New research on daily insecurities shows the value of old-fashioned planning.
Life often takes people to uncharted territory, throwing surprises into even the most familiar of situations. Perhaps you were always a regular traveler, getting onto planes, trains, and busses without giving the trip very much serious thought.
However, it’s been a while since you felt comfortable enough to resume some of your earlier habits. Lacking choice in the matter, you’re now being more or less compelled to venture away from your comfort zone.
How will this renewed exposure to the vagaries of travel turn out? As you start to organize your suitcases and think about everything you need to bring with you, it’s hard to drown out your inner voices telling you that you’re bound to forget something important or will have trouble producing the required security documents.
The stress of uncertainty can prompt individuals to cope in essentially one of two ways.
In proactive coping, you try to envision every possible scenario and prepare potential ways to manage each and every outcome.
Think you might forget your travel documents or, for some reason, they’re not working? Leave yourself plenty of extra time to deal with any resulting headaches this can cause. Worried that something might leak in your suitcase? Bring some spot remover should your summer whites develop some unwanted blotches.
In reactive coping, you wait until the disaster unfolds and then try to figure out what to do about it. If you cannot produce your travel documents when needed, reactive coping would kick in when you frantically search online and on the spot for possible solutions.
The Value of Proactive Coping
Using job insecurity as a model to study coping, the University of Amsterdam’s Judith Langerak and colleagues (2022) proposed that most existing research on stress and coping compares two types of reactive strategies.
In emotion-focused coping, you try to make yourself feel better about a situation; in problem-focused coping; it’s the opposite. Problem-focused coping involves changing the actual parameters of the situation by trying to fix it.
What if, the Dutch authors propose, it’s actually more effective to use some of those proactive coping methods in which you anticipate a bad situation and prepare a set of possible solutions? Instead of coming up with a strategy while you’re in the midst of it all, seeing what you might face in advance could better help you successfully get to the other side.
Comparing Proactive and Reactive Coping
Using a short-term longitudinal design, Langerak et al. followed 266 Dutch employees from various employment sectors across five testing intervals within two months as they navigated their self-described job insecurity experiences.
The participants responded weekly to prompts asking them to rate themselves on statements reflecting the belief that they could lose their job or run into job conditions so bad they would be forced to consider leaving. The workers in this study also included the self-employed, the “gig” workers who face almost constant uncertainty.
To assess coping, the U. Amsterdam research team asked participants to rate themselves on items derived from five types of proactive coping methods: career planning, career consultation, networking, scenario thinking, and reflecting.
The outcome measures included ratings of perceived psychological strain. The authors also controlled for factors such as age, gender, and education, as well as the availability of resources in the form of time, money, and social support.
Although “proactive” in the sense of involving planning, it is still possible to engage each of these strategies as job insecurity unfolds.
In line with this argument, the authors tested two models in which they statistically placed the five coping strategies as the precursor to job insecurity (proactive coping) or as a result (reactive coping).
In other words, a worker could use these coping strategies to stave off job insecurity or buffer the effects of ongoing job insecurity. The question was, which model would result in the best prediction of psychological strain from week to week?
Somewhat contrary to Langerak et al.’s predictions, week-to-week variations in proactive within individuals had no bearing on subsequent perceptions of job insecurity.
The authors attribute this unexpected finding to the fact that the study took place during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, during which time employees may have felt that “proactivity is not always positive; It may not be ‘wise’ when the context is not ready for change” (p. 12).
Proactive coping also may “take more time to manifest itself” than to show up as a weekly stress-reducing strategy.
This last point seems to be the study’s main take-home message. Not only did their investigation occur during a legitimately stressful time for most workers, but it also placed what might have been an unreasonable demand on the data to show effects on the scale of weekly vacillations.
Furthermore, building on the point that short-term pain can mitigate long-term gain, the authors conclude that “it is advisable not to cease proactive behaviors to prevent temporary discomfort but to engage in proactive behaviors while trying to minimize discomfort” (p. 14).
What Can Proactive Coping do For You?
Proactive coping behaviors that involve making plans for the future may take time to have their beneficial effects, and they can even be painful in the short run.
As in planning for that upcoming trip, there’s no doubt that thinking about all the awful things that could happen could raise your stress levels substantially. It’s much more pleasant to believe that a fantastic experience awaits you and that all will go smoothly from start to finish.
The problem is that very few experiences, especially those involving uncertainty, ever measure up to their anticipatory hype.
In many ways, the Dutch study reinforces the expression that one should “expect the worst but hope for the best.” If what matters to you is the quality of the experience itself rather than the planning that proceeds it, there is nothing to be lost and everything to be gained by using, for example, “scenario thinking,” where you project out the possibilities for the situation that might develop.
Even when you’re in the midst of it all, the U. Amsterdam study suggests that there can be benefits in continuing to engage in the same coping methods you used prior to the event.
To sum up, getting outside the traditional stress and coping framework in which reactive methods take center stage can help you gain a greater sense of control over your future.
Thinking about what can go wrong can help ensure that it, in fact, goes right.