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Action cures most setbacks
Acting after a loss
The more a person sits and waits with a problem, the more the problem has the upper hand inside their head. A team that has lost men can put its gear back on, load up, and go out on the next mission. The action does not have to be huge or some mammoth triumph.
Setbacks at work
The same goes for a personal setback, such as missing out on a job or a promotion. A person can go home and dwell on it, which makes no progress. Or a person can run a quick analysis. Why didn't the promotion come through? Maybe there was a qualification missing, or a gate not yet jumped through. The next question is how to get through that gate, so the promotion comes next time.
Action is a cure for a lot of problems. Tim Ferriss has a version of the same idea: get out of your head and get into your body. Doing things is one way to break out of a bad spiral.
Why does dwelling on a problem make it worse?
Psychologist Susan Nolen-Hoeksema spent years studying rumination, the habit of replaying one's problems and feelings without acting on them. After the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake near San Francisco, she and Jannay Morrow tracked Stanford students and found that those who ruminated were more depressed than the others when checked again weeks later. In laboratory experiments, she also found that a short stretch of rumination prolonged a low mood, while a short stretch of distraction lifted it.
Why do unsolved problems keep nagging at the mind?
In the 1920s, Bluma Zeigarnik, a student of Kurt Lewin in Berlin, found that people remembered interrupted tasks better than finished ones, an effect now named for her. In 2011, E. J. Masicampo and Roy Baumeister showed that unfinished goals kept popping into people's minds during other tasks. People who wrote down a specific plan for the goal had fewer intrusive thoughts, even though they had not completed it.
Why do small steps matter after a setback?
Researchers Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer analyzed nearly 12,000 daily diary entries from 238 employees across seven companies. They found that the best days at work were most often marked by progress on meaningful work, even small progress. Setbacks showed up most often on the worst days. Amabile and Kramer named this the progress principle in their 2011 book.
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