Visit our COVID-19 site for latest information regarding how we can support you. For up to date information about the pandemic visit www.sacoronavirus.co.za.
A one-stop forum for all your banking questions
Life has changed and we have no idea when – or even if – it will ever go back to normal. Here are 5 ways to make rational decisions in the middle of mass social anxiety.
Even though the entire world has been impacted by the Covid-19 crisis, we aren’t all reacting to our ‘new normal’ in the same way. In fact, according to Gordon Asmundson, a psychology professor at the University of Regina, people are sitting at opposite ends of the ‘response’ spectrum, in either complacency or panic, and both extremes can be harmful.
The problem is that too much complacency can make us believe that ‘It won’t happen to me.’ These individuals won’t take proper precautions and may end up harming those around them – particularly more compromised individuals whose immune systems cannot withstand infection.
On the other end of the spectrum, panic places an unnecessary burden on health systems, leads to panic buying and causes deep anxiety and even depression.
For most of us, we’re probably bouncing between the two extremes, which are panic and complacency. We’re unsure how we feel, or how we’re supposed to feel. We’re struggling to breathe one moment and thinking this is all so crazy it can’t be real, the next.
As the crisis stretches on however, it’s becoming more real – which means most of us are moving more towards panic than we potentially were before. As most of us have experienced over the past few weeks, fear is contagious, and so if we don’t start evaluating our emotions and taking measures to control them, we might find ourselves sinking deeper and deeper into a state of dread – which is not at all conducive to good decision-making.
5 Ways to make decisions rationally
We can’t control what is going to happen with Covid-19, but we can begin to control our decision-making abilities. Here are five ways to get started.
There are no clear or sure-fire ways to navigate this crisis. We are all in new and unfamiliar territory. Finding simple yet effective ways to manage our emotions and make better decisions will help us to take some control over our lives, which will have a positive domino effect on everything else.
You can nominate posts from the Talk section to the community’s Learn knowledge base.
Just click on the Topic options dropdown above the post and select ‘nominate to knowledge base’.
If the post meets the criteria, we’ll turn it into a knowledge base article.