Humans famously discount the future.

We humans famously discount the future and instead, obsess over the present. It’s a damning trait because with the pace of change now exponential, threats and opportunities long assumed to be years away are now arriving daily.

This innate blindness to the future begs the question: How confident are you that you’re aware of these emerging market dynamics?

The dynamics below come from major global studies by Lindsay Foresight & Stratagem. The first was done in 2018, commissioned by the 4A’s and titled The Quantum Age of Marketing™. Others come from 2019 studies by Lindsay Foresight & Stratagem. Together, they uncover eleven megatrends with an inordinately large impact on any organization’s ability to drive growth and value creation in the future –or transform itself for viability the day after tomorrow.

1. Commerce, culture and consumption are converging. Among the implications are major shifts in what people are moved to consume; a 180-degree flip in how products and brands are successfully launched and scaled.

2. Increasingly, people lead no-line lives, going back and forth between online and offline worlds as autonomically as breathing. Implications include the degree of speed with which all companies must now connect customers and employees with frictionless, optimized, personalized experiences. And because anything in an organization can positively or negatively impact this (customer service, IT, finance, innovation, marketing and more), it means everyone in an organization must have the same, right understanding of what experiences must deliver and how success will be measured. For example: Optimized performance requires a company purpose, value proposition and brand promise that give the company a reason to live in the lives of customers; employee understanding of the role they play in its delivery. This means companies are particularly vulnerable if employees have an uneven understanding of modern marketing (which is customer-experience focused); if they have little first-person customer data for insight and improvement-tracking; if the staff, C-Suite and board are naive on how people truly do develop preferences or make buying decisions. Enterprise-wide sophistication on all these is now critical because…

3. Companies are no longer dealing with people but rather, with Gods. This is because people today have the power to bless or damn - — overnight- — a product, brand, cause, executive or marketing initiative. That’s why it’s imperative that everyone in a company know what psychology, neuro-psych, social psych, quantitative psych and behavioral economics tell us it now takes to influence people’s attitudes and behaviors in our favor.

4. Relentless disruption, disintermediation and dramatic opportunity are the new norm. Executives should just expect it and have a menu of proactive strategies such as auditing themselves and customers to note where there is vulnerability. Other strategies include dramatic increases in innovation, joint partnerships and acquisitions. A side effect of this is the next trend …

5. Categories are fusing, getting confusing, and evolving into something much broader. This means businesses need to anticipate now the new and broader competitive sets (McKinsey calls them ecosystems) in which we’ll all soon be competing. To win in the face of them, we can take comfort that …

6. Previous barriers to growth, innovation and partnerships are being toppled. Technology has made commerce borderless. Culture, consumption, careers and opportunity, too. Staffing, partnerships and revenue models that would have been impossible a couple years ago are no longer so. In fact, so amazing is the pace that …

7. Nothing is impossible anymore except what we tell ourselves can’t be done. But ‘we ain’t seen nothing yet.’ As Michael Malone expressed in The Wall Street Journal: “A thousand years from now what will be remembered most about our time will be its stunning efflorescence of innovation and entrepreneurship… Now…everything is at play…to completely remake the world.”

8. Destined to accelerate the potential of companies and brands to have competitive advantage and transform their future are advances in quantum computing, quantum physics and quantum biology. And with quantum computing likely available on the cloud in only a few years, the result will be a dramatic increase in learning from large data sets related to consumer behavior and also, new product possibilities.

9. Advantage in accelerating growth, value creation and marketing effectiveness will only come from faster learning and strategic, pre-emptive foresight. The future belongs to companies where, across the entire enterprise, people are equipped to learn more, faster, about what delights customers. What moves their sentiments and behaviors. This means every company must re-envision itself as an ecosystem connecting customers, employees, vendors and data to have more and better foresight in real time and no-line ways. This requires companies to re-architect operational and revenue models for extreme agility and total customer centricity.

10. Business strategy is merging with marketing strategy. Years ago, Peter Drucker advocated: “Marketing is not a function; it is the whole business from customers’ point of view.” And given the speed with which Gods today can bless or damn things, companies that do not operate and optimize from customers’ point of view will find themselves vulnerable competitively and financially. For example, the agile operations required to please customers today cannot happen if the basic 4 (product, place of distribution, price and promotion) are optimized separately from each other. With first-person data, rapid testing and proactive modeling all 4 can and should be optimized holistically. This is just one example of how today, all business operations are marketing operations. How all in a company are now marketers. How, already, business strategy is tantamount to marketing strategy and vice versa. (A key conclusion of the Lindsay Foresight & Stratagem study: The degree to which an organization or brand converges its business and marketing strategy predicts its survival.)

11. The future belongs to those with new growth playbooks. Strategies of the past are no match for a future without precedent. They’ll be impotent in the face of what the World Economic Forum describes as a “whole new ecosystem of existence.”. Deloitte strategists and authors of Detonate: Why-and how-Corporations Must Blow Up Best Practices to Survive explain: What many deem to be best practices are anchored in the perception of permanence. Long used playbooks were built for a slowness and predictability that no longer exists. Falling back on them will feel comfortable but will not foster the kind of transformation needed to prepare for the day after tomorrow.

We all have designs on others. And they on us. This desire to influence is innate: From humankind’s earliest days, to survive we had to persuade others to join in the hunt for the wooly mammoth, and agree on enemies to fight. Science tells us the brain actually evolved to want to change others. It’s why laments that “the other side doesn’t listen to reason” are probably useless. Jonathan David Haidt, acclaimed professor of social psychology at New York University’s Stern School of Business explains: We evolved to listen to reasoning that supports whatever our own conclusion, not others. We evolved not so much to learn — as to gain advantage in influencing others.

Having spent 40 years researching and speaking around the world (including SXSW this year) and professionally practicing (via marketing) the psychology of human decision-making and behavioral economics, my sense is that never before have people been so obsessed with influencing others to buy into whatever they’re advocating.

It’s not just that social media platforms and digital technology now enable people to scale their efforts at influence. It’s also the plethora of social activists today, brands desperate to accelerate growth, the big shift to direct-to-consumer marketing where the ability to move behavior is paramount for any marketer. And given the imperative of all organizations to transform for future, business and career survival depends on getting people to change.

No matter your job title or the industry in which you work, today we’re all in the same business: The business of trying to change human behavior (more at LFandS.com. ) And it’s serious business: whether or not we really do move minds and behaviors can now be tracked-and in real time. Our employability will increasingly depend on being really good at it. The ability to change people’s attitudes and behaviors is now a core competency required of us all.

So it’s imperative we learn all we can on the moral and ethical ways that work. It’s why I recommend the article How to Change Anyone’s Mind in the Wall Street Journal’s Weekend Edition of February 22–23. By Wharton Marketing Professor Jonah Berger, it’s a great read. It suggests his new book (The Catalyst: How to change anyone’s mind) would be a wise investment.

But then, far be it from me to try and influence you.

Lindsay Foresight & Stratagem identifies emerging issues and opportunities on the horizon, connecting dots others don’t see to have insight and foresight that, when taught via speeches or workshops, reframes situations, opens minds and changes conversations in a way leads to more effective business, brand, innovation and marketing strategies. The firm’s research and playbooks are informed and vetted by a global think tank.

Study Report and Strategic Playbook

What behavioral science teaches us about the innate and contagious power of fear and anxiety.

And tips for how to quell them.

As someone recently pointed out, USA now stands for the United States of Anxiety. If all forecasts are true, each of us is likely to feel even more anxious as we wait to see how our economy revs up again, amidst COVID-19. In the meantime, a sense of danger for our loved ones, incomes, and way of life are all understandable — but for a reason you may not realize. Each and every person on the planet today is here precisely because, over millennia, our genes have been optimized to sense danger and react to it in often irrational ways. This is evolution’s “survival of the fittest” kicking in with you right now.

So go ahead, be afraid. It will increase your odds. But don’t be afraid at the expense of being wise.

Anxiety brings with it its own danger to your health. Unmanaged, fear and melancholy can easily “go viral” and endanger the well-being of others, the marketplace and world order. John Maynard Keynes was the first to allude to these “animal spirits” within us which have such impact on others and the economy. Writing about them in March 2020, Robert Shiller, the Nobel prize-winning economist observed: What we have now is really two epidemics. One is the coronavirus, but the other is an epidemic of fear driven by “narratives” we tell ourselves and others. He warns that emotions carried by the narratives have more influence on thoughts and behaviors than scientific reality may justify.

What’s more, in a world where the marketplace is one big conversation moving at the speed of light, apocalyptic narratives can infect people’s spirits much faster than employers, consumers and governments can react. Flattening the curve of fear’s contagiousness is important lest it create even more danger ahead.

And while earnest Facebook posts of tiny concerts, evening news reports on acts of kindness and “we’re in this together” on everyone’s lips are all wonderful things, they will be insufficient to fight fear and do little to speed our recovery from mass melancholy.

What would help? A science lesson. And based on it, a hygiene protocol we’re all asked to follow.

Just as treating COVID-19 requires teaching everyone the why (science) and how (protocol) to rigorously wash hands, disinfect and sneeze into our elbows, so too does fighting fear and melancholy require teaching everyone good mental hygiene (the protocol) and the science (why) behind it. The science is behavioral science. This is the body of evidence and insight born of psychology, sociology, evolutionary biology, neuroscience quantitative psychology — which concerns itself with the statistical modeling of behavioral data — and marketing, which is now rich with statistical evidence on what moves people’s attitudes and behaviors.

For over 40 years I’ve been a scholar and professional practitioner of behavioral science in application to what drives commerce, culture and consumption; habits; the stories we tell ourselves and each other; marketing and brand strategy; leadership dynamics in the boardroom and the C-Suite.

My expertise is the subconscious and conscious drivers of people’s attitudes, decision-making and behaviors.

From this vantage point I’m convinced that if everyone in the country had a better understanding of the science behind fear and anxiety an, directly related to it, suggestions for quelling them, the societal benefits right now would be significant. What’s more, the return on educating everyone now would pay off for decades to come.

So here’s a short course. Despite the length, it still represents only select highlights from the body of knowledge that exists. But in it you’ll realize learning that’s useful today but also, learning that’s helpful outside of crises. So even if you pass it along now to family, friends, co-workers, your boss, investors and board, consider saving and resending it again a year from now. The more everyone knows about the science of how we humans tick, the stronger we’ll be at handling today, tomorrow and the day after.

#1 AS HUMANS, OUR NATURAL DEFAULT PROGRAM IS ?
As Bill Bryson pointed out so eloquently: “Consider the fact that, for 3.8 billion years, a period of time older than the Earth’s mountains and rivers and oceans…not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stuck fast, untimely wounded or otherwise deflected from its life’s quest of delivering a tiny charge of genetic material to the right partner at the right moment to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that could result — eventually, astoundingly, and all too briefly — in you.”

This means that your genes truly are optimized to read and react to real and imagined danger from a time before brains as we know them today developed. It is in the “evolutionary ancient central amygdala” that innate fears reside, explains Robert Sapolsky, the globally-revered expert in evolutionary biology and professor of neurological science at Stanford University. In his masterwork Behave, he details how the central amygdala is home to complex circuits of excitation. Even today it innately senses danger and drives a lot of our more complex brain functions. It’s surrounded by the also primitive basolateral amygdala which learns new things to fear, then informs the central amygdala to immediately respond with stress hormones and a mobilization of the sympathetic nervous system. So, just like rats that receive a shock accompanied by a tone then learn to expect the shock just from hearing the tone, our own amygdala is so conditioned to danger we read it into situations even where it doesn’t exist.

What’s more, we’re over-conditioned to expect danger and react dramatically to it. Jason Zweig (author of Your Money and Your Brain) explains, it’s because of the degree of surprise and bad outcomes experienced from something truly dangerous. While good things are also memorable, they’re not so critical to survival so our brains never attune to them as strongly as danger.

Of course, there’s more to our brains than the amygdala. Later areas that evolved are said to be the most mammalian and especially in primates, home to cognition, memory, storage, and abstract thought. Sapolsky describes the neocortex as, “the gleaming, logical, analytical crown jewel where info from the other parts of the brain goes to be decoded.” When one consciously thinks about something, such as weighing whether a danger is real or not, this is where the processing takes place and sends signals to the more primitive parts of the brain to “calm down.”

However, for all the marvels science has discovered about the power of these more recently evolved parts of our brain, there’s this irony: While our brains have the capability to weigh matters (such as whether or not a danger is real, and smart strategies in the face of it), apparently our brains also evolved to avoid this kind of sifting and winnowing!

As Daniel Kahneman, Nobel Prize winner and author of the seminal work Thinking Fast and Slow explains: “Thinking is to humans as swimming is to cats; we can do it, but we’d prefer not to.”

That single bit of science makes all the difference in the discussion of mental hygiene. Optimized as we are to sense danger, not only are vulnerable to sensing it even where it doesn’t exist, we also tend to avoid thinking through if the danger is real to the extent we believe it to be.

Even if provided lots of data, detail and advice on why we should feel less anxious than we do, we’re not likely to study it and draw proper conclusions: Our brains are not wired to sort complex info. In a now famous grocery store experiment, researchers set up a table offering samples of jam. Sometimes there were six flavors to choose from, at other times, 24. While shoppers were more likely to stop at the table with more flavors, they were 10 times more likely to buy jam at the table with fewer choices. Having more options made it harder to think things through, and behave as those marketing jam would want.

Think of what this means when trying to lead people to undertake behaviors needed for good physical or mental health. Even when the stakes are high, people are unlikely to sort thru complex or conflicting info. At best, we’ll look for easy-to-read patterns in what we see and hear, then consciously or subconsciously be guided most by those.

#2 EVOLUTION FAVORED THOSE REALLY GOOD AT PERCEIVING PATTERNS.
Imagine walking down the savannah. You observe the shape of a berry that once made you sick so you avoid it. The body shape of that male? It’s similar to those who are successful at protecting mothers with babies, so you sidle up to him. Even at a cellular level our immune system is coded to recognize patterns such as invading bacteria and viruses. Each of your cells has an “identity” tag on its surface that marks it as a part of your body and no one else’s. What’s more, in responding to perceived danger we developed patterns of behavior, essentially decision-making shortcuts. That virus invading my body? FIGHT! That rustling sound in the tall grass? RUN!

#3 WE EVOLVED TO ACT FIRST, THINK LATER. AND MOST OF THE TIME, NOT THINK AT ALL.
People and civilizations advanced because trivial and frequent decisions and activities came to be done without our having to think much about them. It’s still true today. The brain processes an estimated 35,000 decisions a day, and the only way we get through them is shortcuts. Consciously and rationally weighing which toothpaste to buy or what to eat or which route to take to work could each take hours. No wonder, as Kahneman and the jam experiment point out, we humans prefer not to think. Rather, we evolved to favor mental shortcuts that make it easy to immediately decide, immediately act, move on.

Examples of this in real life are endless. Take the profession of marketing, where the whole point is to create and mobilize mental shortcuts in a brand’s favor. These include engraining in a consumer’s memory patterns (like brand names, logos, taglines) which, when a need arises in life, provide a decision-making short cut. Research and experience have found that people tend to automatically prefer brands they’ve heard of — or who’s logo and packaging they recognize — even if they’ve never experienced them. Irrationally but reliably, people equate brand visibility with brand leadership, quality, success and more, even before the actual product comes into play.

This is a perfect example of a human decision-making shortcut based on little or no conscious thought. Just based on one factor (like recall or recognition) we jump to all kind of conclusions about a brand or product. It’s irrational, but truly how the brain works. The other interesting thing about this is that recalling a brand’s name or recognizing it’s logo of packaging is usually learned implicitly.

It’s estimated that 80–95% of the info that drives our shortcuts is learned implicitly. So it’s not just the decision-making shortcuts that are below our consciousness, it’s how we came to them. Among the worst shortcuts are those prompt erroneous conclusions and irrational judgements based solely on a person’s gender, sexual identity, color, geographic origin, position on an issue or candidate or political party affiliation.

Yet many shortcuts are godsends. Imagine grocery shopping if, to make a decision, you had to read and compare every single package in a category. Instead, the shortcut you call upon is buying the same brand as last time. You look for a familiar logo or pattern on a package. Many decision-making shortcuts manifest themselves in daily habits that save us time. In fact, we defer to decision-making shortcuts most of the time.

Kahneman refers to this “fast” decision-making as System 1 thinking, a process that is intuitive, experience-based and generally below our level of cognition because of its rapidity. Of course, the speed and automaticity of it this skill is exactly what increased the odds of our ancestor’s survival. Probably in many ways ours, too.

Kahneman refers to a human’s alternative processing method as System 2. It’s more reflective, deliberative and seeks to double check or reconsider System 1 presumptions and decisions. It’s work, and as Kahneman stresses, we prefer to avoid it. So shortcuts — and the evolutionary conditioning behind them –still drive the majority of our decision-making.

When the thinking shortcut is behavioral, it’s called a habit. Some are famously unhealthy. Others, like rigorous handwashing when leaving a bathroom, bus or grocery store provide untold health benefits to individuals and society. Of course, in the face of COVID-19, the entire nation is now being taught, encouraged and habituated to better handwashing and sneezing techniques. So certainly we’re also capable of — en masse — teaching, encouraging and habituating other healthy protocols like those that improve our mental health. (see next article).

