I Feel Again Angry I Feel Helpless

How to restore your sense of control when yous experience powerless

Covid-19 has changed our lives in countless uncompromising ways. Yet we hate feeling powerless – then how do we take back control?

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If a century of psychological scientific discipline has taught the states anything almost the fundamental needs of the human mind, it is that we yearn for the feeling of control.

Whatever their background, people who perceive that they have power to determine their own fate – from tiny short-term decisions to important life events – tend to be happier, healthier and more productive. Even the most challenging circumstances can be more bearable if we experience that nosotros have some say in the outcome, while small stresses may become exaggerated if nosotros feel that nosotros are completely helpless to change the situation. "Powerlessness is inherently threatening, and it prompts a strong desire to reduce or eliminate that feeling," says Eric Anicich, an assistant professor of management and organisation at the Academy of Southern California Marshall Schoolhouse of Business organization.

This enquiry could not be more relevant in 2020. Aslope the fright of the virus itself, the pandemic has limited our lives personally and professionally in countless ways, with the ongoing economic uncertainty and restrictions threatening to terminal well into 2021.

There is no uncertainty that this loss of personal control volition have affected our wellbeing, but Anicich's contempo research suggests that many people have coped much ameliorate than they might have initially expected with the new challenges. And for those of united states of america who are yet struggling, psychologists like Anicich have some advice for the all-time ways to restore our sense of personal power and command – both now and in the futurity.

We similar being in control - but our sense of self-determination has been thrown into disarray past the pandemic (Credit: Alamy)

Lost liberty

A rudimentary want for self-conclusion may have emerged deep in our evolutionary history. While we may not often think of other creatures exercising their free will, many species suffer when their autonomy is taken away from them. For almost a century, scientists have known that simply restricting an fauna's movements will result in a marked stress response. Although there is no threat of physical injury, the inability to motion and act freely leads to the release of hormones like adrenaline and cortisol, a quickened heartbeat and the formation of gastric ulcers. And even small freedoms tin can have a large impact: giant pandas given a 'chamber' in their enclosure, which allows them to choose between two distinct environments, fare amend than those with only one space to roam.

While at that place are clear upstanding problems with deliberately placing humans in severely stressful situations, various cleverly designed studies evidence that the perception of control over our circumstances can profoundly affect the ways that nosotros respond to challenges. The furnishings are especially problematic if we feel that we take lost power that nosotros once had. In 2008, for instance, Belgian and British researchers asked participants to play a menu game, during which they could receive a small electric stupor. In the first third of the game, the participants were able to learn which responses in the game would bring the shock, providing them with some level of control over the pain. At a certain point, notwithstanding, these rules vanished, and the shocks arrived regularly without any link to the participants' behaviour. Although the electricity was administered at exactly the same intensity, the participants' loss of control over their hurting made the experience considerably more unpleasant, resulting in greater fear and distress, and a reduced power to concentrate.

The same patterns have been observed in many other scenarios, including longer-term studies examining people'south mental and physical health over months and years. Importantly, our perception of control is relatively subjective, and scientists have found that this can influence our wellbeing independently of the many other factors that decide the actual amount of command we have over our lives. People who study feeling little ability in their lives tend to show a greater take a chance of illnesses and death, even when y'all control for factors like their socioeconomic status.

As the beast-research demonstrated, these long-term health effects may partly arise from the enhanced physiological response to stress, but it could also ascend from behavioural differences besides. When people feel helpless, they are less likely to have care of their own health through practise and nutrition. If you doubt your power to have charge of a situation, then any effort will seem futile, and the perception tin can get self-fulfilling.

These differences in mindset may explicate the mode dissimilar people respond to events like unemployment. Any chore loss is hard to handle, only people with lower "perceived control" earlier the redundancy find it harder to find a new job after. (The two factors could, of course, be cocky-reinforcing  – since, in this situation, your sense of personal empowerment may also depend on your chances of successful job hunting.)

Animals showroom a stress response when they are not able to move around freely, research shows (Credit: Alamy)

Heightened resilience

These previous studies had all tended to look at individual crises, rather than global events. But thanks to a chance coincidence, Anicich has already captured a snapshot of our feelings during the early on days of the pandemic, which immediately threw billions of lives into disarray and severely limited many of the behaviours that nosotros had taken for granted.

