A little pessimism might actually help you through the pandemic, author says

Janice MacLeod is a committed optimist. 

In fact, at the time the pandemic hit two years ago, the author and artist from Port Dover, Ont., had recently come through cancer treatment with her glass-half-full outlook still intact.

With the arrival of COVID-19, her daughter's daycare closed, as did the auto factory where her husband works, thanks to a parts shortage. It would be the first of many disruptions to the quiet she relies on to write and paint the illustrated letters she sells to subscribers. Still, MacLeod says her outlook at the time was, "It's fine. OK. I'm going to hunker down. No problem."

Reflecting on the much more difficult situation in other places in the world, the couple counted their blessings and kept busy.

"We renovated the basement ... we had a garden, all those kinds of things. Chin up, chin up!"

But as the COVID-19 crisis went from weeks to months to two years, that positive outlook also meant frequently having to adjust her expectations.

"I would really think, OK, it's done. And I can get back to my solitary life in the house working, and I'm going to get to go places also." But then there would be another lockdown, another shutdown at her partner's work or a close contact with a COVID-positive person that left them isolating at home.

When the Omicron wave hit, infecting even the fully vaccinated, including herself, MacLeod said, "I just felt so defeated. I felt like [the virus] is going to do whatever it wants to do."

There could be something uniquely disappointing about pandemic living for those who usually try to see the sunny side of things.

"There is this sense that it's the endlessly optimistic people who've suffered the most psychologically in this period because they're the ones for whom things being uncertain and rocky and sometimes quite dark is a big sort of shock to the system," said Oliver Burkeman, author of The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking.

In contrast, pessimists may have envisioned nightmare scenarios that have not come to pass, Burkeman told The Current producer Peter Mitton.

Defensive pessimism

The journalist from North York Moors, England, who has written several atypical self-help books, calls himself a "defensive pessimist."

"I sort of assume that the worst is going to happen because that way you don't get any nasty surprises," he said.

The term "defensive pessimism" was actually coined by American psychologists Nancy Cantor and Julie Norem in 1986 to describe a cognitive strategy for alleviating anxiety by mentally preparing for worst-case scenarios.

Burkeman is quick to point out that his pandemic experience was a relatively good one, given that he was not bereaved by COVID-19.

Still, he said, "one of the curious things that happened as the pandemic really got entrenched was that every new news headline that came along, no matter how bad it was, was still finitely bad."

"It was still something short of the kind of images of total apocalypse that we defensive pessimists go around with in our minds."

Although there's no empirical evidence to date on how optimists are faring in the pandemic compared with pessimists, one of the things we do know is that the worst possible mental health outcome did not come to pass.

Drop in suicides

Dr. Tyler Black is a child and adolescent psychiatrist and assistant professor at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver who specializes in researching suicide.

Although many people sounded the alarm at the beginning of the pandemic that Canada would see a "tsnunami" of suicides, he said, in fact there was a record drop in suicides in 2020, the latest year for which data is available.

"We had a 32 per cent decrease in suicides, which is unprecedented in a normal year to year," Black said. "Fluctuations in Canada would be in the order of a few per cent up or down. And we've been, actually, quite flat since 2000."

It will be a while until researchers better understand the reasons, but Black points to a couple of potential contributing factors.

"It was the first time that we've had significant economic insecurity, where the government's first response was to spend money on Canadians and put money in their pockets," he said.

Also, while there was certainly more distress with the arrival of the pandemic, "people pulled together. We were all working hard to survive," Black said.

Later on, "we got vaccinated to protect each other. We wear masks to protect each other. We check in on each other. We have these virtual technologies that allow us to connect with each other, even though we can't be physically together."

Those silver linings help, but Burkeman says it's our relationship to uncertainty that may differentiate the pandemic experiences of optimists versus pessimists.

What the pandemic exposes, in a similar way to other major calamities like war, he said, is the kind of uncertainty that's always there. It's just that pessimists are more likely to have thought through these outcomes — be they natural disasters or car crashes or infectious diseases.

'A negative path to happiness'

"The truth about being a human, finite in your control over your time and all the rest of it, is that anything could happen to anybody at any moment," Burkeman said. "And it's kind of so terrifying that we find all sorts of ways to shore up our inner defences against it."

That's why his work puts forward the somewhat counterintuitive notion of "a negative path to happiness."

"By opening ourselves to negative emotions — to the willingness to feel uncertainty, pessimism, sadness, anxiety — as opposed to sort of spending our lives pursuing the path of positive thinking, trying to banish all those thoughts from our minds, it's actually a much more peaceful way to live."

Every human since the beginning of humanity has been navigating that uncertainty, and we seem to be extremely, extremely good at it, ultimately.- Oliver Burkeman

It's heartening, he said, to consider how adept we've been throughout history, of managing through troubled times. 

"Every human since the beginning of humanity has been navigating that uncertainty, and we seem to be extremely, extremely good at it, ultimately, as a species." 

Back in Port Dover, Janice MacLeod has been employing the loud clatter of the old-school typewriter she's using for a new project to let her family know she's busy with work, during yet another closure at the auto plant.

Despite the challenges, "I'm really excited about the restrictions being lifted," she said.

"After all the 'we're open, we're closed, we're open, we're closed,' ... I've not learned at all, because I really think, this time, this time, it's going to be over," MacLeod said with a laugh. "You'd think I'd have changed, but I'm still really optimistic."

Written by Brandie Weikle. Produced by Peter Mitton.