Now, when we humans do think, it’s not what you probably imagine…

#4 THE BRAIN DOESN’T ACTUALLY THINK AS WE THINK IT THINKS.
For centuries it was believed that people first carefully process what they’re seeing around them and how to behave in light of it; what they need and want and because of that, what they’ll buy and how much they’re willing to “pay.” But science now reveals such causality goes exactly the opposite way: The processing of information takes place beneath our cognition. When the need for action is triggered, a decision made by our subconscious rises to our conscious mind which rationalizes it after the fact with whatever tidbits that are handy, even though they’re likely to have little to do with the root of the actual decision. (Again, this is true even in what many presume to be their most thoughtful, rational and “executive-like” decisions.) The real driver of the decision comes from subconscious factors, implicit learning and shortcuts we don’t even realize.

The “aha” of many scientists (especially those in quantitative psych) is that people are conscious of what they want to buy or do buy only after they’ve chosen it.

For those dealing with fear and anxiety, what’s important to realize about this is not just that the brain doesn’t think as we think it thinks because it jumps to decisions which only come to our conscious mind later. It’s also that what drives our fear and anxiety doesn’t come to our conscious mind until after the subconscious has used it to drive decision-making shortcuts and behaviors. When you pair this with the conclusion of scientists that negative experiences sear themselves into the subconscious more than positive ones, it’s easy to see that the reason we are the way we are today (fearful and anxious) is because over millions of years danger and negative outcomes have conditioned our genes to just expect the worst. We’re not that different than aforementioned rats who were conditioned to expect the worst just from hearing a bell.

#5 WE EVOLVED TO HAVE A FUNDAMENTAL IMBALANCE IN FAVOR OF SEEING THINGS NEGATIVELY.
Scientists call this expectation “negativity bias.” It includes the tendency for bad events and emotions to affect us more strongly than positive ones. “We’re devastated by a word of criticism but unmoved by a shower of praise. We see the hostile face in the crowd and miss all the friendly smiles. We focus so much on bad news, especially in a digital world that magnifies its power, that we don’t realize how much better life is becoming for people around the world.”

Of the human tendency to expect the worst, social psychologists at Case Western University looked for situations in which bad events didn’t have such a strong impact on people. They hoped to identify patterns that would enable them to develop an elaborate, complex and nuanced theory about when bad is stronger versus when good is stronger. Despite scouring the research literature in psychology, sociology, economics, anthropology and other disciplines, they couldn’t find compelling counter examples of good being more influential.8

Negativity bias is easy to recognize in ourselves if you know where to look. It turns out that a bad first impression is much more influential that a good first impression. Again, from Daniel Kahneman (and his longtime collaborator Amos Tversky) thought of a financial loss (say, losing $1,000) has a larger impact on people’s behaviors than the thought of saving the same amount. (It’s irrational but true.)

Rory Sutherland, a long-revered practitioner of effective advertising, has written that the subconscious driving our behaviors is not a calculating machine but an inference machine. It does not decide, but rather places bets. It’s more preoccupied with avoiding disaster than obtaining perfection. “Human behavior makes much more sense when viewed from this standpoint of fears rather than desires. Why is it so difficult to encourage people to move their bank accounts? Not because it’s a bad decision overall but because it has a small but pertinent possibility of being catastrophically bad. Why do people follow the herd? Not because it’s the best thing to do but because it has a low chance of being egregiously awful. If a lot of people do something awful it is a fair assumption that it’s at least okay most of the time.”

You’ll recognize the latter as the panic induced over-buying and hoarding of bathroom tissue that came with COVID-19. It was anxiety induced and irrational like so much of our behavior. But as so many behavioral economists have proven, while our thinking may be irrational, it is irrational in highly predictable ways. (It’s the very predictability of some common irrational tendencies we all have that makes it exciting to think of the good that mass teaching of mental health tips to mitigate them could provide.)

Clearly, negative expectations hold great power over how we interpret the world, and why much of our anxiety is irrational: Researchers find that anxious individuals tend to allocate excess attention to threat and there is evidence that this cognitive bias causally contributes to the development and maintenance of even more anxiety. Said another way: Fear and anxiety distort the perception of risk. Perception of risk increases fear and anxiety. Fear and anxiety over what might happen overshadows rational thinking about what probably will happen. Whatever our level of thinking, it’s all very emotional, isn’t it?

#6: HUMAN DECISION-MAKING STARTS AND ENDS WITH EMOTIONS.
For centuries it was believed that that thinking and feeling were located in separate parts of the brain, and functioned separately. The first to point out this error was Neurologist Antonio Damasio of USC. Among his revelations is that the function of emotion and reasoning are fully integrated throughout the brain.

Among his many fascinating examples are those of people who, because of severe brain injuries, are unable to experience emotions. They can’t make decisions. They can’t shop. They’ve lost the ability to read and connect patterns and memories that inform expectations, judgements and decision-making shortcuts.

It turns out the brain’s decision-making software is powered by the emotions. This means — in the tug-of-war of what to prefer or what to choose — emotions dominate rational thinking. Emotion almost always wins. You could say emotion is the language of the brain. However, as Damasio would point out, fear, joy and sorrow are simply labels the most recently developed part of the brain gives to physical signals the brain reads in the body.

#7 YOUR BRAIN BOTH CONCLUDES AND CREATES WHAT THE REST OF YOUR BODY SENSES.
Protoplasm progressed only because it developed receptors that could “read danger” long before the human brain had sophisticated cognitive processing and labels to express it.

Many behavioral scientists refer to our gastrointestinal system as our “second brain”, citing the primal connection between the two. “We often talk about a ‘gut feeling’ when we meet someone for the first time. We’re told to ‘trust our gut instinct’ when making a difficult decision or that it’s ‘gut check time’ when faced with a situation that tests our nerve and determination. This mind-gut connection is not just metaphorical. Our brain and gut are connected by an extensive network of neurons and what many refer to as a superhighway of chemicals and hormones that constantly provide feedback about how hungry we are, whether or not we’re experiencing stress, or if we’ve ingested a disease-causing microbe.”

Lisa Feldman Barrett, the distinguished professor of psychology at Northeastern University, argues that, “the main purpose of the brain is simply to read the body and regulate the body budget.” If your body “senses” danger, the brain reads it and, conditioned to expect the worst, signals your heart to beat faster and your lungs to breathe faster. Over time, the same sensations and physiological changes are recognized as a pattern, so a shortcut response develops to deal with them. The modern brain puts a label (like “fear”) to the sensations and physiological changes. The label in and of itself is a processing shortcut, because when we label what we sense as “fear,” that alone alters what you expect to see and feel next, influencing your perception of reality.

Proof of this is eye-opening. If offered two glasses of wine (both the same white wine but one in a glass colored red with a tasteless, odorless food coloring) people will taste and rate them far differently. If offered an orange-flavored drink that is colored red, people taste it as cherry. As a shortcut, color alone changes our perception of reality.

As Barrett argues in her book How Emotions are Made, you might think that in everyday life, the things you see and hear influence what you feel, but it’s mostly the other way around!

The reality is that, by expecting the worst or the best of things, each of us lives in a virtual reality of our own creation. What we expect becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. So if we perceive a child, a date, a teacher, an elected official, an older person or a product to be a stupid or ineffectual, we’ll then will see it confirmed at every turn, even though it may not be at all true.

#8 REALITY ISN’T ALWAYS WHAT OUR BRAIN SEES AND CONCLUDES,
LEADING US TO FEEL AND ACT IRRATIONALLY.
The tendency is to seek out evidence that supports what we expect to find, hope to find, what we already believe to be true is what behavioral economists refer to as “confirmation bias.” Even if employing System 2 thinking, we tend to see in a mound of evidence what we want to see. (No wonder, in a recent article about people searching for info on COVID-19, the author referred to the search for statistics and predictions as doomsurfing.) Confirmation bias means that even if presented with alternative data, we tend to discount it, or discount its source, because it takes a lot of mental effort (System 2 thinking) to reprogram what our brain already is sure to be true — that reality of our own creation.

Remember what Kahneman said? We humans are capable or thinking, but we’d prefer not to. That’s because it’s so much easier to read patterns and just jump to conclusions. Take “availability bias,” which is the human tendency to think that whatever we’ve heard about most recently, or most frequently, is more common, popular, powerful or more effective than it actually is. It leads people to believe things are true or trending when that may not be the case at all. Because hearing the same thing over and over the brain processes — irrationally — as truth.

Availability bias explains the power of taglines that have been seared into our memory, like “Fox News, fair and balanced.” Is it? Even if reams of evidence were laid before you, as noted previously your brain would not sift and winnow them well; any of your preconceived expectations of Fox newscasts would color your assessment of the evidence. In his book The Righteous Mind, Jonathan Haidt (the noted social psychologist and Professor of Ethical Leadership at New York University’s Stern School of Business) explains: We are often exasperated, wondering why others don’t see what we see or don’t listen to our reasoning. It’s because we were never designed to see or listen to anything other than what supports our own conclusions. We evolved not so much to learn, as to try and gain advantage in influencing others to our point of view.

What we see we want others to see. We’re driven to persuade others to see and believe what we think is needed to survive and thrive. Ahhh, “tribalism,” the human tendency to form and belong to social groups with other like-minded individuals.

The tragedy, loss of lives and economic impact of COVID-19 aside — all of which are truly awful and deservedly anxiety provoking — in most other cases confirmation bias, availability bias and tribalism would mean that the world may not be as bad as your caveman-like brain tells you. “Ever wonder why people’s perception of the incidence of crime, terrorism, kidnapping and other violent acts is often much higher than reality? A big part of the answer, according to experts in social science, psychology and computer science, is that the biases that were once useful to our primitive forebears have become — like the craving for sweet foods — detriments in our modern world. Instincts that may once have saved us from real dangers have now, thanks to global instantaneous communication, turned us all into chicken littles.”

Yet, those signals we process irrationally as negative, and the confirmation we feel that the sky is falling, don’t just come from our own brain reading our own bodies or Google search results. It’s our brains reading what other’s bodies give off. It’s fear and panic others are radiating that is infecting us.

#9 FEAR, ANXIETY AND JOY OUR BODIES RADIATE ARE NOT ONLY SENSED AND READ BY OUR OWN BRAIN, BUT BY OTHER’S BRAINS, TOO.
Emotional contagion is the phenomenon of having one person’s emotions and related behaviors directly trigger similar emotions and behaviors in others. Again, it’s implicit learning (including non-verbal) and believed to happen easily in person but also via communications like phone calls and emails. In this primitive, and unconscious way we “read” what another is feeling, then mimic it, feed it back and pass it on.

It’s primal, and the telegraphy is real. Evolution again perfected this skill of which we are not conscious. Day in and day out, we’re all scanning others and the situations we find ourselves in, assessing and picking up other’s anxiety. It’s our autonomic nervous system at work. This subconscious skill at detecting and assessing threat or safety has a name: Neuroception. “It explains why a baby coos at a caregiver but cries at a stranger; why a toddler enjoys a parent’s embrace but views a hug from a stranger as an assault.”

Neuroception also explains why fear can be so contagious. And how people can inadvertently create a pandemic of fear. If a person senses a high degree of anxiety in a lot of others, the brain reads an elevation of danger to the point of panic. Do we pause and search for objective data so as to rationally weigh if what we sense as panic is justified? And do we weigh the best course of action? If you’ve read this far, you know the answer. What’s more, you’ll immediately understand Robert Schiller’s concern about the risks of negative narratives we tell ourselves and others; why they make us all the more vulnerable to being infected with fear that leads to irrational behaviors which lead to more fear.

Speaking of fear, here’s something of which we all should be afraid:

#10 OUR CULTURE IS NOW RIFE WITH FORCE MULTIPLIERS OF FEAR.
These in particular can easily feed and magnify perceptions of danger and fuel a contagion of fear:

Echo Chambers: To create cohesion and increase odds of survival, early tribes would tell the same stories over and over. This is no different today. However, thanks to email, social media and other forms of technology that gather data on people’s behaviors and preferences, the repetition and retelling are easier. The repetition and retelling are easily scaled. In the process, more and more data is gathered, which machine learning analyzes to determine who likes what stores and what emotional tenor. As a result, people who fall prey to stories of economic hopelessness find algorithms serving up even more of them. Machine learning and AI are just echoing back to us our own fears and anxieties, confirming them, deepening them.

Thought viruses: What’s also scary is the number of nefarious types and sick minds that work to infect our minds and moods with fake or falsified info.

“Extremity bias:” This is the tendency of humans to love telling stories dramatically, and answering questions with the most colorful language. It’s done to get attention and elevate one’s importance. Jonah Berger, a professor at Wharton explains what happens: “A positive story becomes absolutely glowing, a negative one turns horrific, like the tall tales of ancient oral tradition.”17 The power of “extremifying” was well known by town criers in the middle ages talking to 20 people. But today it’s known and practiced by everyone. It’s become common on social media, in content marketing and digital marketing.

Around the globe, businesses, brands, legitimate media, community organizations and political parties have revenue models that depend on getting and keeping people’s attention: The competition is fierce. So extremification comes into play. Unfortunately, throughout history “good news” has never been much of a draw. So what we tend to end up with are ever more “surprising” claims, the “scariest” stats; frightful forecasts of disasters; doom and gloom and “breaking” news 24/7.

Force multiplication: In and of itself, each of the above forces has great potential to increase the anxiety people already feel. Remember, we evolved to easily sense and take on the emotions of others. Our tendency is not to pause, and with System 2 thinking, double-check the rationality of what we’re sensing. It’s more likely that our System 1 thinking (with its confirmation bias, availability bias and more) will assume that what we’re sensing is credible.

But here’s the thing to be really concerned about: Each of these anxiety-fueling forces operates concurrently with the others, creating a huge multiplier effect. Increase the speed of multiplication with a world-wide-web operating at the speed of light and not even the highly contagiousness of COVID- 19 can match the virality of fear and anxiety that can be created if we’re not careful.

Robert Schiller, and others like David Brooks (in his Opinion piece in the New York Times) are right to be concerned about a pandemic of fear. It also turns out FDR was right when, during another time of great anxiety, he pointed out that the real danger to fear is fear itself. From behavioral science we now know fear drives irrational behavior and irrational thinking. It increases anxiety and serious mental health issues, that often lead to increases in physical health issues, which create even more anxiety for everyone for years to come.

HOW DO WE FIGHT FEAR AND ANXIETY?
We leverage what we know to be true:

When we all act together in service to the same cause, we perform miracles. If we’ve learned anything from the fight against COVID-19, it’s that if we all engage in the same proven protocols to mitigate the spread of the contagion, we can flatten the curve of the illness’ impact and weaken the hold it has on our lives and economy. In the same way, we can lessen the damage of anxiety and melancholy to ourselves, our families, communities, and nation if we band together to fight it en masse. What do we fight it with?

Knowledge based on sound science is always a gamechanger. Take this article. It’s a short course explaining some of the drivers of fear and anxiety and drawn from research in psychology, sociology, behavioral economics and neuroscience. This same behavioral science also informs us on how to lessen fear and anxiety. In fact, ten quick tips can be found here. LINK. Will you consider practicing them? You’ll find each as easy as other health protocols you’ve been working to habituate (washing hands vigorously, sneezing into your elbow). One of the mental hygiene tips is guaranteed to make you laugh. (Consider sharing it to give others a laugh, along with a jumpstart toward better mental health.)

Sharing and caring are powerful and persuasive. You’ve seen the result of people, using the same health tips, to stem the tide of COVID-19. But it took thousands of individuals like you modeling them to inspire others to adopt them. It took thousands passing along to their family, friends and co-workers the why (the science) behind the behaviors. So if there’s someone who’s spirits you’d like to lift, pass along the knowledge and tips you’ve gained here. Modeling them yourself for others to see. And please don’t wait. Even after the immediate threat of COVID-19 declines, we’ll find ourselves worrying about whether or not it’s really gone. And then there are the many other fears and anxieties on the horizon that are subject to today’s force multipliers: A deep recession? Climate change? A terrorist attack? Another pandemic? What worries you about your family, your life, your future?

With the same amazing commitment, rigor and science with which we’ve all mobilized to mitigate the impact of COVID-19, let’s now mobilize to fight our fear and melancholy. As the corona virus is reminding us, the USA can pretty much overcome anything if we pledge our hearts, minds and behaviors in service to it. So will you work to mitigate your own anxiety so it doesn’t infect your siblings, husband, child, parents, cousins, co-workers, neighbors, and friends.

WHAT BEHAVIORAL SCIENCE TEACHES US ABOUT THE BEST WAY TO QUELL THE CONTAGIOUS POWER OF FEAR AND ANXIETY

THERE IS SO MUCH TO WORRY ABOUT THESE DAYS!
It’s impacting our physical health, our mental health and prompting worrisome behaviors. During the days the earth stood ill, cases of domestic abuse in France increased a third. (And those were only the cases reported.)

Without a doubt more threats to our physical and mental health are coming. While the impact of coronavirus on human lives and the economy already seem more than we can bear, many scientists are now saying COVID-19 may never be fully eradicated. We’re all projecting that many of the things we treasured in the past (going to concerts and events, traveling, hugging each other) will be forever changed. Economists are saying it will take months and months for millions of people to get jobs again; it will take years for the marketplace and our investment portfolios to recover.

IT COULD TAKE YEARS BEFORE OUR ANXIETY WANES AND OUR MENTAL HEALTH IMPROVES.
“The economic and social-science literature is replete with studies that document the harm to people from recessions and economic hardship — including higher rates of suicide, opioid abuse, alcoholism and domestic violence…a 2019 study in Clinical Psychological Science found individuals who had experienced even a single financial, job-related or housing impact during The Great Recession (2008+) still had higher odds of symptoms of depression, generalized anxiety panic and problematic substance abuse three or four years after the recession had ended.”

