Commentary

The Mother Of All Mood Swings

How are you doing? 

Yes, you. 

I know how I’m doing — today, anyway. It varies day to day. It depends on the news. It depends on the weather. It depends on Trump’s Twitter stream.

Generally, I’m trying to process the abnormal with the tools I have. I don’t know precisely how you’re doing, but I suspect you’re going through your own processing with your own tools.

I do know one thing. The tools I have are pretty much the same tools you have, at least when we look at them in the broad strokes. It’s one of the surprising things about humans. We all go through some variation of the same process when we deal with life’s big events. 

Take grief and other traumatic life changes. We’re pretty predictable in how we deal with it. So predictable, in fact, that there’s a psychological model with its own acronym for it: DABDA. It’s known as the five stages of grief:  denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. It was first introduced in 1969 by Swiss-American psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross.  

advertisement

advertisement

Noted American neurobiologist and author Robert Sapolsky marvels on the universality of our processing of grief in his book  “The Trouble with Testosterone”:  “Poems, paintings, symphonies by the most creative artists who ever lived, have been born out of mourning… We cry, we rage, we demand that the oceans’ waves stop, that the planets halt their movements in the sky, all because the earth will no longer be graced by the one who sang lullabies as no one else could; yet that, too, is reducible to DABDA. Why should grief be so stereotypical?”

But it’s not just bad stuff we process this way. If you look at how we process any big change, you’ll find there are pretty predictable stages we humans go through.

So why are we so predictable in how we deal with change? In general, these are all variations of the sensemaking cycle, which is how we parse the world around us. We start with a frame — an understanding of what we believe to be true — and we constantly compare this to new information we get from our environment. 

Because we are cognitively energy-efficient, we are reluctant to throw out old frames and adopt new ones, especially when those new ones are being forced upon us. It’s just the way we’re wired. 

But life change is usually a solo journey, and we rely on anchors to help us along the way. We rely on our psychoscapes, the cognitive environments in which our minds typically operate. Friends, families, favorite activities, social diversions: these are the things that we can rely on for an emotional boost, even if only temporarily.

But what if everyone is experiencing trauma at the same time? What if our normal psychoscape is no longer there? What then?

Then we enter the SNAFU zone.

SNAFU is an acronym coined in World War II:  “situation normal, all f*cked up.”  It was used to refer to a situation that is bad, but is also a normal state of affairs. 

We are talking a lot about the new normal. But here’s the thing: The new situation normal is going to be a shit show, guaranteed to be all f*cked up. And it’s going to be that way because everyone  — and I mean everyone — is going to be going through the Mother of all Mood Swings. 

First of all, although the stages of managing change may be somewhat universal, the path we take through them is anything but. Some will get stuck at the denial and anger stage and storm the state legislature with assault weapons demanding a haircut. Some are already at acceptance, trying to navigate through a world that is officially SNAFU. We are all processing the same catalyst of change, but we’re at different places in that process. 

Secondly, the psychological anchors we depend on may not be there for us. When we are going through collective stress, we tend to rely on community. We revert to our evolutionary roots of being natural herders. Without exception, the way humans have always dealt with massive waves of change is to come together with others. And this is where a pandemic that requires social distancing throws a king-sized wrench in the works. We can’t even get a hug to help us through a bad day.

As the levels of our collective stress climb, there are bound to be a lot of WTF moments. Nerves will fray and tempers will flare. We will be walking on eggshells. There will be little patience for perspectives that differ from our own. Societal divides will deepen and widen. The whole world will become moodier than a hormonal teenager. 

Finally, we have all of the above playing out in a media landscape that was already fractured to an unprecedented level going into this. All the many things that are FU in this particular SNAFU will be posted, tweeted, shared and reshared. There will be no escape from it. 

Unlike the hormonal teenager, we can’t send COVID-19 to its room.

Next story loading loading..