His team was already setting up an online psychological survey to mensurate Americans' general experiences of work when the crisis became credible in March, allowing them to tape people's immediate reactions to the Covid-19 upheaval. "We had the very fortunate opportunity to collect data at a time when things were really irresolute quickly," he says. "It concluded up being a kind of natural experiment." The participants were questioned three times a day for 10 days, from the Monday after the World Health Organisation categorised the virus as a "global pandemic" and the United states of america government declared a state of national emergency. To measure their sense of command, the participants were asked to rate on a calibration of 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly hold) the statement "Correct at present I feel powerless"; for authenticity, another chemical element of autonomy, they had to rate the argument "I feel like I am able to truly exist myself correct now".

Equally y'all might expect, most people'southward sense of autonomy immediately savage off a cliff, but Anicich's participants began to bounciness back surprisingly quickly. Although they had not experienced a complete recovery by the end of the 10 days, the sense of powerless and authenticity were both heading towards the pre-pandemic levels recorded in a separate sample, taken in September 2019.

Interestingly, he plant that participants with a neurotic personality initially suffered the well-nigh, just their recovery was then more rapid. "Neuroticism oft gets a very bad rap – it's viewed every bit kind of a toxic trait," he says. "Just my estimate would exist that highly neurotic people are going near their lives with a highly vigilant mindset, and and so they're cued to detect threats in their environment and to respond to those threats quickly, when they emerge." (See Why 'healthy neurotics' tin can thrive in stressful times.)

The antidote

Anicich wasn't able to collect data over a longer period, and he suspects that the helpless feelings will have ebbed and flowed over the subsequent months, every bit the crisis unfolded. "It's possible that participants saw steady recovery gains for some menstruum of time earlier new personal or societal setbacks or restrictions emerged which may have caused another dip in their sense of autonomy, following the fasten in the second moving ridge of Covid cases, for example."

Fortunately, he has some tips for ways that we could all regain a sense of command, at present and in the future.

He says that the showtime step may be to recognise our ain biases in the way nosotros appraise our circumstances. Thank you to "affective forecasting errors", humans tend to exist bad at estimating how they will feel in the future. For positive events – such as winning the lottery – we imagine that we volition feel much happier, for much longer, than nosotros actually exercise. And for negative events the reverse is truthful: we struggle to imagine how nosotros'll become over a threat or disappointment. "The intensity and duration of negative experiences isn't always as bad as people think information technology volition be," says Anicich. Simply reminding ourselves of that fact might aid to relieve the initial sense of hopelessness nosotros often feel on hearing bad news, he proposes.

Fifty-fifty if your work place has changed dramatically, finding ways to make it work for yous tin can help (Credit: Alamy)

Since we oft measure out our sense of ability to other people, it's also important to avoid making negative comparisons, says Anicich. We might exist envious of someone in ameliorate circumstances who appears to have more freedom, or we might keep recalling how much more control we had in the past – only those kinds of thoughts will only heighten our feelings of helplessness.

On a practical level, we can establish a sense of command by looking for small ways to ease the situation. If you lot take been forced to work from home, setting your own schedules and optimising your space could help you to regain some sense of autonomy. Bosses should likewise help to empower their employees, says Anicich. "They should try to take more than of a hands-off approach as opposed to micromanaging employees."

Astrid Homan, a professor of work and organisational psychology at the University of Amsterdam, advocates a similar approach. Working with Maria Dijkstra, she recently asked participants to detail their apply of vii different coping strategies, alongside questionnaires measuring their perceived control over their lives and their general wellbeing. As yous might wait, abstention tactics are less constructive than proactively confronting whatever problems that are within your accomplish. And deliberately reframing your thoughts, to put your troubles in perspective, can itself restore a sense of personal autonomy, fifty-fifty when the stress itself is impossible to evade.

In the pandemic, this might involve resetting our expectations of what we tin can achieve, and acknowledging the limits of the situation. "You might recognise that you lot have to lower your standards, and that information technology's not because you don't want to work hard, only because you merely can't exercise everything yous used to exercise before," says Homan.

Her findings, and Anicich'southward full general advice, both think the Stoic philosophy – originating in Ancient Hellenic republic –  of separating what is inside your power, from what is not, and and so looking for means to reinterpret the situation. Although we tin't control the earth, nosotros are able to alter our reaction to information technology. Information technology may have emerged in wildly different circumstances, simply that time-tested wisdom could be the ultimate antidote to the sense of powerlessness that we are all facing today.

David Robson is the author of The Intelligence Trap: Why Smart People Do Dumb Things (WW Norton/Hodder & Stoughton). He is @d_a_robson on Twitter.

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Source: https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20201209-how-to-restore-your-sense-of-control-when-you-feel-powerless