Even if projections of more danger and melancholy ahead are exaggerated in the media and social networks –even if they ultimately don’t come true — the mere expectation of them increases anxiety and alters our nervous systems, putting us on high alert. This increases the odds we’ll perceive even more things as threatening, even if they aren’t, because evolution has hypersensitized us to see danger at every turn and then react quickly irrationally and unhealthily to it.

If everyone in the country had a better understanding of these scientific underpinnings of our emotions and, based on the same science, how to better quell fear and anxiety, then the societal benefits would be significant. The return on lowering anxiety now would pay off for decades to come. That’s because people who are anxious have weakened immune systems. They’re all the more prone to viruses, along with many other illnesses and mental health problems. They’re prone to the infectiousness of other people’s anxiety.

RESEARCH REVEALS THAT THE ANXIETY EACH OF US FEELS IS CONTAGIOUS TO OTHERS.
No wonder a New York Times advice column concerning itself with the Coronavirus outbreak points out that, just like we owe it to our family, friends and society to wear masks so as not to infect others, we owe it to our family, friends and society to keep ourselves mentally healthy and not infect them with our anxiety.

STOPPING THE SPREAD OF ANXIETY AND PROTECTING OUR OWN MENTAL HEALTH REQUIRES THE SAME KIND OF DAILY ATTENTION REQUIRED FOR PHYSICAL HEALTH.
In the same way that just saying, “I need to eat better and exercise more,” doesn’t work, mental health requires more than just telling ourselves to “get a grip” when we’re anxious. “The rational brain is basically impotent to talk the emotional brain out of its own reality.” For some, better mental health requires regular counseling by a professional. But everyone can benefit from some simple mental health behaviors that are easily done every day.

The ten suggested are as simple as the physical health behaviors (like rigorous handwashing) we’ve all pledged to do because of COVID-19. Now to be clear, I’m not a mental health clinician. But my 40 years of scholarship and professional application of behavioral science have given me insight and experience on what works to influence people’s attitudes and behaviors. Earlier, I provided a “short course” on some of the psychology, behavioral economics and neuroscience behind the fear and anxiety we feel. The ten mental health tips offered address them specifically.

Pause. Breathe. Call on what Daniel Kahneman describes as your System 2 thinking capability. Ask yourself, “Are things really as bad or as hopeless as they seem?” We all live in a virtual reality of our own making. So double check your impressions and the potential for confirmation bias. Search out credible sources that can paint a different picture. Without calling on this System 2 thinking, your System 1 thinking will be free to drive fear and anxiety that may not be justified, and the irrational decisions and behaviors that result will ultimately make you feel even worse.

Give other people permission to remind you to do #1. When, uninvited, people challenge our thinking, we usually don’t listen to them. So this tip is one of the smartest things you can do for your own mental health (and that of those around you who suffer when you aren’t at your best): On a day you’re certain you’d never need another to remind you to do tip #1, recruit three different people to watch for your future need of #1 and whenever “it’s time,” invite you to do some System 2 thinking, even help show you the way.

Argue the opposite is true. Work to prove yourself wrong. This is a technique used by debate teams to prepare to counter arguments their competition might make. It’s also productively used in the business arena: When someone is forced to argue a compelling case for the other side’s point of view, they invariably have to research, face and internalize new evidence. Then, any prior confidence their point of view is the right one is then softened because they see things in a new light.

Stop fueling your fear and anxiety by feeding more of it to yourself. This is something mental health experts universally advise: Tune into news and social networks less often. Some days, avoid them altogether. Unsubscribe from push notifications. What one seasoned investment advisor has experienced actually applies to everyone and in all situations: There’s absolutely no benefit in putting yourself on high alert with every little move the world makes. Wait until tomorrow or the day after to check into the world again.

Whenever you do seek news and information, “disinfect” it before consumption: Limit yourself to sources of trusted journalism. Don’t fall prey to tabloid news and conspiracy theories. (They might be tempting for entertainment value. But implicit learning being as powerful as it is, once in your brain the pathogens from trash can infect your thoughts in ways you’ll not realize.) From the start consume only what’s healthy. Make sure the facts and statistics you ingest are good quality.

Put things in a bigger context. Actively construct a larger perspective. This is where history is helpful. “Every age thinks it’s ‘the Age of Anxiety,’ warns Joseph LeDoux, who is one of the foremost experts on the neuroscience of fear. But history holds plenty of evidence of times of fear greater than what we face now.” Chaos, death, suffering and hopelessness have been around forever, as have been evidence of people’s resilience, resourcefulness and recovery in the face of it.

Another source of a perspective comes from bigger data sets. For example: What’s missing from COVID-19 reports that would lessen anxiety are stats that the majority who contract the virus experience only mild cases, or are asymptomatic and never suffer.

Often the way journalists try to present perspective is in the form of stories of individual people; anecdotes. As a result, we can come away with the impression something is a big, serious, universal problem without stopping to think that a few examples are not the equivalent of a statistically significant sample. Also, we often forget to guard ourselves against reading causation into what is merely coincidence — or seeing causation in correlation. For example, just because 100% of the people who eat mashed potatoes eventually die is not a reason to fear eating them.

Good mental hygiene also requires us to fight our availability bias. This is the tendency to take what we hear most recently and most frequently and process it as trending or as truth. Shark attacks make headlines. So of course, shark attacks are top of mind in the set of fears we have when at an ocean beach. But a larger data set reveals that shark attacks are statistically rare; that people are more likely to drown at the beach. “People fear terrorism, even though the odds they will die in a plane crash are far higher…”

So many people would find their anxiety lessened by looking at a bigger picture such as good science provides.

Consider brain science. From it we know that we’re hypersensitized to anticipate danger, and in response we can become obsessed anticipating the worst that can happen. But nine in ten things people most frequently worry about never come to pass. Says Jack Nitschke, a psychology professor at the University of Wisconsin and a practicing psychotherapist, “Anxiety is about being concerned about something that might happen.” In most cases what we worry about is largely unpredictable, irrational and turns out to be a waste of time.

A short course on brain science also teaches us that the fear and anxiety we express in our thoughts and behavior are a self-fulfilling prophecy: William James, the father of psychology in the U.S., concluded a century ago that, “The behaviors we choose can radically alter our inner landscape… Panic is increased by flight… Sobbing makes sorrow more acute.” Neuroscience has now proved him right: Giving way to our own anxiety actually produces more of the very anxiety we’re trying to quell! It’s as if we’re re-infecting ourselves with it. So what James prescribed in the 1800s is recommended by many psychologists today: Refusing to express your anxiety is considered the first step in getting it to go away. Rather, work to “stay in the moment.” It keeps you from catastrophizing.

To stay in the moment, state-of-the-art psychiatry advises, “Put down your cellphone, turn off the cable news… Take a walk. Listen for birds. Concentrate on the warmth of the sun or wind on your face.” It’s called practicing mindfulness.

Practice mindfulness. Though a technique that’s thousands of years old, mindfulness is now well-proven to be a potent tool to help people manage overwhelming fears about the future. Information on best practices, tools and techniques are available for free from a scientific research institute named Center for Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin. Their mission? “Cultivate well-being and relieve suffering through a scientific understanding of the mind.”

Founded by world-renowned neuroscientist Dr. Richard J. Davidson, the center’s findings are the result of years of study, most famously on Buddhist monks whose lives are devoted to meditation. Surprisingly, Davidson finds that as little as five minutes of meditation a day for a couple weeks can start to rewire anyone’s brain for greater calm, happiness and health. This is so simple and accessible a technique for the common man that Davidson says, “I envision a day when mental exercise will be as much a part of our daily lives as physical exercise and personal hygiene.”

Another mental hygiene practice that works –
Accepting the inevitability of anxiety as a part of everyday life. Humans will always carry some degree of anxiety. Even before COVID-19, in the heyday of the economy, we all found plenty to be anxious about. In a New York Times Article Laura Turner reports that what she and many others have found to help mitigate anxiety is accepting that, like seasonal weather, it’s useless to think you can avoid it. She advises treating anxiety as if it were a well-meaning friend who you can expect to visit but on occasion will stay too long, at which point you tell him or her, “time to go; I now need to focus my energy on other things.”

As one psychologist explains in Psychology Today, embracing anxiety as a part of life is a form of courage. It’s actually a badge of honor to strive to live fully in the face of all the uncertainty we each face every day. Certainly that is what our ancestors must have done, too: It could only be by living fully in the face of uncertainty and risk that their genes made it to today, alive in each of us.

But is there a secret to living fully in the face of the inevitable anxiety that life presents? It turns out there is widespread agreement on one of the factors –

Laugh more. Universally, laughter is one of the most sought-after states humans seek. It’s not that the brain is hard-wired for it, but research shows the brain IS hard-wired for what humor provides that all brains crave — connectedness to others. It’s why humor is most successful when crafted to exploit a common understanding we all share. It’s why a funny video gets rapidly passed along. It seems that, almost more than anything else, we are predisposed to bond by sharing humor.

That’s a good thing, because the positive immune and metabolic changes laughter creates are suspected of playing a big role in survival of the fittest. The boost to immunity that laughter can provide is great anytime, but never so much as when faced with two global pandemics: the coronavirus and high anxiety.

As one medical doctor advocated decades ago: Laughter is the best medicine. Over 100 years ago, “laugh more” was William James’s prescription to anyone with high anxiety. His rationale as a psychologist? “We don’t laugh because we’re happy, we’re happy because we laugh.”27 Neuroscience has now proved him right. As Lisa Feldman Barrett argues in her book How Emotions are Made, you might think things you see and hear influence what you feel, but it’s mostly the other way around! It turns out that when we smile, our body physically changes in response. If we laugh, we’ll see whatever comes next in a different light, and our body will “see” it too.

For some, it may seem that now is not the time to crack jokes. The great researcher and behaviorist Dr. Jane Goodall would disagree. On March 25, 2020, when she herself was frustrated from days of self-isolation advised, “During all of this we have to keep a sense of humor.”

One day of laughing a bit more, followed by another day of laughing a bit more, and then another and — voila! — it adds up to week, a month, a life of less anxiety and living more fully. And not just for you, but because of the contagious nature of emotions, it creates a happier life for others in your sphere; and in the larger sphere we share called planet Earth.

THESE TEN TIPS FOR BETTER MENTAL HYGIENE ARE STEEPED
IN GOOD SCIENCE AND THE ADVICE OF CREDIBLE EXPERTS.
But who will preach and teach them to the nation? Who will be the Dr. Anthony Fauci of the country’s mental health? Right now, no one seems to have the calling, the platform, the funding or the time. So it turns out the one to preach and teach them to you — is you. What you have before you in this article and its prior one are essentially self-directed study. They’re things you’ll enjoy learning because they work. They’re also a responsible way to prevent your own anxiety from infecting others.

BUT IF YOU ALSO WANT TO DO YOUR PART TO IMPROVE THE MENTAL HEALTH OF THE NATION…
Share these mental health tips with those you don’t want infecting you or others with their anxiety. Family, friends, co-workers and your boss are likely to welcome any learning that could help them feel better. Besides, unlike the inconvenient handwashing protocol called for in the fight against COVID-19, the leading mental health protocol here is easy. It’s fun. It’s laughing! Who can’t love that as a requirement? So laugh vigorously. Laugh multiple times a day. Repeat this today, tomorrow and the day after tomorrow.

If you laugh more it will improve not just your mental and physical health, it will also improve others, because behavioral science tells us laughter is contagious. So while you faithfully and concertedly work to prevent the spread of any germs you have, would you faithfully and concertedly pledge to infect the world with a little more laughter?

Marsha Lindsay researches, analyzes and forecasts future marketplace dynamics to help C-Suites, Boards and marketers prepare now for what’s next and strategically best for advantage and accelerated growth. She’s widely published. Founder of Lindsay Foresight & Stratagem, her speaking engagements and consulting clients span the Fortune 100, multinationals, VC-infused startups and universities around the globe. All her work is grounded on decades of scholarship in the behavioral sciences — the universal and timeless tenets that drive human motivation, decision-making and business transactions, as well as employee and corporate dynamics.

1 Landsman, Stephanie. Robert Schiller: Corona Virus is creating a ‘dangerous time’ for markets, panic is just starting. Trading Nation. 2020 March 09, https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/09/shiller-coronavirus-panic-has-not-peaked-market-plunge-just-starting.html

2 Behind Lindsay Foresight & Stratagem. https://www.lfands.com/our-founder/

3 Bryson, Bill. A Short History of Nearly Everything. Broadway Books; 1st edition. 14 September 2004.

4 Sapolsky, Robert M. Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst. Penguin Press. 2017 May 02.

5 Zweig, Jason. Mr. Market Just Got Inside Your Head. Don’t Let Him Mess With You. The Wall Street Journal, Markets, The Intelligent Investor. 2019 May 17.

6 Who Am I? http://whoami.sciencemuseum.org.uk/whoami/findoutmore/yourbody/whatdoesyourimmunesystemdo/howdocellsrecogniseeachother

7 NOTE: This is why we dare not put too much stock in what people state in surveys or media interviews as their intended behaviors. More predictable are insights from ethnographies, psychological tests with control groups or sufficient quantitative data. As for the why of the behaviors? Again, they are unlikely to ever be conscious. The best we can hope for are insights, professionally assessed from the subconscious, on what really motivates and incents people, irrational though they may seem.

8 Tierney, John and Baumeister, Roy F. For the New Year, Say No to Negativity. The Wall Street Journal, Ideas, The Saturday Essay. 2019 December 27. https://www.wsj.com/articles/for-the-new-year-say-no-to-negativity-11577464413

9 Southgate, Nick and Sutherland, Rory. Behavioral Economics in Action: Strategies and Insights from the IPA Effectiveness Awards. IPA. https://ipa.co.uk/knowledge/publications-reports/behavioural-economics-in-action-strategies-and-insights-from-the-ipa-effectiveness-awards

10 The neurobiology of emotion–cognition interactions: fundamental questions and strategies for future research. 2015 February 17. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4344113/

11 Damasio, Antonio. Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain. Penguin Books. 2005 September 27.

12 Interview by Manuela Lenzen. Feeling Our Emotions. Scientific American, Mind. 2005 April 01. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/feeling-our-emotions/

13 Sonnenburg, Justin and Sonnenburg, Erica. Gut Feelings — the “Second Brain” in Our Gastrointestinal Systems [Excerpt]. Scientific American, Health. 2015 May 01. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/gut-feelings-the-second-brain-in-our-gastrointestinal-systems-excerpt/

14 Bryson, Bill. The Body: A Guide for Occupants. Doubleday; 1 Edition. 2019 October 15.

15 Barrett, Lisa Feldman. How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain. Mariner Books, reprint edition. 2017 March 07.

16 Haidt, Jonathan. The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. Vintage, reprint edition. 2013 February 12.
17 Mims, Christopher. The World Isn’t as Bad as Your Wired Brain Tells You. The Wall Street Journal, Tech, Keywords. 2018 August 31. https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-world-isnt-as-bad-as-your-wired-brain-tells-you-1535713201

18 Emotional contagion. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotional_contagion

19 Porges, Stephen W. Neuroception: A Subconscious System for Detecting Threats and Safety. ERIC. 2004 May 24. https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ938225

20 Landsman, Stephanie. Robert Schiller: Corona Virus is creating a ‘dangerous time’ for markets, panic is just starting. Trading Nation. 2020 March 09, https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/09/shiller-coronavirus-panic-has-not-peaked-market-plunge-just-starting.html

21 Brooks, David. Mental Health in the Age of the Coronavirus. The New York Times, Opinion. 2020 April 2. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/02/opinion/mental-health-coronavirus.html

22 Brooks, David. Mental Health in the Age of the Coronavirus. The New York Times, Opinion. 2020 April 2. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/02/opinion/mental-health-coronavirus.html

23 Tierney, John and Baumeister, Roy F. For the New Year, Say No to Negativity. The Wall Street Journal, Ideas, The Saturday Essay. 2019 December 27. https://www.wsj.com/articles/for-the-new-year-say-no-to-negativity-11577464413

24 Magee, Erinne. Handling Your Kid’s Disappointment When Everything Is Cancelled. The New York Times, Parenting. 2020 March 18. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/18/parenting/coronavirus-kids-events-cancelled.html?type=roundup&link=intro

25 Brooks, David. Mental Health in the Age of the Coronavirus. The New York Times, Opinion. 2020 April 2. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/02/opinion/mental-health-coronavirus.html

26 Herrera, Tim. Suffering Through Your First Financial Crisis? Read This to Relax. The New York Times, Smarter Living. 2020 March 15. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/15/smarter-living/corona-stock-market-tips-dealing-with-financial-crash-crisis.html

27 Piore, Adam. Scientists’ Understanding of Anxiety is Radically Evolving — But How Long Will it Take for Treatments to Catch Up? Newsweek. 2019 September 05. https://www.newsweek.com/2019/09/20/anxiety-medication-drugs-science-exercise-brain-1457006.html

28 Mims, Christopher. The World Isn’t as Bad as Your Wired Brain Tells You. The Wall Street Journal, Tech, Keywords. 2020 April 14. https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-world-isnt-as-bad-as-your-wired-brain-tells-you-1535713201

29 Piore, Adam. Scientists’ Understanding of Anxiety is Radically Evolving — But How Long Will it Take for Treatments to Catch Up? Newsweek. 2019 September 05. https://www.newsweek.com/2019/09/20/anxiety-medication-drugs-science-exercise-brain-1457006.html

30 Kaag, John. William James, Yoga and the Secret of Happiness. The Wall Street Journal, Ideas, Essay. 2020, February 27. https://www.wsj.com/articles/william-james-yoga-and-the-secret-of-happiness-11582825877

31 Center for Healthy Minds. University of Wisconsin-Madison. https://centerhealthyminds.org/

32 List of All Center for Healthy Minds Studies. Center for Healthy Minds. University of Wisconsin-Madison. https://centerhealthyminds.org/science/research

33 Gilsinan, Kathy. The Buddhist and the Neuroscientist: What compassion does to the brain. The Atlantic, Health. 2015 July 04. https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/07/dalai-lama-neuroscience-compassion/397706/

34 Turner, Laura. This Is a Good Time to Stop Fighting Anxiety. The New York Times, Opinion. 2020 March 12. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/12/opinion/sunday/anxiety-treatment-therapy.html

35 Seaburn, David B., Ph.D, L.M.F.T. Feeling Anxiouos? Of Course. Psychology Today, Anxiety. 2020 March 16. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/going-out-not-knowing/202003/feeling-anxious-course

36 Barrett, Lisa Feldman. How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain. Mariner Books, Reprint Edition. 2017 March 07.
37 Gorman, James. Jane Goodall is Self-Isolating, Too. The New York Times. 2020 March 25. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/25/science/jane-goodall-coronavirus.html

DRAWN FROM THE 2020 LINDSAY FORESIGHT & STRATAGEM STUDY:
THE NEW STRAT PLANNING PLAYBOOK OF BEST PRACTICES FOR A FUTURE WITHOUT PRECEDENT.

