Global Woe

Here’s the bad news: real GDP in the UK dipped to -10.3% in 2020, and unemployment rose from 3.7% to 5.4% across 2019/2020.  Similar grim figures have emerged across the globe as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic – GDP growth for the EU was -7.4%, and unemployment rose from 3.7% to 8.9% in the USA – and with the inevitable emergence of viral mutations there is still a hard road ahead.  The (sort-of) good news is that vaccines were produced in record time, and approved just as quickly in many countries.  The dark cloud behind the silver lining is that the availability of vaccines will for some time be limited, and will disproportionately benefit rich countries at a cost to poorer ones: unlike trade, altruism is definitely not global.

There are also significant differences in how effectively countries have responded to the pandemic.  Take New Zealand, where an early and rigorous response has led to just 2,295 reported cases and 25 deaths so far; by contrast, partly as a result of indecisive government bumbling, the comparable figures to date in the UK are over 3.5 million and 100,000, respectively.  NZ has fewer than 10% of the UK’s population, but it isn’t a function of size: China, with a population of 3.4 billion, had 89,000 cases and 4,636 deaths.  Unlike other large economies, China’s GDP actually grew by over 2% in 2020.  

There are hot debates about the reliability of the incidences reported by different countries, but despite the discrepancies, the fact is that we live in an economically interdependent world.  No country is insulated from the effects: New Zealand has coped better than most, but GDP there had contracted 11% by the middle of 2020.  Covid-19 has undoubtedly resulted in a global recession, and as you might expect, there has been a substantial increase in perceived stress: overall, 67% of people surveyed across Australia, France, Germany, New Zealand, Singapore, the UK and the USA reported feeling more stressed since the pandemic began. 

Sounds ominous, but what do the figures actually mean?  The tragic deaths of friends and family members will surely have contributed to respondents’ perceptions of stress, but so will having to home-school children in lockdowns.  The demands are hardly comparable, and are distinguished by a threshold.  When the emotional demand exceeds someone’s ability to cope, as may happen with bereavement, they may cross the threshold and end up suffering from post-traumatic stress.  It would be very hard to claim that having to home-school led to PTSD.

Let’s put these examples into perspective.  The diagnosable stress that might result from bereavement will need intensive one-on-one counselling or drug treatments to address it, but PTSD is thankfully relatively rare.  Almost all of the other everyday issues that people regard as ‘stressful’ are not at all; they simply reflect an increase in pressure.  In other words, the demand has increased, but it will only be stressful if you continue to ruminate about the upset it causes.  It is rumination that prolongs the misery and sustains the demands on our cardiovascular and immune functions that might well lead to illness.

What’s needed to adapt in an agile way to the changing world we live in is resilience.  Resilient people don’t stress themselves out churning over emotional upsets, and the unqualified good news is that you really can choose to not suffer from everyday stress – rumination is a learned behaviour, not a hard-wired one.  The new Challenge of Change Online Resilience Training offers a comprehensive, tried-and-tested programme for acquiring resilience skills which incorporates a validated psychometric assessment of how resilient you are and what you need to do to enhance your skills.  Being online, it can be completed in your own time and at your own pace, and it includes detailed follow-up documents and videos to consolidate the learning.  There has hardly been a more important time to develop the effective resilience skills the programme offers.