When the lights go out, and you can’t look on the bright side

JUDITH ANCER

The next time it happened, we were grouchy. My son moaned that he had an assignment, I couldn’t watch my recorded TV show, and everyone agreed that everything was going to the dogs. In our case, just the one dog, Jozi the Labrador, from whom we could learn a thing or two about taking things in our stride.

When the power goes out, we feel angry or anxious, all normal responses – and that’s when it goes out on schedule. When it shuts down unpredictably, everything feels even more out of control, and an absence invades every aspect of our lives. We can’t comfort ourselves with a hot cup of tea or distract ourselves with Netflix.

At the next social event, people mutter about emigration, and confess to a loss of faith in the country’s future.

Without minimising these very normal responses, I think it’s important to take stock of what’s happening psychologically.

Hans Rosling, a global health expert and statistician, explains in his book Factfulness that these negative responses are exacerbated by the human instinct for catastrophising. He calls this the dramatic world view. It has allowed us to survive over millennia by interpreting all negative events as alarm signals so that we could respond decisively when faced with predators or pillaging war parties.

When the lights go out, the catastrophising instinct kicks in. Threats to our comforts and routines lead us to believe that what will follow in the darkness is chaos. This South African situation is compounded by the global sense that the world is getting worse. Because we know too much. When bombs explode in Madrid or toddlers are kidnapped in Portugal, we know about it immediately, and the dramatic live footage makes us fearful or angry. We draw our children closer, expecting the worst.

Social media is an unrelenting assault on our primal fears. The dramatic worldview doesn’t serve us well in our connected world. We are constantly triggered, and we can’t escape all this reality. And unlike reality shows, no one shouts “cut” to return us to normal, whatever that is.

The world has become an echo chamber of pessimism. We blame the media for pumping out bad news stories rather than the slow boiling good ones that outnumber them, but the media is just us, attuned to overdramatic incidents.

Of course, others respond differently, enthusiastically insisting that we look on the bright side, or take up some faddish belief. But that’s also unhealthy. Naivety and denial end up being just as bad for mental health as pessimism and doleful warnings about the future. Denial may be a natural response to feeling overwhelmed, but it works only in the short term.

Whether angry or optimistic, we formulate theories and plans based on our feelings. All feelings are acceptable (hey, I’m a psychologist), but without substantiating facts and evidence, they’re a poor executive manager. If we treat them uncritically, especially while sitting in the dark, we may generate emotion-fuelled decisions on important life issues ranging from, “anywhere is better than here” to “no child of mine will ever uber without an armed guard”.

Here are a couple of things you can do to plot a happier course between the two paths I have mentioned.

First, go to the facts. Whether you live in a load shedding South Africa or a Brexit-fearing Britain, the broad facts across the world are in our favour. For example, life expectancies are up, along with access to education, the number of children in schools, immunisation rates, and many more, while homicides, the number of people living in extreme poverty, and disease infection rates are falling. So, let the facts help you to balance your feelings, and embrace the fact-based worldview.

Second, distinguish between the concepts of “weather” and “climate”. Current events are weather, what happens over longer periods is climate. Power outages are weather. The fact that 30% more South Africans have electricity now compared to 1994 is climate – not headline worthy, but true. Even a cursory study of history reveals a stark truth: most profound problems such as poverty, hunger, and violence are being reduced steadily. The failure to find dramatic short-term solutions is not a failure of what we are doing, but of how we think about our incremental improvements. Distinguishing between weather and climate trains us to understand that, as Rosling says, life can be both bad today and improving at the same time.

Finally, beware of all-or-nothing, either/or thinking. Either the world is good or it is bad; either politicians are the devil’s spawn or saviours leading us to the promised land. A healthier psychological position is to acknowledge that sometimes things are grey. In the midst of the bad we can see some good, and we can hold seemingly contradictory points of view. A non-binary view of the world allows for the ebb and flow of positive and negative. It sees people as simultaneously capable of indifference and kindness (kissing your child goodbye while turning away from the beggar on the corner), and it helps us to deal with complexity and uncertainty. Letting go of either/or thinking is liberating and psychologically healthier.

If you can discipline yourself to think this way, you can become what Rosling calls a “possibilist”. A pessimist thinks that life will get worse, an optimist thinks that life will get better. Both are routinely disappointed. However, a possibilist “neither hopes without reason, nor fears without reason [and] constantly resists the overdramatic worldview”. A possibilist pays careful attention to the facts, and sees that improvement is possible.

In a nutshell: life (and Eskom) is bad, but improvements are possible. There is some light, in spite of the darkness.

• Judith Ancer is a clinical psychologist in practice in Johannesburg. She supervises and trains mental health professionals, educators, parents, and organisations, and is currently working on a book on mental health in the workplace.