Afraid of the Dark

Cool article in another NYTimes.com blog -- this time by Harvard psychology professor Daniel Gilbert -- discussing the psychological connection between uncertainty and unhappiness. He says the hardest part of the current economic recession is not knowing what's going to happen. Counterintuitively, knowing things will be bad makes us happier than knowing there is a possibility they will be good. In his words:

Why would we prefer to know the worst than to suspect it? Because when we get bad news we weep for a while, and then get busy making the best of it. We change our behavior, we change our attitudes. We raise our consciousness and lower our standards. We find our bootstraps and tug. But we can’t come to terms with circumstances whose terms we don’t yet know. An uncertain future leaves us stranded in an unhappy present with nothing to do but wait.

This is closely related to something I heard (and believe), about the relationship between psychological stress and control over a situation. Things can be bad, but as long as feel we have control over the situation, we aren't too stressed. Conversely, it's when we feel things are out of our control that we experience stress. A useful application of this principal in my own life is to look at any situation, and try to understand what things you can control and what things you can't... then accept the things you can't control and only worry about the ones you can.

(image by Shoboshobo)