means that you need to accept the situation. Consider looking into Stoic literature and exercises (say, negative visualizations) to come to peace with that possibility.
An internal part is being exposed to dangers associated with them. Internal locus of control means that you can take action to mitigate the risks. Consider having a plan to temporarily move to a likely peaceful area within your country or to another county.