Just because corona happened, doesn’t mean your life has stopped. You still have bills to pay, children to take care of, a career to be on top of, etc. And you still have a lot of big life decisions to make. Whether to move for your career, change careers, finally get engaged, pull the plug on your marriage and more. Yes, just because corona happened doesn’t mean all these big decisions have suddenly gone away. If you’re like a lot of people, you may be thinking that since your life has been upended by coronavirus right now then you may as well just bight the bullet and make whatever big change it is that you’ve been thinking of anyway. Well, don’t pull the trigger too fast. Despite what you may be thinking, making even more changes at a time when your life is already in upheaval is not usually a good idea.
Big Decisions During Coronavirus
Science shows us that humans rely on predictability and reliability. We need to know (within reason) what tomorrow looks like, as well as next week and even next year. If you can’t reasonably imagine what the future looks like it does funny things to you It causes stress, anxiety, and depression just to name a few. With coronavirus there’s already a lot of uncertainty. Adding more uncertainty at this time is just a recipe for disaster. You don’t want to create more life changes for yourself at this time because it just creates more uncertainty. And more uncertainty means more stress, more anxiety and potentially even more problems for you down the road.
Instead of making big decisions right now, you can start by doing some research into your potential big decisions. If you’re thinking about a divorce for example you can start looking at legal fees and processes to see how much it will cost. If you’ve been thinking about moving, you can lookup how the real estate market is changing in the area you want to move to. Just because you can’t make big decisions right now doesn’t mean you can’t be making plans for when you finally decide to pull the trigger.
When to Make Big Decisions During Coronavirus
We’re already hearing on the news that some places are beginning to relax some of their social distancing measures. This is exciting for a lot of reasons. But hold off on making any of those big decisions quite yet. Just because things have started relaxing, they’ve only just started. There’s still a lot that has to be discovered before you can have any reasonable certainty when you can make that big decisions. And that’s the clincher. Before you make any big decisions, you need to be able to look ahead and see with reasonable certainty what that’s going to look like once you pull the trigger. Remember what I said about uncertainty and unpredictability causing anxiety, stress, etc.? Well, you don’t want to knowingly walk into those problems. So once you can reasonably see what it’s going to look like down the road after you make those big decisions, that’s when you’ll know it’s the best time (mental health wise, anyway) to pull the trigger.
Remember, there are a lot of changes going on right now. There’s no need to add to your stress by making even more changes and creating more uncertainty. Do yourself and your mental health a favor and wait for things to settle down a bit before you go making any big changes.