It’s almost guaranteed there are blindspots in your strategic plans of the past, and the one you are undertaking next.

I should know. For decades I’ve participated in countless strat planning sessions; facilitating many of them. I’ve suffered process frustrations and disappointing outcomes firsthand — probably even caused some. I don’t know whether it was a subconscious attempt at penance, or intuition on the need to rethink the strat planning process overall, but recently I undertook an analysis of traditional planning best practices. Then I reanalyzed them through two lenses: Marketplace dynamics of the future (things any strat plan should account for) and my expertise in behavioral science. The latter spans universal tenets that drive human decision-making, including governance and organizational change management.

From this deep dive it was easy to draw conclusions on process improvements that would lead to more effective strat plans; a more rewarding experience for participants, too. I uncovered eight troubling and all-too-common blindspots. Every strat planning process suffers from some if not all eight. That’s unfortunate, because strategic planning is supposed to anticipate the future so no one is blindsided by what’s around the corner or just over the horizon.

#1: GOING UP A BLIND ALLEY. The first stage of planning is the journey to discover the essential business challenge or opportunity facing the organization. Blind alleys are the result of the planning team being deluged with background, data, spreadsheets and several hours-long PowerPoint presentations filled with chart after chart. This mental overload defies any person’s ability to parse, analyze, reflect or responsibly debate what the info might reveal. When this happens, team members are especially vulnerable to confirmation bias. They see in material what they want to see. Few if any “aha’s” arise. The team has no clue on the core problem that should really be addressed to advance the company’s future sustainability and growth.

The treatment? It needs to start before the planning journey begins, with thoughtful preparation and curation of info provided the team. That way, the team is not overwhelmed with irrelevant or tangential info (which leads to blind alleys). Rather, they can devote their talent — and sufficient time — to assessing and framing the essential challenge or opportunity the plan is to tackle. As Einstein famously said, “If I had an hour to solve a problem and my life depended on the solution, I would spend the first 55 minutes defining the problem.”

The problem/opportunity, once defined and stated as a question, becomes the mystery the planning team is to solve. Einstein bragged, “Once I know the problem, I can solve it in less than five minutes.” Experienced strategists agree that once things are properly framed, good ideas for solutions come rather quickly. However, in the set of new best practices for strat planning that arise from my study, the solutioning of the strat plan team should also be informed by a set of thoughtfully prepared and curated info. Like the first wave of “food for thought,” this second wave may require primary research and methods competitors don’t use, in order to have insights they don’t have. The best kind of insight not only serves to inspire the strategy that solves the problem, but also enriches the problem statement.

Without first acing the problem/opportunity statement the strat plan is to address, there can be no real vision for an organization’s future. That’s because when a statement is too broad, too narrow, not clear or not based on very good information, planners are unable to come up with a winning strategy to address it. The tragedy is not just that when the problem is off the strategy is off, it’s that when the strategy is off, everything that flows from it in hopes of solving the problem will also be off: the targets, innovations, capabilities, technology, partnerships, milestones and measurements. The entire strat planning effort will have been a waste of time.

To avoid plans that never get you where you need to go, center the team’s journey of discovery on the customer. To state the obvious but often overlooked: Customers are where sales, share, margin and profit originate. They’re where problems and opportunities originate, too. Who is your core and most profitable customer today? What’s driving their purchase decisions? What competitors do you lose them to, and why? That’s “why” besides price. Price is just a rational excuse people give for a deeper reason they don’t want to admit or may not even realize. (More on the best questions for planning can be found in the book Drinking From The Firehose: Making Smart Decisions Without Drowning in Information. The authors provide a summary here.)

Customer-centric problem/opportunity definition and customer-centric solutioning result in strategies that boost future viability, what is needed to scale and accelerate the revenue and margin to survive and thrive. That said, you still have to watch out for blurry vision, also known as –

#2: NEARSIGHTEDNESS. If severe enough, an inability to focus far ahead is tantamount to blindness. And “far ahead” is what’s critical for a strat plan team to see, because, let’s be honest, any plan that focuses close in — like the next 6–12months — is not a strat plan. It’s an operational plan with short-term tactics. In contrast, a true strategic plan is meant to transform an organization for systemic advantage, detailing the tactics to make progress in the short term (the next year), and the mid-term (the second year).

Some people say that, given the exponential pace of change today, one can’t plan more than six months ahead. That’s true if one’s employee situation, product quality, cash position or balance sheet are already so endangered you’re on the brink of not being able to survive. But if that’s an organization or brand’s situation, I’d posit that it’s precisely because its leaders were nearsighted, and didn’t plan more than a few months ahead! If they don’t strategize 18–36 months out now, chances are they will never have the opportunity, because in a few months they’ll be out of business.

The net result of nearsightedness in a time of exponential change is the death of an organization (it comes from Covid-19 as well as the accelerated disruption and innovation of our times). It’s what Peter Hinssen warned about when speaking at the London Business School: Most organizations allocate 90% of their efforts to “today,” with the rest going to tomorrow. This means the day after tomorrow gets nothing. Of course, today generates your current value. But when plans for your future value don’t extend beyond tomorrow, you won’t make it there. It’s that simple. What distinguishes category kings and paradigm shifters from others is they focus — devote lots of time — to day after tomorrow thinking.

The treatment for nearsightedness? It’s focusing on the day after tomorrow. Who will be or could be your core customer then? What do you know that others don’t about their needs, motivation, behaviors and influencers then? What’s so surprising about this future projection that it challenges expectations? What about it might require new products, a new operational or revenue model, and a new strategy for accelerating value creation in the eyes of the customer of 18–36 months from now? To win in this marketplace the day after tomorrow, what new capabilities should be invested in now? What new software or technology would be wise to develop now? Who could you acquire or partner with now to accelerate preparedness and preemptive advantage?

Ahhhh: Imagination! Intellectual insight! Foresight! As the dictionary of the Oxford University Press says, a lack of these three is the very definition of myopia. Yet, even when planning teams are exposed to what the future holds, sometimes they don’t want to see it.

#3: BLINDNESS TO THE FUTURE: We humans all have an innate blindness to the future. Behavioral economics reveals we irrationally discount and ignore the long term in favor of what we can see or feel in the present. And if some prediction of the future — were it to come true — means we ourselves would have to change, we’re likely to discount the prediction, or its source. Yet the truth is no one can change the fate of their company, brand or career without having great future sight. As Mark Twain said, “It’s important to plan for the future because that’s where you’re going to spend the rest of your life.” It’s where your company and employees will too, but only if you have an effective strategic plan to get there.

With the pace of change now exponential, threats and opportunities long assumed to be years away are now arriving daily, yet the kind of transformation needed to deal with these threats and opportunities requires leaders to start years in advance. It takes time to enlighten colleagues on what’s changing and get them to accept the implications. It takes time to align them on how to tackle the implications. It takes time to pull off the plan.

There’s no shortage of conjecture on the future, courtesy of pundits and prognosticators competing for attention and revenue. But there’s a respectable science of prediction-making, with standards of good data and vetted protocols. Called forecasting, it’s widely acknowledged never to be 100% accurate. (As Yogi Berra famously noted, “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.”) But done responsibly — and not too far out (say, only three to five years in the distance) — forecasting is proven to be quite helpful by raising highly probable issues and opportunities and strategic playbooks to prepare for them.

Research, foresight and playbooks on the day after tomorrow are actually my métier, devoted to helping C-Suites, Boards and marketers prepare now for what’s next and strategically best for advantage and accelerated growth. In the course of teaching and consulting around the globe, I find most executives account in their future plans for the implications of climate change, water shortages, cyber threats and major demographic shifts. I’ve found few accounting for other challenges and opportunities which are 3–5 years out, such as these I’ve identified:

• Commerce, culture and consumption are converging. Among the implications are major shifts in what people are moved to consume, how and when; a 180-degree flip in how products and brands are successfully launched and scaled.
• Categories are fusing, getting confusing and evolving into something much broader. This means organizations need to anticipate now the new and broader competitive sets (McKinsey calls them ecosystems) in which they’ll soon be competing.
• Organizations are no longer dealing with people but rather, with gods. People today have technology and networks that give them power to bless or damn — overnight — a product, brand, cause, executive or marketing initiative. Given this, the future belongs to companies where, across the entire enterprise, people are equipped to learn more, faster, about what delights customers of today and tomorrow. This means organizations must reenvision themselves as an ecosystem connecting everyone, and connecting all the data, in order to have more, better and faster foresight, value creation and customer delight. This requires companies to rearchitect operational and revenue models for extreme agility and total customer centricity. Think of the model as an atom, with customers at the center, and all operations spinning around them at ever higher speeds to the point of predicting customer needs and wants. This means –
• Business strategy must merge with marketing strategy. Already, and increasingly in the future, all business operations are marketing operations. And this key conclusion –
• The rapidity and degree to which an organization converges its business and marketing strategy in ways that account for the above dynamics predicts its survival.

The treatment for blindness to this future? It’s making sure the planning teams experience a workshop where everyone learns and applies the same view of the day after tomorrow such as that of the futurecast above. Workshop exercises include:

• Considering the fusion and evolution of categories — imagining who competitors might be in 2–3 years.
• Roughing out a sample S.W.O.T. analysis, not based on the present (one’s current category or capabilities) but rather in light of what it takes to deal with the futurecast above.

Experiencing a robust and credible futurecast and spending time on its implications are critical steps in future-proofing one’s organization, brand and employees.

#4: BLINDNESS TO STRAT PLANNING’S REAL PURPOSE. Most people presume a strat plan’s purpose is to achieve a particular milestone of sales, share, profitability or market cap. There’s no denying these are important, but they’re not the goal, just measures of the success in achieving it. The real goal is future-proofing: Anticipating the future and developing strategies that minimize its possible negatives while at the same time enabling one’s organization to create the future as you’d like it to be, crafting strategies that increase your odds.

The treatment? Early in the strat planning effort, discuss as a team what a future-proofed organization would look like. Distinguish its operation from metrics that measure success. Ideally this imagining takes place in the aforementioned workshop before actual planning begins. That’s because understanding one’s real purpose better prepares a group for the actual work of future-proofing: embracing and aligning behind a futurecast (#3 above); avoiding blind alleys (#1 above); and looking in a mirror.

#5: BLINDNESS TO ONE’S OWN OUT-OF-DATE THINKING: Consider for a moment that, “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you in trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” That’s the wisdom of Mark Twain. It’s particularly true when planning and strategizing for the future.

The kind of future we face is without precedent. The pace of scientific discovery, innovation, disruption and disintermediation are mind-boggling. With “the internet of things,” anything that can be connected is being connected. Increasingly, sensors don’t just read data, they act on it. Borderless commerce is the norm. Barriers to entry for businesses are disintegrating, in part because supply chains are now fungible.

A few years ago, the World Economic Forum described what’s taking place as “a revolution that will fundamentally alter the way we live, work and relate to one another. In its scale, scope and complexity, the transformation will be unlike anything humankind has experienced before…” And now, COVID-19 is accelerating change and, of course, volatility. From mask-wearing to distancing to cash-reserving, it’s creating new best practices.

So much is riding on the work of those involved in strat planning that it’s nigh on a sacred trust to be on top of what’s likely to work in the future to make their organization viable, sustainable, profitable. This begins with a look in the mirror to consider the degree to what you know for sure just ain’t so. What the best and the brightest will recognize is that their long-used rules of thumb and favored go-to strategies of the past are no match for the future they hope to create. Many of these were practices best a time when life was simpler, change was slower and the world smaller; when it was almost guaranteed that if you did A, then B would result.

What’s more, years of data now reveal that many favored rules of thumb are no longer true, or were never true to begin with. For example, extensive longitudinal studies conducted by the Ehrenberg Bass Institute of Marketing Science prove that customer retention is NOT cheaper than acquisition. Price promotions do NOT boost market penetration. The 80/20 rule is nowhere near a rule to be counted on.

Authors of the book Detonate: Why-and how-Corporations Must Blow Up Best Practices to Survive explain the danger of not actively assessing and addressing out of date rules of thumb: Because they’re presumed to be “conventional wisdom,” they get applied at a moment’s notice, often without realizing it. But as they’ve aged they’ve gotten more and more impotent. People have gotten away with using them because — up until recently — the pace of the marketplace was slow, allowing even bad practices to continue without the rapid consequences of today. But today, using them is an existential threat almost as great as the other threats organizations face. That’s because using them can make people hopeful, when they only make matters worse.

This brings us back to the preplanning workshop mentioned earlier; my study’s prime recommendation for strat planning in a world without precedent. Part of the workshop’s “curriculum” should be a session where people share their favorite go-to strategies and rules of thumb, debating their validity. It should be followed by a lesson on several common rules of thumb which evidence reveals are no longer true or never were to begin with. This portion of in the workshop is required because those responsible for transforming organizations can’t really do it until they first transform themselves for the future, too.

The treatment? It’s called unlearning: “For adults, one of the most important lessons to learn in life is the necessity of unlearning. We all think we know certain things to be true beyond doubt, but these things often turn out to be false and — until we unlearn them — they get in the way of new understanding.” Even those who graduated from college five to ten years ago have much to unlearn. Those of us who’ve been in business for ten years or more have a great deal to unlearn in order to be the best possible planners and strategists for the day after tomorrow. That’s why a session on “unlearning” is part of the workshop recommended to prepare teams for strat planning. Among the things to unlearn is the typical outline used to write up and communicate the plan.

#6: BLINDNESS TO THE FACT THAT THE BEST PLAN IS NOT A PLAN PER SE BUT A COMPELLING AND PERSUASIVE CASE. The longer and more detailed a plan document, the harder it is to digest, the less it’s read, the more impossible it is to remember and apply daily, the more skeptical people will be of it, the less they’ll embrace it, the more the entire strat planning effort will have been a waste of time.

Yet most strat plans tend to follow a traditionally long format. It’s outline is one more thing to be unlearned because it’s from a different time. The plan itself also needs a new outline, because plans today are increasing in size and obfuscation, the result of earnest efforts to be thorough and inclusive. Diverse constituencies want to see reflected in the report their department, their input, their concerns, complaints, wants and the future as their personal interest would like it to be. The result is a report that’s hard to organize, hard to write, harder to read and impossible to be moved by.

The treatment?Because the effectiveness and transformational power of a strat plan is only as good as it’s brevity, clarity, understandability, persuasivness and ability of key points to be recalled, the new best practice is to craft it with this outline:

• Define (at the highest level) the essential problem or opportunity the strat plan must address to increase the odds of the organization being sustainable, competitive and profitable the day after tomorrow.
• This is borne from a situation analysis that appears before the definition, and which clearly leads one to conclude the problem or opportunity as defined.
• The essential problem or opportunity should be framed as a question. As Einstein says, “What is the mystery you’re trying to solve?” This sets up all else in the document.
• What is the singular solution (strategy) that is so ingenious “in one fell swoop” it overcomes major hurdles in addressing the issue or opportunity above.
• How said solution (strategy) can be pulled off, as answered by these five questions:
• Where can we play to achieve this strategy?
• How can we win in that space?
• What capabilities/technology/partnerships must be in place to win?
• What management and measurement systems must be in place?
• How can we inspire and align people to deliver the above?

Done well, this outline results in an easy-to-read plan where each section sets up the one that follows and one comes away understanding and buying-in to the whole thing. Done well, the essence of the entire plan can be conveyed in two minutes through 10 sentences, one for each of the bullet points above. Voila! You’ve a plan so clear makes sense to most anyone. And it can be easily retold with accuracy.

This is critical to be able to deliver the ideal outcome of any plan. An enterprise where everyone so “gets” the problem and its solution that they are inspired and aligned to support it even if it means they have to change personally.

#7: BLINDNESS ON THE TRUE DELIVERABLE. The last question of the above outline asks, “How can we inspire and align people to deliver?” Often it never gets asked. At best it’s an afterthought even though it’s arguably the most important thing the plan needs to deliver: A strategy to pull it off. Its an abomination to have a team of valuable execs spend days and days researching, debating and crafting a plan if in the end it is poorly executed.

