Better Coping with External Changes

 

If there’s one thing that 2020 taught us, it is that we’ll be forced to respond to external changes – and at a pace we may not appreciate.  The increased incidence of mental health issues, including the rise in suicide, has proven that we don’t always cope well with external changes.  However, there are things that you can do to cope better yourself and to help those around you cope more effectively with externally-induced change.

Stages of Grief

Elizabeth Kubler-Ross worked with patients who were dying and their families.  She identified seven stages of grieving that she believed everyone went through when confronted with a loss: shock, denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance, and completion.  Her assertion is that while everyone goes through these stages, they do not go through them at the same rate, nor do they feel them at the same degree of severity.

It is with this insight that we can seek to help individuals move through the stages of grief at a rate that is appropriate to them.  While dealing with the loss of a loved one or facing your own mortality is obviously a very large, life-altering event, the changes that we’re forced to cope with are frequently less intense.  As a result, while it may take someone years of grieving the loss of a loved one, we should expect that we can move through the stages of grief much quicker if the changes are less dramatic.

Change Resistance

William Bridges surmised that what was being seen as change resistance wasn’t change resistance at all.  It was loss aversion.  It’s the same loss aversion that Daniel Kahneman studied.  Loss is at the heart of Kubler-Ross’ work on grief.  People were grieving their extreme loss.  In Kubler-Ross’ case, the path was towards acceptance of the loss.  This is the path that we need to travel when we’re facing externally-induced changes.

Bridges believed that the current state (or previous state in the case of an externally-induced change) was, to some degree, comfortable, because it was known.  Even when presented with a vision of a new reality that is positive, there is a messy neutral zone of unknowns that must be navigated.  Kubler-Ross’ patients found themselves navigating these same spaces.  They had to learn how to live without their loved one.  This neutral zone creates frustration, anger, and anxiety as people naturally wonder how things will be and whether they have what it takes to cope with the change.  This question of capability is an assessment of the change as a stressor and the individual’s capabilities to overcome the potential impacts of the change.

Stress and Stressors

Richard Lazarus’ work surrounded emotions and how they came to be.  In his research, he realized that stress wasn’t externally caused.  Instead, stress is the result of a person’s assessment of both a stressor and the capabilities they have to mitigate, prevent, or overcome the result of that stressor.  As the perceived probability and impact of a stressor was reduced, so was stress.  As the assessment of both internal capabilities and the capabilities of those in their community who would be willing to help them increased, stress was again reduced.

Stress in the short term is a useful evolutionary trick designed to save us from the surprise attack.  However, as Robert Sapolsky’s research has indicated, sustained stress has many negative psychological and physiological effects.  Humans have subsumed a mechanism for quick avoidance of threats and, with our capacity for mental rehearsal, turned it into a long-term health problem.

Complicating matters is the work of Sam Glucksberg, who discovered in the early 1960s that even a small amount of stress in the form of a competition for monetary reward was enough to substantially reduce performance in a test that required that the participants escape a trap of functional fixedness.  In short, the participants were asked to solve a problem where they received a container full of items and had to transform the container itself into a part of the solution.  Under the competitive time pressure, the participants took three and a half minutes longer to solve the problem.  This means the impact of even a mild amount of stress may prevent people from thinking in ways that allow for innovative solutions to the problems they face.

Reducing Stress, Increasing Hope

Lazarus’ work provides clues to how to mitigate stress and get better results.  Techniques that minimize the probability or impact of a stressor will decrease stress, as will increasing the perception of capabilities.  One way to do this is to play the “worst-case scenario game” – but to play it fairly.

Reducing Stress via the Worst-Case Scenario

We all naturally gravitate to negative assessments, but by pushing these to the outer limits, we can sometimes reign in unrealistic perceptions and reduce stress.  The worst-case scenario game assumes that the stressor becomes a fact and that it has the maximum impact.  From there, the next move is to imagine how you’d respond and what the probable outcome will be.

It’s possible to play the game in an unfair way, where an asteroid crashes into the Earth or there is a zombie apocalypse from which there is no recovery.  However, when reasonable limits are applied, people often find that they have many more resources for coping than they had realized.  While they may not like the outcomes associated with the stressor becoming real, they realize that the outcomes are neither fatal nor permanent.

Instilling Hope through Waypower and Willpower

An equally powerful way to reduce stress is to instill hope.  Instilling hope cannot be done directly, but the work of C. J. Snyder breaks down hope into two components that can be developed.

The first component of hope is waypower.  That is, an understanding of how the hoped-for outcome will be achieved.  In this respect, the more that we can communicate plans or even ideas regarding the organization’s response to the change, the more we instill a sense of organizational waypower and encourage individuals to develop their own plans.

The second component that Snyder identifies is willpower.  Here, the work of Roy Baumeister and John Tierney is helpful in understanding what willpower is and how it can be increased.  Like muscles, willpower is an exhaustible resource, as many experiments have proven.  We can wear out our willpower by exercising it for a long period of time.  Like our muscles, our willpower, when properly exercised, tends to increase in strength over time.  In the context of increasing hope, we can point to previous successes where the organization and individuals have overcome adverse circumstances and how this strengthened our willpower.

Acceptance

By reducing stress and increasing hope, we increase our capacity to accept the situation and adapt to the challenges that we’re facing through externally-inflicted change.  If we want people to go through the grief process and move on quickly, we should look for ways to encourage their acceptance of the known losses and reduce the stress associated with the change.