Reduce anxiety by checking the facts

I’ve had a couple of instances recently where I’d made assumptions about situations that turned out not to be the case.

The first was during a trip to Kents Cavern near Torquay in Devon. Mr P and I joined my brother and his partner for a few days while they were on holiday in the area. Three of us are from Plymouth, and Kents Cavern is a ‘go-to’ for primary school trips, so it held many fond memories. We decided to act like tourists and take a guided tour of the wonderful prehistoric caves with all their spectacular stalactite and stalagmite formations.

As we were leaving, we all commented on the fact that most of the signage showed the name as Kents Cavern, rather than Kent’s Cavern (yes, I admit it, we are geeks). We couldn’t see how Kents Cavern, without an apostrophe before the ‘s’, could possibly be grammatically correct. We speculated that this was ‘the modern way of doing things’ or maybe it was because you can’t use apostrophes in website domain names, so omitting it on signage saved any confusion. I have to say, we were pretty judgemental. It never occurred to us that Kents Cavern was actually correct.

Having Googled this conundrum when we got home, it turns out that Kents is actually correct. The caves are not named after a person whose surname is Kent. ‘Kents’, it seems, is a shortened version of ‘Kentis’, which was an Old English word for headland. So, Kents Cavern means ‘Hole in the Headland’, not ‘a cavern belonging to a Mr or Mrs Kent.’ So, the sign-makers at this famous tourist attraction did actually know what they were doing after all!

The next mistaken assumption came when I went with a friend to visit a National Trust property on the outskirts of Plymouth. There was some stunning, historic, Chinese wallpaper in a couple of the rooms. The only problem was, the pattern hadn’t been matched across adjoining lengths of wallpaper, so the design didn’t flow across the seams. My friend and I decided that people must have had different tastes in those days and were happy to live with unmatched wallpaper.

It did seem a bit odd, though, so we asked one of the volunteer guides, who put us right. The wallpaper had originated in a different room. That room had to be refurbished due to dry rot, so the wallpaper and underlying wood panels were moved downstairs to a room with different dimensions. The renovators did the best they could to make a continuous design, but the rooms were so different, the disjointed display was the best they could do.

Both of these incidents got me thinking about how easy it is to make assumptions about someone else’s behaviour, and how important it is to check the facts before leaping to conclusions. It’s especially important to do this if the assumptions we’re making are a source of anxiety. It can lead us to false judgements about situations, which can then impact on our responses to those situations.

Years ago, a company that I worked for went through a bit of reorganisation. As is the way of these things, communication was poor and most of us at the sharp end were unhappy with the changes. I mentioned my concerns to a manager that I trusted and respected, who then sent me a rather sharp memo putting me in my place. Gosh it stung!

I was relaying the story to a friend and remember saying something like, ‘Their words really hurt, they’re not normally that harsh. I must have really upset them.’ My friend asked to see the memo, and when I re-read it, I was totally shocked. Not only was the tone of the memo much softer and conciliatory than I remembered, the actual words and phrases that had most upset me were not even there. I had totally hallucinated the spirit of the memo. I’d read it in haste and filled the gaps with what I expected to read. All because I was upset with the situation in the first place.

When we make these kinds of cognitive errors, we run the risk of alienating people or walking away from situations that are totally retrievable.

That’s why it’s a good idea to avoid knee-jerking to an upsetting event. The adage of ‘sleeping on it’ has a great deal of merit. When we sleep, we go through a phase called REM, Rapid Eye Movement sleep. During this phase, as well as de-arousing emotional memories, we also gain novel insights that are not always possible when we’re fully conscious. So, we wake up feeling calmer and with a fresh perspective.

Then, if things still don’t seem right, it’s work checking that you’ve got your facts straight before responding.

We all know that mainstream media is often depressing and sensationalist. If we’re not vigilant, we could end up getting anxious about something in the news that’s been presented in a certain way, when the underlying facts may tell a different story. And in this era of fake news, it’s so important to make sure that the source of our information is correct.

There’s a great Radio 4 programme called ‘More or Less’ that does just that. The team looks behind the numbers in the news to see if the claims being made by individuals and organisations stand up to scrutiny. I love it, because it puts a different perspective on many of the wilder claims people make. I usually feel nicely reassured after listening to the programme.

So, remember to check the facts before expending valuable energy on a situation that, in all likelihood, is nowhere near as bad as it first appears. And, if it doubt, sleep on it.