Execution typically starts with an executive’s speech or a one-time rally; a PowerPoint on the why and wherefore. Reporting the plan’s direction and rationale is more the intent than inspiration, persuasion and behavioral change. Such oversight reflects blindness to the need to future-proof the planning process itself. That requires tackling not just one problem/opportunity, but two:

• The first is the essential problem/opportunity that needs to be addressed to increase the odds of the organization being sustainable, competitive and profitable the day after tomorrow.
• The second is the essential problem/opportunity that needs to be addressed to increase the odds that everyone who is tasked with carrying out the plan understands it, buys into it, and is inspired to work hard enough to bring it to fruition.

The treatment? It’s for the planning team to have both the above in mind from the beginning. It’s having them realize that to pull off the second takes a lot of strategizing and planning, just like the first. The second is helped tremendously when the strat plan itself is a persuasive, logical case that can be summarized in 10 sentences; really easy to understand and “repeat.” That’s because the key to everyone being inspired and aligned to do all it takes to “win” the day after tomorrow is the ability to move their emotions.

Engaging people emotionally so as to impact their behaviors is why some refer to this subsection of the strat plan as a marketing plan. Better than that framing is seeing it as a training plan. The critical components are familiar to anyone who coaches athletes to give up old habits and replace them with new techniques. Sharing a compelling case for what has to change and why. Conditioning to enable the change. Repetition to the point of doing the right things autonomically. Frequent reinforcement and reward. This works, but it means that, like coaching to win, training needed to “win” doesn’t end once the conditioning plan is written. To create the highest possible performers, training never ends.

For a strat planning team to not have an effective training plan accounted for is to leave leaders of an organization blind to what’s needed to fully prepare for the day after tomorrow. It renders blind those they supervise as well. The result?

#8: THE BLIND LEADING THE BLIND. This is when a team goes up blind alleys. Nearsighted team members foil meaningful problem definition. Plans never become strategic because the future never comes into play. (People end up optimizing Blockbuster when they could have been the ones to envision Netflix.) Future-proofing never happens. A plan’s foundation wobbles, based on rules of thumb no longer true. Once written, the plan sits buried on desktops or files. The CEO mentions it’s been completed. It’s checked off of people’s to do lists. Little changes, including the company’s fortunes.

Sooner or later, panic ensues when things predicted to be in the future arrive in the form of major disruptions, competitors, a loss of share, margin, profit, momentum, cash.These things happen when well-intentioned people gather for a strat planning effort based on how it’s always been done; when the strat planning process itself is not very strategic and not designed for a world where problems and opportunities predicted to be years away now arrive daily.

The treatment? If you’ve read this far it’s self-evident. It’s future-proofing your planning process. It’s enlightening a strat planning team on how best to plan by teaching them the best planning practices for these extraordinary times. A great plan for the future is entirely dependent on planning a great planning process — before starting to plan.

The type of preplanning workshop recommended here is essentially designed to prevent each of the blindspots noted in this article. Because once an out-of-date planning process begins, it’s hard to reverse its trajectory. (“Let’s see a show of hands from the strat planning team. We’ve been at this now for two months but who wants to start over?”)

With a good preplanning workshop, the right things are unlearned. People’s minds are stretched so they never return to their prior, smaller dimensions. They will view with new eyes the future issues and competitive possibilities of their category, customer, business and operational model, value proposition, innovation platform, margin-makers and enterprise-wide training plan.You’ll end up with a better plan, better buy-in. You’ll also end up making better use of everyone’s time.

Best of all, you’ll end up with a better day after tomorrow. In these challenging economic times, that’s what we’re all really called to do, isn’t it? So let’s use the best possible best practices in crafting plans to make it happen.

Deploying these strategies outside of a crisis is practically guaranteed to future-proof and future-make your organization before the next one hits.

A “crisis trifecta” — that’s what 2020 will be best known for: a global pandemic; the collapse of economies/supply chains/revenues; extreme social and political unrest. Wouldn’t it be great to know what did and didn’t work for those who led organizations that survived and thrived?

Through interviews, attention to the assessments of McKinsey, Deloitte, HBR and others, as well as my own observations and board experience during the trifecta, here’s what I’ve been able to deduce. The first won’t surprise you, but the second is a real eye-opener:

1. Most every C-Suite and board immediately deployed basic survival strategies: Cutting expenses and conserving cash; securing the health of people, buildings and IT systems. Executives operated as virtually as possible, communicated empathetically with employees, and obsessively with distributors, suppliers and investors. Leaders focused on the immediate; putting out fires and preventing new ones (in some cases not just figuratively but literally).

2. But some execs had the nerve to say to their teams: “We don’t just need to do the basics; we need to do better than what the basics call for!” There is much we can learn from those audacious enough to try to gain from 2020’s distressful, harrowing circumstances.

While it’s long been said that one should “never waste a crisis,” few are ever able to do so. One reason: There’s not really been a playbook for it — until now. My analysis has identified nine specific strategies C-Suites and boards used to the advantage of their organization and their own careers. They’re not only valuable in guiding one through a crisis, they also set one up for success in its aftermath. As you will see, deploying them outside of a crisis is practically guaranteed to future-proof and future-make your organization before the next crisis hits.

1. Look for the silver lining.
Sounds crazy, yet it’s true. Many executives and board directors I interviewed noted that in the crises they experienced unexpected blessings. For some it magnified what was working in their organization despite the trifecta. From this, they drew strength and confidence to tackle what wasn’t working. The crises magnified that, too.

2020’s blessings “in disguise” were the inherent weaknesses the crises exposed. Especially common were an over-dependence on a single country or company for raw materials. Out-of-date business models. An uncompetitive e-commerce strategy. Biased hiring and promotional practices. Operational silos. Weak balance sheets. Product offerings grown stale or generic; an ineffectual value proposition.

Now exposed for all to see, leaders were able to use the urgency of the crises to get people to acknowledge weaknesses about which they’d long remained silent. By addressing these weaknesses, invariably other serious weaknesses were also exposed. That’s because weaknesses tend to be related. For example, a weak leader may not have the spine to rid the organization of under-performers. So, correcting the former also corrects the latter. By resolving weaknesses exposed by 2020, many organizations are already benefitting from the improvements and now strengthened for the future.

Another benefit of facing 2020’s big challenges, leaders developed greater confidence in themselves and their colleagues. Many admit to having less fear and anxiety about the future and the next big crisis, “whenever it comes.” Observing this too, McKinsey refers to this silver lining as “strategic resilience.” [1]

The next entry in the playbook on how not to waste a crisis comes from discovering the degree to which even those executives with a lot on their plates choose not to play it safe when working to resolve their situation. They disregarded convention or what would typically be presumed impossible. Instead, they chose to –

2. Move quickly, boldly and, at times, even audaciously.
Here’s an example: Serving 215,000 members and holding $4.7 billion in assets, Summit is the second largest credit union in Wisconsin, though far from being the largest financial in the state. Yet, early in 2020’s pandemic, bold moves by Summit CEO Kim Sponem helped 16,615 people with home lending — the most of any entity in the state — propelling the financial institution to become Wisconsin’s top mortgage lender. The bold moves that drove this outcome will benefit Sponem and her organization for years to come in the form of more and deeper consumer relationships, more household data, the preemption of competitors in Summit marketing, and thus the promise of even greater growth in the future.

How did it come to be that Summit was able to capitalize on the crisis? As mortgage interest rates started to fall in March 2020, people who wanted to refinance found it almost impossible to take advantage of the falling rates. Mortgages (which still require a few “wet signatures” with the borrower and lender together) were impossible because lobbies of financial institutions in South Central Wisconsin (Summit’s territory) had closed by official mandate, and in-person meetings were anathema due to Covid. Summit’s ingenious solution was to dedicate drive-throughs to the task of “in-person” signatures and notarizations. It was an audacious idea because to pull it off required redeploying over 50 Summit employees to lending (reallocating others to do the work the redeployed had been doing), and then training everyone, getting the right systems on their laptops and recasting many processes, all while people were struggling to learn how to collaborate virtually.

It was an enormous effort, but in the end, it drove record-breaking results month after month; twice the volume of the financials’ highest year prior to 2020. Of course, competitors noted their customers switching to Summit. But even as they tried to duplicate the initiative, it was clear that Summit had first-mover advantage. Sponem’s bold move succeeded in large part because she’d already built a culture that prioritized customer needs.

3. Address customer’s fear and anxiety before your own.
Even in times free of crisis, the organizations that do well are always those that anticipate people’s unmet needs and rise to satisfy them sooner. But a crisis provides the opportunity to address new and emerging needs; mitigate greater fears and anxiety. In addressing these sooner, better and with more compassion, leaders can capture new customers, establish trusted relationships and a loyalty that can last for years. That’s because of the emotional bond that comes from giving people hope in their darkest hours.

Just think back to your worst days in 2020. What organization, brand or person seemed to really care about you? Helped you meet the basic needs of your operation and people? Who supported you emotionally and gave you reason to hope through long weeks and sleepless nights? People do not soon forget those who ease their pain and suffering. Seventy-seven years after liberation from the Nazi occupation, the French still pay tribute to the Allies. Organizations able to convey to current or potential customers “we’ve got your back” during any crisis find in that choice a goodwill that can pay off in new and long relationships, positive word-of-mouth and higher ratings, which attract more customers — a jumpstart to future growth and margin.

One strategy really lays the groundwork for this when a crisis strikes.

4. Have in place a customer-centric operational vision and state-of-the-art innovations to deliver on it.
Organizations that gained the most from 2020’s trifecta were not floundering and burning precious time trying to figure out and then build offerings that, years before, could be predicted to delight customers and now be technologically possible. That’s because they already had them in their queue. Take McDonald’s. Three months into Covid — when most restaurants were closed, grocery stores compromised, and people were struggling to get food conveniently and take a break from cooking themselves — McDonald’s managed to shave 25 seconds off the average time to complete a drive-thru order.[2] This was a strategic initiative they were already working on, “not just to do the basics of drive-thru but do better than the basics.”

Clearly, the virus spurred consumers to embrace new behaviors at an accelerated rate: Telehealth, online shopping, touchless payment systems immediately made their lives easier, more convenient, less stressed.

The virus also propelled businesses into the future. spurring them to make changes in months that normally would have taken them years to execute. It may have been hell tackling these changes in 2020, but for those who did there was a silver lining. They ended 2020 already performing at levels they’d not expected to achieve until 2023 or 2024. The significance of this achievement cannot be underestimated. They are now able to craft their next strat plan on advantages they’d not expected to have until 2024. This leaves any of their competitors who lag in customer centricity severely disadvantaged as they try to catch up.

An analysis by McKinsey[3] found a widening gap between the best- and worst-performing companies as organizations with future-ready business models pulled away from the pack during Covid. This means that leaders who failed to find ways to leverage the crises of 2020 (capturing new customers, delighting them and current customers) now need to make up for lost ground and move quickly, boldly, even audaciously. Any C-Suite or board that finds itself in this situation faces a crisis of their own making. For them, the playbook on how not to waste this crisis has a recommendation.

5. Cast a sound strategic plan that’s focused on identifying and resolving the most essential challenge that must be overcome in the next 3–5 years to remain viable, competitive and growing profitably.
In other words, cast a great strategic plan now to avoid crises in the future. Research by Lindsay Foresight & Stratagem revealed many of the common mistakes made by even the smartest leaders tackling strat plans. One of the most serious is that they focus their plan on achieving a financial ambition. They don’t realize that financial metrics, while important, are not the goal. They are a measurement of success in resolving the most essential challenge the company faces in remaining viable, competitive and growing profitably in the future.

As somewhat of an authority on strat planning (and wanting to stay that way), I paid a great deal of attention to the nature of strat plans that helped or hindered organizations survive the crises. Plans focused on making a certain financial goal were immediately made impotent by 2020’s crises, because each of the plan’s strategies to achieve the goal were rendered useless by events beyond anyone’s control.

In contrast, those with strat plans focused on resolving an essential challenge — such as outperforming competitors in delighting customers with better, faster, more convenient ways to live their lives — did well. They executed their future strategies ahead of schedule, finding that the same kind of critical thinking used to ID and tackle the essential challenge of their strat plan was the kind of critical thinking that also helped them ID and tackle the essential challenge they faced in the crises of 2020.

6. Take the same critical thinking skills used to produce a good strat plan and apply them to crisis management.
The best practices of the former are practically identical to the latter and devoted to preventing disruptions and surprises by using proven processes to foster and organize critical thinking and align teams on the same right things.

The similar nature of strat planning and crisis management was confirmed in an extensive research study published in 2018.[4] It was done in service to hotel and tourism industries which are especially vulnerable to natural disasters, terrorism, infectious diseases, economic recessions and more. In analyzing how 5-star hotels successfully navigated crises, the researcher discovered that strategic planning and crisis management are mistakenly seen as separate from each other, when the purpose of both is to proactively prepare a company for challenges on the horizon. Both involve the formulation and implementation of decisions regarding threats and opportunities inherent in changing situations and management.

This means this playbook’s skills on how to not waste a crisis are relevant to future-proofing and future-making not just for the short term, but also for the long term. In fact, from now on, you should expect to constantly use this playbook on how not to waste a crisis. Why? Because (though I hate to say it), a constant state of crisis is the new norm.

7. Lead as if in a constant state of crisis.
Think about it: 100-year floods are happening a couple times a year; Black Swans are increasingly common. Significant tragedies, setbacks and catastrophes now occur almost daily — cyberattacks, mass shootings, expansionist moves by the Chinese, acts of terrorism, stock market volatility, meme stock events. Add to these the long list of emerging and disruptive marketplace dynamics that wreak havoc daily. Consumers, employees and shareholders who know full-well that with technology and social networks they can bless or damn a CEO, board, company or brand overnight; dysfunctional city and state governments, a dysfunctional U.S. Congress; growing government debt, the interest of which threatens to exceed GDP; and, of course, there’s climate change, shortages of fresh water and more threats to life as we know it.

Yet even in the face of this list, I’m an optimist. I believe in the ingenuity of people and what they will accomplish with research, technology and a new and improved approach to strat planning that is right for the times, especially when crises spur them to move more boldly, quickly and audaciously to resolve essential challenges before us. This playbook on how not to waste a crisis can also help. What follows are its final two tenets.

8. ID your mistakes during past times of crisis and, in light of this new playbook, consider and codify now what you’d do differently.
Grab a pad of paper and, with regard to 2020’s crisis trifecta, write down:

• What are the three biggest lessons you learned about yourself (your good and bad performance)? What will you try to do differently from now on?

• What three significant weaknesses did 2020 reveal about your organization, leadership, finances or business model? For each you’ve yet to address, what is your plan of action to resolve the weakness in the next 3–6 months?

• Crisis or not, when people experience the need for a product or service you sell, why should they prefer you over alternatives? What about your answer is something your competitors couldn’t easily copy and, in that way, future-proof and future-make your organization?

• Do you make strategic planning a priority? If not, why not? In what way could you overcome these hurdles and have a sound strat plan for the future in place six months from now?

• What is the essential challenge your organization must resolve in the next 3–5 years to remain viable, competitive and growing profitably? What is your singular strategy to resolve it and the measurable goal that you know it has resolved?

• Finally, who among your colleagues would benefit from reading this playbook and a little self-examination? Consider sending it to all those on whom you depend on to help you survive the next crisis; to be viable and thrive in the future despite the constancy of crisis that is now the new norm.

Take your answers and, along with the study findings noted in this article, then –

9. Create a personalized version of the playbook on how not to waste a crisis.
Keep it where you can see it every day. This is not only because a constant state of crisis is the new norm, but also because of two universal and timeless truths that none of us needed 2020 to realize. Those who don’t learn from their past mistakes are doomed to repeat them. The best way to predict your future? Create it for yourself.

In a way far greater than previous times in history, all around the world people are asking themselves a lot of the same big questions. It’s because so many of the events of the past couple of years have been new and particularly painful, experienced to some degree by almost everyone around the globe, and at the same time.

Prior eras of widespread questioning include “The Great War (1914–1918), “The Great Depression (1929–1934)” and “The Great Recession (2008- 2012).” Of course, we won’t know for a few years if historians dare designate this time as worthy of “Great” status. But currently, conditions seem to meet the criteria: Extraordinary fear and struggles that span several years and which are expected to continue through this year and beyond. The same fear and struggles affecting almost everyone around the globe. As a result, millions of people forced to reappraise their dreams, habits, values and life philosophies at the same time.

In the process of reappraisal, millions could easily arrive at similar answers that trigger an era of great hopelessness. Or insights that tip humankind toward an era rich with hopeful possibilities. As a professional practitioner of strategic foresight for over 30 years, parsing my research and interviews on 2020, 2021 and 2022, I’m sensing we’re close to an inflection point.

What could be the determining factor? It’s the degree to which a critical mass of people arrive at the same insight. It’s actually a timeless, universal truth so powerful it cracks the code on how to wisely answer most any big question one is dealing with. Why, many have already landed on it! If millions more also come to it, the outcome would be a better future for everyone on the planet.

And because of three insights that make this time of questioning different from past eras, there’s actually a decent chance this could happen:

ONE: A broader span of concurrent events, creating a broader span of concurrent pain and suffering, creating the potential for critical mass. While it’s not necessary to detail all the events for you (after all, you lived them!), summarizing them here showcases their sheer magnitude:

First came the pandemic. Then commerce, cultural and sporting events shut down. Work life shifted for everyone and for many ended all together. Supply chain challenges and shortages ensued along with joblessness and an economic recession. Fear and panic for one’s personal health and finances were widespread.

