Sussman Psychological Consulting

Gratitude is always an option...

On Maintaining a Balanced View of Human Affairs OK, I get it: SARS-CoV-2. It's dangerous. It can cause COVID-19, a dangerous and potentially lethal disease for which the few available treatments are less than powerful, and also less available than could be hoped. But the methods people are using are successfully flattening the curve in numerous locations world wide. So: keep up the good work, self-isolating, physical distancing, hand washing...You know the drill. ...Continue reading

Bear with me here if I'm misinterpreting available statistics from the WHO. It seems the annual worldwide crude death rate when I was coming of age was a bit above 17 deaths/1000 population. The projected figure for this year is a bit above 7 deaths/1000 population. It seems I've survived worse times than these. So have you BTW; the graph slopes fairly consistently downward over increasing years, reflecting an overall reduction in the chance one will die in any particular yea...r from past to present. Now I am ABSOLUTELY NOT saying don't shelter in place, or to just go ahead and skip anything advised by reliable medical sources. NOT AT ALL. I'm just saying that with the technological advances in social media it's become really easy to fall into doomsurfing and come out with the wrong idea. It seems to me that a danger one commonly encounters when using medical sites to self-diagnose is comparable to the danger that seems to be growing increasingly present when users are accessing social media; to wit, the danger that a person may scare themselves unnecessarily is significant and real. One useful technique for putting ones mind to rest in times of trouble is to ask and answer the question "Is there anything that I can do TODAY to prepare for, or to mitigate the impact of, or to successfully avoid the trouble I fear is possible?" If the answer is yes, one goes ahead and does that, whatever that is. One goes ahead and does that without delay. However, if the answer is no, one then resolves to return to the issue and ask oneself the same question tomorrow and then puts the issue aside for today. If the issue returns to mind, one simply repeats the process. I think I know why this process works: Worrying can create the false mental illusion that one is doing something that needs doing. Reminding oneself that there is nothing useful that remains to be done today reduces the power of this illusion to put the mind into a fruitless spin. No longer stuck on the spin cycle, the mind can apply itself to more useful pursuits, or to resting up for tomorrow.

Thanks to my Leadership colleague Patty Alice. As she says, a useful perspective.

Not that any of this sounds bad to do... Just don't go thinking the story it tells is factual bc it's not. And the self-test it proposes isn't a diagnostic at all. The one I received said it was copy/pasted. Folks, please read and heed: Getting a person to copy/paste items to their timeline also copies any malware embedded in the item to their FB account. You WANT to get hacked? Keep copying and pasting every cute même and newsy note when it asks you to do it. You'll be hacked in no time. With Covid-19 keeping us to home so, marketers and scammers are apparently at it in force. Caveat emptor. There are more types of viruses than one. Stay strong.