Employee Mental HealthInspirationsWhatever You Do… Don’t Panic!
Life often brings unexpected challenges that can cause anxiety. Whether it’s demanding work situations, global crises, or rapid changes, it’s essential to remain calm and focus on what you can control. Panic and excessive worry won’t help—in fact, they can make the situation worse. Instead, aim for a rational approach and work to minimize stress. The key is to stay composed and find solutions that keep you balanced and grounded.
Mental Shortcuts
Psychology provides us with useful tools to better handle challenging situations. One of these tools is heuristics—mental shortcuts that help us quickly solve complex problems. Heuristics are fast, efficient, and often accurate, but they can sometimes lead to incorrect conclusions. For example, the availability heuristic influences how we perceive risk based on how easily we can recall a particular situation. This explains why many people fear flying more than driving, even though the likelihood of a car accident is much higher.
While it’s far more probable to die in a car accident, any plane crash immediately becomes headline news. Specifically, 1 in 105 people may die in a car accident, compared to 1 in 5 million in a plane crash. Car accidents happen every day and rarely make it to front-page news or evening broadcasts. Plane crashes, on the other hand, are heavily covered by the media, skewing our judgment of their frequency and risk.
Why Do People Worry Despite the Data?
This ties into another heuristic called the framing effect—the way information is presented can significantly shape our perception. For instance, if you were told a surgery has a 5% mortality rate, would you agree to it? What if you were told it has a 95% success rate? Hearing that surgery has a 95% chance of success sounds far more optimistic than being told there’s a 5% chance of failure, even though both represent the same reality. Research shows people are more likely to agree to surgery in the second case and avoid it in the first.
These mental tricks influence decision-making in everyday life. Recognizing these biases is the first step toward overcoming them. As Daniel Kahneman, the father of cognitive biases, famously said: “The first step to avoiding judgment errors is to recognize that they exist.”