As if these weren’t enough to bear, other events wracked us at the same time: George Floyd was killed. Protests, demonstrations, destruction followed. We were confronted with news of other untimely deaths and unfortunate arrests of our brothers and sisters; debates (often angry) on the ‘mattering’ of lives ensued. Highly empathetic individuals were beyond distraught. Even those conditioned to hard times felt raw. The state of U.S. political affairs / debates / misinformation / disinformation only served to elevate uncertainty and emotions. Insurrection and untruths threatened our democracy. (They still do.)

What’s more, the backdrop for “all of the above” included ever-more-serious cyberattacks that breached private and precious data. And widespread suffering from climate severity: more severe hurricanes, deadly, off-season tornadoes, catastrophic floods and fierce, fast-moving wildfires. On top of 2020’s deep sorrow from an inability — due to COVID protocols — to give succor to loved ones hospitalized, 2021’s pain was fueled by more senseless deaths: Impaired minds shooting kids in school or driving recklessly through a holiday parade hitting and killing celebrants; record levels alcohol and drug related accidents.

And just when you thought ‘at least some cheerful relief will be provided by the holidays,’ along came Omicron. And shortly after, a staggering rise in inflation, the reality of supply-chain shortages and worker shortages keeping shelves empty and manufacturing plants stymied for an indeterminant time to come. And then Putin’s non-sensical attack and destruction of the Ukraine; mass destruction, senseless killing. And in the face of it, the birth of new alliances and the rebirth of old ones. People around the world having a new appreciation for what they do have, including the basics: water, shelter, peace; some agency over their own destiny.

Even for those who’ve experienced the kaleidoscope of emotions brought about by previous wars and depressions, the sheer number of ways 2020, 2021 and 2022 have touched millions of lives around the world is part of what differentiates our current age from prior “Greats.” This has prompted another global phenomenon unique to this time:

TWO: Millions asking themselves similarly deep questions at the same time. Here’s a list comprised of things people on four continents have told me they’ve been thinking about.

1. What do I want out of life for myself and my family?
2. And how, now, can I cast a plan to achieve it knowing what I know now, about how life can change in a minute for me and those I love?
3. Am I vulnerable to dying soon because of a pandemic? The behavior of someone mentally ill? A despot with a nuclear weapon?
4. Are my affairs in order?
5. If I died next week, what would I regret?
6. How much do I want to work physically distanced from people? Do I want a job closer to family? How much do I want to work?
7. Do I like my job? Do I need a new one?
8. Do I want to stay in this relationship? How much harder do I want to work to make it good?
9. Is it time to forgive? Time to forget?
10. What kind of school experience is best for my kids?
11. What’s a minimum acceptable standard for public health and safety and how do vaccines and masks enable that?
12. Am I a racist? Am I a racist subconsciously and don’t even realize it?
13. When does life in the womb really begin? Which takes precedence, the life of the woman carrying the child or the child?
14. What am I personally willing to sacrifice in service to abetting climate change?
15. What income, and freedoms (if any) am I willing to compromise in order to keep my country functioning and strong in the face of terrorism? From those countries that seriously threaten us economically and militarily?
16. To what degree do I believe in free markets? Capitalism?
17. How do I define shareholder value?
18. What do I expect of my citizenship, my elected officials? Elections in and of themselves?
19. What does the United States constitution actually say? Mean? Guarantee?
20. Who shall I vote for in the next election?
21. What is justice?
22. What is fair?
23. What is truth? How do I know if news is real or faked?
24. What is my purpose in life?
25. What would I like my legacy to be?
26. What do I stand for?
27. How do I live — and exemplify to others — what I’ve concluded above?

What also makes these times uniquely in contention for “Great” status- and most importantly — the potential of a hopeful inflection point — is this:

THREE: What almost every acute thinker is likely to discover in their search for answers and homeostasis.

When facing sizable distress or cognitive dissonance, human nature tries to quickly resolve it. Some of this effort involves deliberate, conscious processing. Far more takes place subconsciously. But there is no avoiding it: As humans we are compelled to try and reach a psychological state that reduces or eliminates tension. Particularly common ways to achieve this equilibrium are a change in belief, attitude, or behavior; a rationalization; the framing of one’s situation with some larger meaning. In each of these the ideal is a singular insight that resolves all the disparate considerations of the tension at once.

And this is what is so remarkable right now: A potentially critical mass of people are not only asking themselves similarly big questions, but — in their struggle to find homeostatic answers — they’re arriving at the same insight! It’s this:

Any reconsiderations by which I hope to cast my own future also cast your future. How you answer your most serious questions also casts my future.

While this has always been true, it has always suffered lack of awareness, denial or inaction. Decades of experiencing a global economy and global warming did even prompt a critical mass of people around the globe to internalize it. Rather, a teeny virus made this insight personal and palpable to billions. However, the insight applies to much more than Covid-related questions. It the global economy we live in today, it applies to most everything, from the supply chain that enriches our lives to the elected officials 1000 miles away who can threaten it.

The insight that my decisions cast your future and vice-versa is simple yet profound. The famous naturalist John Muir expressed it quite succinctly 150 years ago: “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.” On this small planet, my future is hitched to your choices. And yours, mine. Our lives are deeply, inherently, and forever interconnected.

The ‘great’ events of 2020–2022 are prompting more and more people to realize this and the result can’t help but be an inflection point for the world worthy of designation as “The Great Revelation.” The revelation being that the only way to achieve the equilibrium we so desperately seek for the planet, our families, and the mental health of everyone is “doing unto others as we would have them do unto us.”

But what are the odds this will happen? Well, you tell me: After all, my future depends on your answering the questions before you with me in mind. Can you? Will you? Perhaps that’s the hardest truth to own up to: Creating the tipping point we all hope for starts not with others around the world changing but with oneself. What are the odds that you — and I — will take this to heart? And rather than later, right now; today?

REVELATIONS FROM BEHAVIORAL SCIENCE WILL HELP YOU FEEL BETTER.

As someone recently pointed out, USA now stands for the United States of Anxiety. If all forecasts are true, each of us is likely to feel even more anxious as we wait to see how our economy revs up again, amidst COVID-19. In the meantime, a sense of danger for our loved ones, incomes, and way of life are all understandable — but for a reason you may not realize. Each and every person on the planet today is here precisely because, over millennia, our genes have been optimized to sense danger and react to it in often irrational ways. This is evolution’s “survival of the fittest” kicking in with you right now.

So go ahead, be afraid. It will increase your odds. But don’t be afraid at the expense of being wise.

Anxiety brings with it its own danger to your health. Unmanaged, fear and melancholy can easily “go viral” and endanger the well-being of others, the marketplace and world order. John Maynard Keynes was the first to allude to these “animal spirits” within us which have such impact on others and the economy. Writing about them in March 2020, Robert Shiller, the Nobel prize-winning economist observed: What we have now is really two epidemics. One is the coronavirus, but the other is an epidemic of fear driven by “narratives” we tell ourselves and others. He warns that emotions carried by the narratives have more influence on thoughts and behaviors than scientific reality may justify.

What’s more, in a world where the marketplace is one big conversation moving at the speed of light, apocalyptic narratives can infect people’s spirits much faster than employers, consumers and governments can react. Flattening the curve of fear’s contagiousness is important lest it create even more danger ahead.

And while earnest Facebook posts of tiny concerts, evening news reports on acts of kindness and “we’re in this together” on everyone’s lips are all wonderful things, they will be insufficient to fight fear and do little to speed our recovery from mass melancholy.

What would help? A science lesson. And based on it, a hygiene protocol we’re all asked to follow.

Just as treating COVID-19 requires teaching everyone the why (science) and how (protocol) to rigorously wash hands, disinfect and sneeze into our elbows, so too does fighting fear and melancholy require teaching everyone good mental hygiene (the protocol) and the science (why) behind it. The science is behavioral science. This is the body of evidence and insight born of psychology, sociology, evolutionary biology, neuroscience quantitative psychology — which concerns itself with the statistical modeling of behavioral data — and marketing, which is now rich with statistical evidence on what moves people’s attitudes and behaviors.

For over 40 years I’ve been a scholar and professional practitioner of behavioral science in application to what drives commerce, culture and consumption; habits; the stories we tell ourselves and each other; marketing and brand strategy; leadership dynamics in the boardroom and the C-Suite.

My expertise is the subconscious and conscious drivers of people’s attitudes, decision-making and behaviors.

From this vantage point I’m convinced that if everyone in the country had a better understanding of the science behind fear and anxiety an, directly related to it, suggestions for quelling them, the societal benefits right now would be significant. What’s more, the return on educating everyone now would pay off for decades to come.

So here’s a short course. Despite the length, it still represents only select highlights from the body of knowledge that exists. But in it you’ll realize learning that’s useful today but also, learning that’s helpful outside of crises. So even if you pass it along now to family, friends, co-workers, your boss, investors and board, consider saving and resending it again a year from now. The more everyone knows about the science of how we humans tick, the stronger we’ll be at handling today, tomorrow and the day after.

#1 AS HUMANS, OUR NATURAL DEFAULT PROGRAM IS 😱
As Bill Bryson pointed out so eloquently: “Consider the fact that, for 3.8 billion years, a period of time older than the Earth’s mountains and rivers and oceans…not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stuck fast, untimely wounded or otherwise deflected from its life’s quest of delivering a tiny charge of genetic material to the right partner at the right moment to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that could result — eventually, astoundingly, and all too briefly — in you.”

This means that your genes truly are optimized to read and react to real and imagined danger from a time before brains as we know them today developed. It is in the “evolutionary ancient central amygdala” that innate fears reside, explains Robert Sapolsky, the globally-revered expert in evolutionary biology and professor of neurological science at Stanford University. In his masterwork Behave, he details how the central amygdala is home to complex circuits of excitation. Even today it innately senses danger and drives a lot of our more complex brain functions. It’s surrounded by the also primitive basolateral amygdala which learns new things to fear, then informs the central amygdala to immediately respond with stress hormones and a mobilization of the sympathetic nervous system. So, just like rats that receive a shock accompanied by a tone then learn to expect the shock just from hearing the tone, our own amygdala is so conditioned to danger we read it into situations even where it doesn’t exist.

What’s more, we’re over-conditioned to expect danger and react dramatically to it. Jason Zweig (author of Your Money and Your Brain) explains, it’s because of the degree of surprise and bad outcomes experienced from something truly dangerous. While good things are also memorable, they’re not so critical to survival so our brains never attune to them as strongly as danger.

Of course, there’s more to our brains than the amygdala. Later areas that evolved are said to be the most mammalian and especially in primates, home to cognition, memory, storage, and abstract thought. Sapolsky describes the neocortex as, “the gleaming, logical, analytical crown jewel where info from the other parts of the brain goes to be decoded.” When one consciously thinks about something, such as weighing whether a danger is real or not, this is where the processing takes place and sends signals to the more primitive parts of the brain to “calm down.”

However, for all the marvels science has discovered about the power of these more recently evolved parts of our brain, there’s this irony: While our brains have the capability to weigh matters (such as whether or not a danger is real, and smart strategies in the face of it), apparently our brains also evolved to avoid this kind of sifting and winnowing!

As Daniel Kahneman, Nobel Prize winner and author of the seminal work Thinking Fast and Slow explains: “Thinking is to humans as swimming is to cats; we can do it, but we’d prefer not to.”

That single bit of science makes all the difference in the discussion of mental hygiene. Optimized as we are to sense danger, not only are vulnerable to sensing it even where it doesn’t exist, we also tend to avoid thinking through if the danger is real to the extent we believe it to be.

Even if provided lots of data, detail and advice on why we should feel less anxious than we do, we’re not likely to study it and draw proper conclusions: Our brains are not wired to sort complex info. In a now famous grocery store experiment, researchers set up a table offering samples of jam. Sometimes there were six flavors to choose from, at other times, 24. While shoppers were more likely to stop at the table with more flavors, they were 10 times more likely to buy jam at the table with fewer choices. Having more options made it harder to think things through, and behave as those marketing jam would want.

Think of what this means when trying to lead people to undertake behaviors needed for good physical or mental health. Even when the stakes are high, people are unlikely to sort thru complex or conflicting info. At best, we’ll look for easy-to-read patterns in what we see and hear, then consciously or subconsciously be guided most by those.

#2 EVOLUTION FAVORED THOSE REALLY GOOD AT PERCEIVING PATTERNS.
Imagine walking down the savannah. You observe the shape of a berry that once made you sick so you avoid it. The body shape of that male? It’s similar to those who are successful at protecting mothers with babies, so you sidle up to him. Even at a cellular level our immune system is coded to recognize patterns such as invading bacteria and viruses. Each of your cells has an “identity” tag on its surface that marks it as a part of your body and no one else’s. What’s more, in responding to perceived danger we developed patterns of behavior, essentially decision-making shortcuts. That virus invading my body? FIGHT! That rustling sound in the tall grass? RUN!

#3 WE EVOLVED TO ACT FIRST, THINK LATER. AND MOST OF THE TIME, NOT THINK AT ALL.
People and civilizations advanced because trivial and frequent decisions and activities came to be done without our having to think much about them. It’s still true today. The brain processes an estimated 35,000 decisions a day, and the only way we get through them is shortcuts. Consciously and rationally weighing which toothpaste to buy or what to eat or which route to take to work could each take hours. No wonder, as Kahneman and the jam experiment point out, we humans prefer not to think. Rather, we evolved to favor mental shortcuts that make it easy to immediately decide, immediately act, move on.

Examples of this in real life are endless. Take the profession of marketing, where the whole point is to create and mobilize mental shortcuts in a brand’s favor. These include engraining in a consumer’s memory patterns (like brand names, logos, taglines) which, when a need arises in life, provide a decision-making short cut. Research and experience have found that people tend to automatically prefer brands they’ve heard of — or who’s logo and packaging they recognize — even if they’ve never experienced them. Irrationally but reliably, people equate brand visibility with brand leadership, quality, success and more, even before the actual product comes into play.

This is a perfect example of a human decision-making shortcut based on little or no conscious thought. Just based on one factor (like recall or recognition) we jump to all kind of conclusions about a brand or product. It’s irrational, but truly how the brain works. The other interesting thing about this is that recalling a brand’s name or recognizing it’s logo of packaging is usually learned implicitly.

It’s estimated that 80–95% of the info that drives our shortcuts is learned implicitly. So it’s not just the decision-making shortcuts that are below our consciousness, it’s how we came to them. Among the worst shortcuts are those prompt erroneous conclusions and irrational judgements based solely on a person’s gender, sexual identity, color, geographic origin, position on an issue or candidate or political party affiliation.

Yet many shortcuts are godsends. Imagine grocery shopping if, to make a decision, you had to read and compare every single package in a category. Instead, the shortcut you call upon is buying the same brand as last time. You look for a familiar logo or pattern on a package. Many decision-making shortcuts manifest themselves in daily habits that save us time. In fact, we defer to decision-making shortcuts most of the time.

Kahneman refers to this “fast” decision-making as System 1 thinking, a process that is intuitive, experience-based and generally below our level of cognition because of its rapidity. Of course, the speed and automaticity of it this skill is exactly what increased the odds of our ancestor’s survival. Probably in many ways ours, too.

Kahneman refers to a human’s alternative processing method as System 2. It’s more reflective, deliberative and seeks to double check or reconsider System 1 presumptions and decisions. It’s work, and as Kahneman stresses, we prefer to avoid it. So shortcuts — and the evolutionary conditioning behind them –still drive the majority of our decision-making.

When the thinking shortcut is behavioral, it’s called a habit. Some are famously unhealthy. Others, like rigorous handwashing when leaving a bathroom, bus or grocery store provide untold health benefits to individuals and society. Of course, in the face of COVID-19, the entire nation is now being taught, encouraged and habituated to better handwashing and sneezing techniques. So certainly we’re also capable of — en masse — teaching, encouraging and habituating other healthy protocols like those that improve our mental health. (see next article).

Now, when we humans do think, it’s not what you probably imagine…

#4 THE BRAIN DOESN’T ACTUALLY THINK AS WE THINK IT THINKS.
For centuries it was believed that people first carefully process what they’re seeing around them and how to behave in light of it; what they need and want and because of that, what they’ll buy and how much they’re willing to “pay.” But science now reveals such causality goes exactly the opposite way: The processing of information takes place beneath our cognition. When the need for action is triggered, a decision made by our subconscious rises to our conscious mind which rationalizes it after the fact with whatever tidbits that are handy, even though they’re likely to have little to do with the root of the actual decision. (Again, this is true even in what many presume to be their most thoughtful, rational and “executive-like” decisions.) The real driver of the decision comes from subconscious factors, implicit learning and shortcuts we don’t even realize.

The “aha” of many scientists (especially those in quantitative psych) is that people are conscious of what they want to buy or do buy only after they’ve chosen it.

For those dealing with fear and anxiety, what’s important to realize about this is not just that the brain doesn’t think as we think it thinks because it jumps to decisions which only come to our conscious mind later. It’s also that what drives our fear and anxiety doesn’t come to our conscious mind until after the subconscious has used it to drive decision-making shortcuts and behaviors. When you pair this with the conclusion of scientists that negative experiences sear themselves into the subconscious more than positive ones, it’s easy to see that the reason we are the way we are today (fearful and anxious) is because over millions of years danger and negative outcomes have conditioned our genes to just expect the worst. We’re not that different than aforementioned rats who were conditioned to expect the worst just from hearing a bell.

