It’s unavoidable to fell sad or hopeless and respond negatively to a catastrophe in our lives. However, how do you explain and think about things happened to you or thing that will happen to you has significant influence in people’s longevity. People who immerse themselves in irrational thinking that blame themselves when something goes wrong and have a pessimistic view on everything they do died sooner. Surprisingly, they are not more likely die from biological causes of death but accidents or violence. Catastrophizers blame themselves too much so that they are more likely to act irresponsible and put themselves onto risky paths.
From my perspective, it’s more about think rational and don’t immerse myself in negative emotions. As I mentioned in previous posts, I’m very conscious about my psychological health. When I encountered big obstacles in my life, the negative emotion and thoughts didn’t last more than one week. Several days after the catastrophe, I jumped out of my emotion and normally started to analyze the events as a bystander. Sometimes, I knew I was controlled and significantly influenced by the negative emotion, I would ask for helps from close friends and even psychologists to help me, because I’m very clear about how irrational emotion could be and how important it is to have a rational rationale to interpret bad things happened to me. After my objective analysis, I normally wrote them down to help me see the clear picture when the irrational emotion came again to influence my life.
A qualitative study was mentioned in this chapter. The study was about interviews conducted among 11 Terman men who were lawyers. I kind of got a taste of the value of qualitative study just what Dr. Nonterah discussed with me: the qualitative is not about generalize a phenomena but undercover some pattern from the rich information that would enlighten an interpretation or perspective.