#5 WE EVOLVED TO HAVE A FUNDAMENTAL IMBALANCE IN FAVOR OF SEEING THINGS NEGATIVELY.
Scientists call this expectation “negativity bias.” It includes the tendency for bad events and emotions to affect us more strongly than positive ones. “We’re devastated by a word of criticism but unmoved by a shower of praise. We see the hostile face in the crowd and miss all the friendly smiles. We focus so much on bad news, especially in a digital world that magnifies its power, that we don’t realize how much better life is becoming for people around the world.”

Of the human tendency to expect the worst, social psychologists at Case Western University looked for situations in which bad events didn’t have such a strong impact on people. They hoped to identify patterns that would enable them to develop an elaborate, complex and nuanced theory about when bad is stronger versus when good is stronger. Despite scouring the research literature in psychology, sociology, economics, anthropology and other disciplines, they couldn’t find compelling counter examples of good being more influential.8

Negativity bias is easy to recognize in ourselves if you know where to look. It turns out that a bad first impression is much more influential that a good first impression. Again, from Daniel Kahneman (and his longtime collaborator Amos Tversky) thought of a financial loss (say, losing $1,000) has a larger impact on people’s behaviors than the thought of saving the same amount. (It’s irrational but true.)

Rory Sutherland, a long-revered practitioner of effective advertising, has written that the subconscious driving our behaviors is not a calculating machine but an inference machine. It does not decide, but rather places bets. It’s more preoccupied with avoiding disaster than obtaining perfection. “Human behavior makes much more sense when viewed from this standpoint of fears rather than desires. Why is it so difficult to encourage people to move their bank accounts? Not because it’s a bad decision overall but because it has a small but pertinent possibility of being catastrophically bad. Why do people follow the herd? Not because it’s the best thing to do but because it has a low chance of being egregiously awful. If a lot of people do something awful it is a fair assumption that it’s at least okay most of the time.”

You’ll recognize the latter as the panic induced over-buying and hoarding of bathroom tissue that came with COVID-19. It was anxiety induced and irrational like so much of our behavior. But as so many behavioral economists have proven, while our thinking may be irrational, it is irrational in highly predictable ways. (It’s the very predictability of some common irrational tendencies we all have that makes it exciting to think of the good that mass teaching of mental health tips to mitigate them could provide.)

Clearly, negative expectations hold great power over how we interpret the world, and why much of our anxiety is irrational: Researchers find that anxious individuals tend to allocate excess attention to threat and there is evidence that this cognitive bias causally contributes to the development and maintenance of even more anxiety. Said another way: Fear and anxiety distort the perception of risk. Perception of risk increases fear and anxiety. Fear and anxiety over what might happen overshadows rational thinking about what probably will happen. Whatever our level of thinking, it’s all very emotional, isn’t it?

#6: HUMAN DECISION-MAKING STARTS AND ENDS WITH EMOTIONS.
For centuries it was believed that that thinking and feeling were located in separate parts of the brain, and functioned separately. The first to point out this error was Neurologist Antonio Damasio of USC. Among his revelations is that the function of emotion and reasoning are fully integrated throughout the brain.

Among his many fascinating examples are those of people who, because of severe brain injuries, are unable to experience emotions. They can’t make decisions. They can’t shop. They’ve lost the ability to read and connect patterns and memories that inform expectations, judgements and decision-making shortcuts.

It turns out the brain’s decision-making software is powered by the emotions. This means — in the tug-of-war of what to prefer or what to choose — emotions dominate rational thinking. Emotion almost always wins. You could say emotion is the language of the brain. However, as Damasio would point out, fear, joy and sorrow are simply labels the most recently developed part of the brain gives to physical signals the brain reads in the body.

#7 YOUR BRAIN BOTH CONCLUDES AND CREATES WHAT THE REST OF YOUR BODY SENSES.
Protoplasm progressed only because it developed receptors that could “read danger” long before the human brain had sophisticated cognitive processing and labels to express it.

Many behavioral scientists refer to our gastrointestinal system as our “second brain”, citing the primal connection between the two. “We often talk about a ‘gut feeling’ when we meet someone for the first time. We’re told to ‘trust our gut instinct’ when making a difficult decision or that it’s ‘gut check time’ when faced with a situation that tests our nerve and determination. This mind-gut connection is not just metaphorical. Our brain and gut are connected by an extensive network of neurons and what many refer to as a superhighway of chemicals and hormones that constantly provide feedback about how hungry we are, whether or not we’re experiencing stress, or if we’ve ingested a disease-causing microbe.”

Lisa Feldman Barrett, the distinguished professor of psychology at Northeastern University, argues that, “the main purpose of the brain is simply to read the body and regulate the body budget.” If your body “senses” danger, the brain reads it and, conditioned to expect the worst, signals your heart to beat faster and your lungs to breathe faster. Over time, the same sensations and physiological changes are recognized as a pattern, so a shortcut response develops to deal with them. The modern brain puts a label (like “fear”) to the sensations and physiological changes. The label in and of itself is a processing shortcut, because when we label what we sense as “fear,” that alone alters what you expect to see and feel next, influencing your perception of reality.

Proof of this is eye-opening. If offered two glasses of wine (both the same white wine but one in a glass colored red with a tasteless, odorless food coloring) people will taste and rate them far differently. If offered an orange-flavored drink that is colored red, people taste it as cherry. As a shortcut, color alone changes our perception of reality.

As Barrett argues in her book How Emotions are Made, you might think that in everyday life, the things you see and hear influence what you feel, but it’s mostly the other way around!

The reality is that, by expecting the worst or the best of things, each of us lives in a virtual reality of our own creation. What we expect becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. So if we perceive a child, a date, a teacher, an elected official, an older person or a product to be a stupid or ineffectual, we’ll then will see it confirmed at every turn, even though it may not be at all true.

#8 REALITY ISN’T ALWAYS WHAT OUR BRAIN SEES AND CONCLUDES,
LEADING US TO FEEL AND ACT IRRATIONALLY.
The tendency is to seek out evidence that supports what we expect to find, hope to find, what we already believe to be true is what behavioral economists refer to as “confirmation bias.” Even if employing System 2 thinking, we tend to see in a mound of evidence what we want to see. (No wonder, in a recent article about people searching for info on COVID-19, the author referred to the search for statistics and predictions as doomsurfing.) Confirmation bias means that even if presented with alternative data, we tend to discount it, or discount its source, because it takes a lot of mental effort (System 2 thinking) to reprogram what our brain already is sure to be true — that reality of our own creation.

Remember what Kahneman said? We humans are capable or thinking, but we’d prefer not to. That’s because it’s so much easier to read patterns and just jump to conclusions. Take “availability bias,” which is the human tendency to think that whatever we’ve heard about most recently, or most frequently, is more common, popular, powerful or more effective than it actually is. It leads people to believe things are true or trending when that may not be the case at all. Because hearing the same thing over and over the brain processes — irrationally — as truth.

Availability bias explains the power of taglines that have been seared into our memory, like “Fox News, fair and balanced.” Is it? Even if reams of evidence were laid before you, as noted previously your brain would not sift and winnow them well; any of your preconceived expectations of Fox newscasts would color your assessment of the evidence. In his book The Righteous Mind, Jonathan Haidt (the noted social psychologist and Professor of Ethical Leadership at New York University’s Stern School of Business) explains: We are often exasperated, wondering why others don’t see what we see or don’t listen to our reasoning. It’s because we were never designed to see or listen to anything other than what supports our own conclusions. We evolved not so much to learn, as to try and gain advantage in influencing others to our point of view.

What we see we want others to see. We’re driven to persuade others to see and believe what we think is needed to survive and thrive. Ahhh, “tribalism,” the human tendency to form and belong to social groups with other like-minded individuals.

The tragedy, loss of lives and economic impact of COVID-19 aside — all of which are truly awful and deservedly anxiety provoking — in most other cases confirmation bias, availability bias and tribalism would mean that the world may not be as bad as your caveman-like brain tells you. “Ever wonder why people’s perception of the incidence of crime, terrorism, kidnapping and other violent acts is often much higher than reality? A big part of the answer, according to experts in social science, psychology and computer science, is that the biases that were once useful to our primitive forebears have become — like the craving for sweet foods — detriments in our modern world. Instincts that may once have saved us from real dangers have now, thanks to global instantaneous communication, turned us all into chicken littles.”

Yet, those signals we process irrationally as negative, and the confirmation we feel that the sky is falling, don’t just come from our own brain reading our own bodies or Google search results. It’s our brains reading what other’s bodies give off. It’s fear and panic others are radiating that is infecting us.

#9 FEAR, ANXIETY AND JOY OUR BODIES RADIATE ARE NOT ONLY SENSED AND READ BY OUR OWN BRAIN, BUT BY OTHER’S BRAINS, TOO.
Emotional contagion is the phenomenon of having one person’s emotions and related behaviors directly trigger similar emotions and behaviors in others. Again, it’s implicit learning (including non-verbal) and believed to happen easily in person but also via communications like phone calls and emails. In this primitive, and unconscious way we “read” what another is feeling, then mimic it, feed it back and pass it on.

It’s primal, and the telegraphy is real. Evolution again perfected this skill of which we are not conscious. Day in and day out, we’re all scanning others and the situations we find ourselves in, assessing and picking up other’s anxiety. It’s our autonomic nervous system at work. This subconscious skill at detecting and assessing threat or safety has a name: Neuroception. “It explains why a baby coos at a caregiver but cries at a stranger; why a toddler enjoys a parent’s embrace but views a hug from a stranger as an assault.”

Neuroception also explains why fear can be so contagious. And how people can inadvertently create a pandemic of fear. If a person senses a high degree of anxiety in a lot of others, the brain reads an elevation of danger to the point of panic. Do we pause and search for objective data so as to rationally weigh if what we sense as panic is justified? And do we weigh the best course of action? If you’ve read this far, you know the answer. What’s more, you’ll immediately understand Robert Schiller’s concern about the risks of negative narratives we tell ourselves and others; why they make us all the more vulnerable to being infected with fear that leads to irrational behaviors which lead to more fear.

Speaking of fear, here’s something of which we all should be afraid:

#10 OUR CULTURE IS NOW RIFE WITH FORCE MULTIPLIERS OF FEAR.
These in particular can easily feed and magnify perceptions of danger and fuel a contagion of fear:

Echo Chambers: To create cohesion and increase odds of survival, early tribes would tell the same stories over and over. This is no different today. However, thanks to email, social media and other forms of technology that gather data on people’s behaviors and preferences, the repetition and retelling are easier. The repetition and retelling are easily scaled. In the process, more and more data is gathered, which machine learning analyzes to determine who likes what stores and what emotional tenor. As a result, people who fall prey to stories of economic hopelessness find algorithms serving up even more of them. Machine learning and AI are just echoing back to us our own fears and anxieties, confirming them, deepening them.

Thought viruses: What’s also scary is the number of nefarious types and sick minds that work to infect our minds and moods with fake or falsified info.

“Extremity bias:” This is the tendency of humans to love telling stories dramatically, and answering questions with the most colorful language. It’s done to get attention and elevate one’s importance. Jonah Berger, a professor at Wharton explains what happens: “A positive story becomes absolutely glowing, a negative one turns horrific, like the tall tales of ancient oral tradition.”17 The power of “extremifying” was well known by town criers in the middle ages talking to 20 people. But today it’s known and practiced by everyone. It’s become common on social media, in content marketing and digital marketing.

Around the globe, businesses, brands, legitimate media, community organizations and political parties have revenue models that depend on getting and keeping people’s attention: The competition is fierce. So extremification comes into play. Unfortunately, throughout history “good news” has never been much of a draw. So what we tend to end up with are ever more “surprising” claims, the “scariest” stats; frightful forecasts of disasters; doom and gloom and “breaking” news 24/7.

Force multiplication: In and of itself, each of the above forces has great potential to increase the anxiety people already feel. Remember, we evolved to easily sense and take on the emotions of others. Our tendency is not to pause, and with System 2 thinking, double-check the rationality of what we’re sensing. It’s more likely that our System 1 thinking (with its confirmation bias, availability bias and more) will assume that what we’re sensing is credible.

But here’s the thing to be really concerned about: Each of these anxiety-fueling forces operates concurrently with the others, creating a huge multiplier effect. Increase the speed of multiplication with a world-wide-web operating at the speed of light and not even the highly contagiousness of COVID- 19 can match the virality of fear and anxiety that can be created if we’re not careful.

Robert Schiller, and others like David Brooks (in his Opinion piece in the New York Times) are right to be concerned about a pandemic of fear. It also turns out FDR was right when, during another time of great anxiety, he pointed out that the real danger to fear is fear itself. From behavioral science we now know fear drives irrational behavior and irrational thinking. It increases anxiety and serious mental health issues, that often lead to increases in physical health issues, which create even more anxiety for everyone for years to come.

HOW DO WE FIGHT FEAR AND ANXIETY?
We leverage what we know to be true:

When we all act together in service to the same cause, we perform miracles. If we’ve learned anything from the fight against COVID-19, it’s that if we all engage in the same proven protocols to mitigate the spread of the contagion, we can flatten the curve of the illness’ impact and weaken the hold it has on our lives and economy. In the same way, we can lessen the damage of anxiety and melancholy to ourselves, our families, communities, and nation if we band together to fight it en masse. What do we fight it with?

Knowledge based on sound science is always a gamechanger. Take this article. It’s a short course explaining some of the drivers of fear and anxiety and drawn from research in psychology, sociology, behavioral economics and neuroscience. This same behavioral science also informs us on how to lessen fear and anxiety. In fact, ten quick tips can be found here. LINK. Will you consider practicing them? You’ll find each as easy as other health protocols you’ve been working to habituate (washing hands vigorously, sneezing into your elbow). One of the mental hygiene tips is guaranteed to make you laugh. (Consider sharing it to give others a laugh, along with a jumpstart toward better mental health.)

Sharing and caring are powerful and persuasive. You’ve seen the result of people, using the same health tips, to stem the tide of COVID-19. But it took thousands of individuals like you modeling them to inspire others to adopt them. It took thousands passing along to their family, friends and co-workers the why (the science) behind the behaviors. So if there’s someone who’s spirits you’d like to lift, pass along the knowledge and tips you’ve gained here. Modeling them yourself for others to see. And please don’t wait. Even after the immediate threat of COVID-19 declines, we’ll find ourselves worrying about whether or not it’s really gone. And then there are the many other fears and anxieties on the horizon that are subject to today’s force multipliers: A deep recession? Climate change? A terrorist attack? Another pandemic? What worries you about your family, your life, your future?

With the same amazing commitment, rigor and science with which we’ve all mobilized to mitigate the impact of COVID-19, let’s now mobilize to fight our fear and melancholy. As the corona virus is reminding us, the USA can pretty much overcome anything if we pledge our hearts, minds and behaviors in service to it. So will you work to mitigate your own anxiety so it doesn’t infect your siblings, husband, child, parents, cousins, co-workers, neighbors, and friends.

WHAT BEHAVIORAL SCIENCE TEACHES US ABOUT THE BEST WAY TO QUELL THE CONTAGIOUS POWER OF FEAR AND ANXIETY

THERE IS SO MUCH TO WORRY ABOUT THESE DAYS!
It’s impacting our physical health, our mental health and prompting worrisome behaviors. During the days the earth stood ill, cases of domestic abuse in France increased a third. (And those were only the cases reported.)

Without a doubt more threats to our physical and mental health are coming. While the impact of coronavirus on human lives and the economy already seem more than we can bear, many scientists are now saying COVID-19 may never be fully eradicated. We’re all projecting that many of the things we treasured in the past (going to concerts and events, traveling, hugging each other) will be forever changed. Economists are saying it will take months and months for millions of people to get jobs again; it will take years for the marketplace and our investment portfolios to recover.

IT COULD TAKE YEARS BEFORE OUR ANXIETY WANES AND OUR MENTAL HEALTH IMPROVES.
“The economic and social-science literature is replete with studies that document the harm to people from recessions and economic hardship — including higher rates of suicide, opioid abuse, alcoholism and domestic violence…a 2019 study in Clinical Psychological Science found individuals who had experienced even a single financial, job-related or housing impact during The Great Recession (2008+) still had higher odds of symptoms of depression, generalized anxiety panic and problematic substance abuse three or four years after the recession had ended.”

Even if projections of more danger and melancholy ahead are exaggerated in the media and social networks –even if they ultimately don’t come true — the mere expectation of them increases anxiety and alters our nervous systems, putting us on high alert. This increases the odds we’ll perceive even more things as threatening, even if they aren’t, because evolution has hypersensitized us to see danger at every turn and then react quickly irrationally and unhealthily to it.

If everyone in the country had a better understanding of these scientific underpinnings of our emotions and, based on the same science, how to better quell fear and anxiety, then the societal benefits would be significant. The return on lowering anxiety now would pay off for decades to come. That’s because people who are anxious have weakened immune systems. They’re all the more prone to viruses, along with many other illnesses and mental health problems. They’re prone to the infectiousness of other people’s anxiety.

RESEARCH REVEALS THAT THE ANXIETY EACH OF US FEELS IS CONTAGIOUS TO OTHERS.
No wonder a New York Times advice column concerning itself with the Coronavirus outbreak points out that, just like we owe it to our family, friends and society to wear masks so as not to infect others, we owe it to our family, friends and society to keep ourselves mentally healthy and not infect them with our anxiety.

STOPPING THE SPREAD OF ANXIETY AND PROTECTING OUR OWN MENTAL HEALTH REQUIRES THE SAME KIND OF DAILY ATTENTION REQUIRED FOR PHYSICAL HEALTH.
In the same way that just saying, “I need to eat better and exercise more,” doesn’t work, mental health requires more than just telling ourselves to “get a grip” when we’re anxious. “The rational brain is basically impotent to talk the emotional brain out of its own reality.” For some, better mental health requires regular counseling by a professional. But everyone can benefit from some simple mental health behaviors that are easily done every day.

The ten suggested are as simple as the physical health behaviors (like rigorous handwashing) we’ve all pledged to do because of COVID-19. Now to be clear, I’m not a mental health clinician. But my 40 years of scholarship and professional application of behavioral science have given me insight and experience on what works to influence people’s attitudes and behaviors. Earlier, I provided a “short course” on some of the psychology, behavioral economics and neuroscience behind the fear and anxiety we feel. The ten mental health tips offered address them specifically.

Pause. Breathe. Call on what Daniel Kahneman describes as your System 2 thinking capability. Ask yourself, “Are things really as bad or as hopeless as they seem?” We all live in a virtual reality of our own making. So double check your impressions and the potential for confirmation bias. Search out credible sources that can paint a different picture. Without calling on this System 2 thinking, your System 1 thinking will be free to drive fear and anxiety that may not be justified, and the irrational decisions and behaviors that result will ultimately make you feel even worse.

Give other people permission to remind you to do #1. When, uninvited, people challenge our thinking, we usually don’t listen to them. So this tip is one of the smartest things you can do for your own mental health (and that of those around you who suffer when you aren’t at your best): On a day you’re certain you’d never need another to remind you to do tip #1, recruit three different people to watch for your future need of #1 and whenever “it’s time,” invite you to do some System 2 thinking, even help show you the way.

Argue the opposite is true. Work to prove yourself wrong. This is a technique used by debate teams to prepare to counter arguments their competition might make. It’s also productively used in the business arena: When someone is forced to argue a compelling case for the other side’s point of view, they invariably have to research, face and internalize new evidence. Then, any prior confidence their point of view is the right one is then softened because they see things in a new light.

Stop fueling your fear and anxiety by feeding more of it to yourself. This is something mental health experts universally advise: Tune into news and social networks less often. Some days, avoid them altogether. Unsubscribe from push notifications. What one seasoned investment advisor has experienced actually applies to everyone and in all situations: There’s absolutely no benefit in putting yourself on high alert with every little move the world makes. Wait until tomorrow or the day after to check into the world again.

Whenever you do seek news and information, “disinfect” it before consumption: Limit yourself to sources of trusted journalism. Don’t fall prey to tabloid news and conspiracy theories. (They might be tempting for entertainment value. But implicit learning being as powerful as it is, once in your brain the pathogens from trash can infect your thoughts in ways you’ll not realize.) From the start consume only what’s healthy. Make sure the facts and statistics you ingest are good quality.

Put things in a bigger context. Actively construct a larger perspective. This is where history is helpful. “Every age thinks it’s ‘the Age of Anxiety,’ warns Joseph LeDoux, who is one of the foremost experts on the neuroscience of fear. But history holds plenty of evidence of times of fear greater than what we face now.” Chaos, death, suffering and hopelessness have been around forever, as have been evidence of people’s resilience, resourcefulness and recovery in the face of it.

Another source of a perspective comes from bigger data sets. For example: What’s missing from COVID-19 reports that would lessen anxiety are stats that the majority who contract the virus experience only mild cases, or are asymptomatic and never suffer.

Often the way journalists try to present perspective is in the form of stories of individual people; anecdotes. As a result, we can come away with the impression something is a big, serious, universal problem without stopping to think that a few examples are not the equivalent of a statistically significant sample. Also, we often forget to guard ourselves against reading causation into what is merely coincidence — or seeing causation in correlation. For example, just because 100% of the people who eat mashed potatoes eventually die is not a reason to fear eating them.

Good mental hygiene also requires us to fight our availability bias. This is the tendency to take what we hear most recently and most frequently and process it as trending or as truth. Shark attacks make headlines. So of course, shark attacks are top of mind in the set of fears we have when at an ocean beach. But a larger data set reveals that shark attacks are statistically rare; that people are more likely to drown at the beach. “People fear terrorism, even though the odds they will die in a plane crash are far higher…”

So many people would find their anxiety lessened by looking at a bigger picture such as good science provides.

Consider brain science. From it we know that we’re hypersensitized to anticipate danger, and in response we can become obsessed anticipating the worst that can happen. But nine in ten things people most frequently worry about never come to pass. Says Jack Nitschke, a psychology professor at the University of Wisconsin and a practicing psychotherapist, “Anxiety is about being concerned about something that might happen.” In most cases what we worry about is largely unpredictable, irrational and turns out to be a waste of time.

A short course on brain science also teaches us that the fear and anxiety we express in our thoughts and behavior are a self-fulfilling prophecy: William James, the father of psychology in the U.S., concluded a century ago that, “The behaviors we choose can radically alter our inner landscape… Panic is increased by flight… Sobbing makes sorrow more acute.” Neuroscience has now proved him right: Giving way to our own anxiety actually produces more of the very anxiety we’re trying to quell! It’s as if we’re re-infecting ourselves with it. So what James prescribed in the 1800s is recommended by many psychologists today: Refusing to express your anxiety is considered the first step in getting it to go away. Rather, work to “stay in the moment.” It keeps you from catastrophizing.

To stay in the moment, state-of-the-art psychiatry advises, “Put down your cellphone, turn off the cable news… Take a walk. Listen for birds. Concentrate on the warmth of the sun or wind on your face.” It’s called practicing mindfulness.

Practice mindfulness. Though a technique that’s thousands of years old, mindfulness is now well-proven to be a potent tool to help people manage overwhelming fears about the future. Information on best practices, tools and techniques are available for free from a scientific research institute named Center for Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin. Their mission? “Cultivate well-being and relieve suffering through a scientific understanding of the mind.”

Founded by world-renowned neuroscientist Dr. Richard J. Davidson, the center’s findings are the result of years of study, most famously on Buddhist monks whose lives are devoted to meditation. Surprisingly, Davidson finds that as little as five minutes of meditation a day for a couple weeks can start to rewire anyone’s brain for greater calm, happiness and health. This is so simple and accessible a technique for the common man that Davidson says, “I envision a day when mental exercise will be as much a part of our daily lives as physical exercise and personal hygiene.”

Another mental hygiene practice that works –
Accepting the inevitability of anxiety as a part of everyday life. Humans will always carry some degree of anxiety. Even before COVID-19, in the heyday of the economy, we all found plenty to be anxious about. In a New York Times Article Laura Turner reports that what she and many others have found to help mitigate anxiety is accepting that, like seasonal weather, it’s useless to think you can avoid it. She advises treating anxiety as if it were a well-meaning friend who you can expect to visit but on occasion will stay too long, at which point you tell him or her, “time to go; I now need to focus my energy on other things.”

As one psychologist explains in Psychology Today, embracing anxiety as a part of life is a form of courage. It’s actually a badge of honor to strive to live fully in the face of all the uncertainty we each face every day. Certainly that is what our ancestors must have done, too: It could only be by living fully in the face of uncertainty and risk that their genes made it to today, alive in each of us.

But is there a secret to living fully in the face of the inevitable anxiety that life presents? It turns out there is widespread agreement on one of the factors –

Laugh more. Universally, laughter is one of the most sought-after states humans seek. It’s not that the brain is hard-wired for it, but research shows the brain IS hard-wired for what humor provides that all brains crave — connectedness to others. It’s why humor is most successful when crafted to exploit a common understanding we all share. It’s why a funny video gets rapidly passed along. It seems that, almost more than anything else, we are predisposed to bond by sharing humor.

That’s a good thing, because the positive immune and metabolic changes laughter creates are suspected of playing a big role in survival of the fittest. The boost to immunity that laughter can provide is great anytime, but never so much as when faced with two global pandemics: the coronavirus and high anxiety.

As one medical doctor advocated decades ago: Laughter is the best medicine. Over 100 years ago, “laugh more” was William James’s prescription to anyone with high anxiety. His rationale as a psychologist? “We don’t laugh because we’re happy, we’re happy because we laugh.”27 Neuroscience has now proved him right. As Lisa Feldman Barrett argues in her book How Emotions are Made, you might think things you see and hear influence what you feel, but it’s mostly the other way around! It turns out that when we smile, our body physically changes in response. If we laugh, we’ll see whatever comes next in a different light, and our body will “see” it too.

For some, it may seem that now is not the time to crack jokes. The great researcher and behaviorist Dr. Jane Goodall would disagree. On March 25, 2020, when she herself was frustrated from days of self-isolation advised, “During all of this we have to keep a sense of humor.”

One day of laughing a bit more, followed by another day of laughing a bit more, and then another and — voila! — it adds up to week, a month, a life of less anxiety and living more fully. And not just for you, but because of the contagious nature of emotions, it creates a happier life for others in your sphere; and in the larger sphere we share called planet Earth.

THESE TEN TIPS FOR BETTER MENTAL HYGIENE ARE STEEPED
IN GOOD SCIENCE AND THE ADVICE OF CREDIBLE EXPERTS.
But who will preach and teach them to the nation? Who will be the Dr. Anthony Fauci of the country’s mental health? Right now, no one seems to have the calling, the platform, the funding or the time. So it turns out the one to preach and teach them to you — is you. What you have before you in this article and its prior one are essentially self-directed study. They’re things you’ll enjoy learning because they work. They’re also a responsible way to prevent your own anxiety from infecting others.

BUT IF YOU ALSO WANT TO DO YOUR PART TO IMPROVE THE MENTAL HEALTH OF THE NATION…
Share these mental health tips with those you don’t want infecting you or others with their anxiety. Family, friends, co-workers and your boss are likely to welcome any learning that could help them feel better. Besides, unlike the inconvenient handwashing protocol called for in the fight against COVID-19, the leading mental health protocol here is easy. It’s fun. It’s laughing! Who can’t love that as a requirement? So laugh vigorously. Laugh multiple times a day. Repeat this today, tomorrow and the day after tomorrow.

If you laugh more it will improve not just your mental and physical health, it will also improve others, because behavioral science tells us laughter is contagious. So while you faithfully and concertedly work to prevent the spread of any germs you have, would you faithfully and concertedly pledge to infect the world with a little more laughter?

Marsha Lindsay researches, analyzes and forecasts future marketplace dynamics to help C-Suites, Boards and marketers prepare now for what’s next and strategically best for advantage and accelerated growth. She’s widely published. Founder of Lindsay Foresight & Stratagem, her speaking engagements and consulting clients span the Fortune 100, multinationals, VC-infused startups and universities around the globe. All her work is grounded on decades of scholarship in the behavioral sciences — the universal and timeless tenets that drive human motivation, decision-making and business transactions, as well as employee and corporate dynamics.

1 Landsman, Stephanie. Robert Schiller: Corona Virus is creating a ‘dangerous time’ for markets, panic is just starting. Trading Nation. 2020 March 09, https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/09/shiller-coronavirus-panic-has-not-peaked-market-plunge-just-starting.html

2 Behind Lindsay Foresight & Stratagem. https://www.lfands.com/our-founder/

3 Bryson, Bill. A Short History of Nearly Everything. Broadway Books; 1st edition. 14 September 2004.

4 Sapolsky, Robert M. Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst. Penguin Press. 2017 May 02.

5 Zweig, Jason. Mr. Market Just Got Inside Your Head. Don’t Let Him Mess With You. The Wall Street Journal, Markets, The Intelligent Investor. 2019 May 17.

6 Who Am I? http://whoami.sciencemuseum.org.uk/whoami/findoutmore/yourbody/whatdoesyourimmunesystemdo/howdocellsrecogniseeachother

7 NOTE: This is why we dare not put too much stock in what people state in surveys or media interviews as their intended behaviors. More predictable are insights from ethnographies, psychological tests with control groups or sufficient quantitative data. As for the why of the behaviors? Again, they are unlikely to ever be conscious. The best we can hope for are insights, professionally assessed from the subconscious, on what really motivates and incents people, irrational though they may seem.

8 Tierney, John and Baumeister, Roy F. For the New Year, Say No to Negativity. The Wall Street Journal, Ideas, The Saturday Essay. 2019 December 27. https://www.wsj.com/articles/for-the-new-year-say-no-to-negativity-11577464413

9 Southgate, Nick and Sutherland, Rory. Behavioral Economics in Action: Strategies and Insights from the IPA Effectiveness Awards. IPA. https://ipa.co.uk/knowledge/publications-reports/behavioural-economics-in-action-strategies-and-insights-from-the-ipa-effectiveness-awards

10 The neurobiology of emotion–cognition interactions: fundamental questions and strategies for future research. 2015 February 17. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4344113/

11 Damasio, Antonio. Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain. Penguin Books. 2005 September 27.

12 Interview by Manuela Lenzen. Feeling Our Emotions. Scientific American, Mind. 2005 April 01. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/feeling-our-emotions/

13 Sonnenburg, Justin and Sonnenburg, Erica. Gut Feelings — the “Second Brain” in Our Gastrointestinal Systems [Excerpt]. Scientific American, Health. 2015 May 01. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/gut-feelings-the-second-brain-in-our-gastrointestinal-systems-excerpt/

14 Bryson, Bill. The Body: A Guide for Occupants. Doubleday; 1 Edition. 2019 October 15.

15 Barrett, Lisa Feldman. How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain. Mariner Books, reprint edition. 2017 March 07.

16 Haidt, Jonathan. The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. Vintage, reprint edition. 2013 February 12.
17 Mims, Christopher. The World Isn’t as Bad as Your Wired Brain Tells You. The Wall Street Journal, Tech, Keywords. 2018 August 31. https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-world-isnt-as-bad-as-your-wired-brain-tells-you-1535713201

18 Emotional contagion. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotional_contagion

19 Porges, Stephen W. Neuroception: A Subconscious System for Detecting Threats and Safety. ERIC. 2004 May 24. https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ938225

20 Landsman, Stephanie. Robert Schiller: Corona Virus is creating a ‘dangerous time’ for markets, panic is just starting. Trading Nation. 2020 March 09, https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/09/shiller-coronavirus-panic-has-not-peaked-market-plunge-just-starting.html

21 Brooks, David. Mental Health in the Age of the Coronavirus. The New York Times, Opinion. 2020 April 2. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/02/opinion/mental-health-coronavirus.html

22 Brooks, David. Mental Health in the Age of the Coronavirus. The New York Times, Opinion. 2020 April 2. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/02/opinion/mental-health-coronavirus.html

23 Tierney, John and Baumeister, Roy F. For the New Year, Say No to Negativity. The Wall Street Journal, Ideas, The Saturday Essay. 2019 December 27. https://www.wsj.com/articles/for-the-new-year-say-no-to-negativity-11577464413

24 Magee, Erinne. Handling Your Kid’s Disappointment When Everything Is Cancelled. The New York Times, Parenting. 2020 March 18. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/18/parenting/coronavirus-kids-events-cancelled.html?type=roundup&link=intro

25 Brooks, David. Mental Health in the Age of the Coronavirus. The New York Times, Opinion. 2020 April 2. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/02/opinion/mental-health-coronavirus.html

26 Herrera, Tim. Suffering Through Your First Financial Crisis? Read This to Relax. The New York Times, Smarter Living. 2020 March 15. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/15/smarter-living/corona-stock-market-tips-dealing-with-financial-crash-crisis.html

27 Piore, Adam. Scientists’ Understanding of Anxiety is Radically Evolving — But How Long Will it Take for Treatments to Catch Up? Newsweek. 2019 September 05. https://www.newsweek.com/2019/09/20/anxiety-medication-drugs-science-exercise-brain-1457006.html

28 Mims, Christopher. The World Isn’t as Bad as Your Wired Brain Tells You. The Wall Street Journal, Tech, Keywords. 2020 April 14. https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-world-isnt-as-bad-as-your-wired-brain-tells-you-1535713201

29 Piore, Adam. Scientists’ Understanding of Anxiety is Radically Evolving — But How Long Will it Take for Treatments to Catch Up? Newsweek. 2019 September 05. https://www.newsweek.com/2019/09/20/anxiety-medication-drugs-science-exercise-brain-1457006.html

30 Kaag, John. William James, Yoga and the Secret of Happiness. The Wall Street Journal, Ideas, Essay. 2020, February 27. https://www.wsj.com/articles/william-james-yoga-and-the-secret-of-happiness-11582825877

31 Center for Healthy Minds. University of Wisconsin-Madison. https://centerhealthyminds.org/

32 List of All Center for Healthy Minds Studies. Center for Healthy Minds. University of Wisconsin-Madison. https://centerhealthyminds.org/science/research

33 Gilsinan, Kathy. The Buddhist and the Neuroscientist: What compassion does to the brain. The Atlantic, Health. 2015 July 04. https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/07/dalai-lama-neuroscience-compassion/397706/

34 Turner, Laura. This Is a Good Time to Stop Fighting Anxiety. The New York Times, Opinion. 2020 March 12. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/12/opinion/sunday/anxiety-treatment-therapy.html

35 Seaburn, David B., Ph.D, L.M.F.T. Feeling Anxiouos? Of Course. Psychology Today, Anxiety. 2020 March 16. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/going-out-not-knowing/202003/feeling-anxious-course

36 Barrett, Lisa Feldman. How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain. Mariner Books, Reprint Edition. 2017 March 07.
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