Ask Dr. Helen: Preparing for Disaster — Prudent or Paranoid?
Preparations of any sort are always conditioned upon two factors above all others:
1. A perception of risk or threat;
2. A sense that some imagined preparation to meet the risk or threat is “cost effective.”
This is a frankly economic assessment rather than a diagnosis of neurosis or psychosis. No one’s opinion about the riskiness of a given situation — whether expressed as a probability, a worst-case downside, or a mathematically computed expectation — is privileged over anyone else’s. Atop that, one can never know fully about the special risk factors another person might have to take into account. (Do you really think you know how much cash, jewelry, or precious metal your neighbor has in his house?)
That having been said, one of the yardsticks best applied to preparing for a bad turn of events is whether you can’t stop obsessing over the adequacy of your preparations. If nothing you can do, or think of doing, assuages your anxieties, you should ponder whether the problem originates inside you rather than emanating from the world around you.
“Don’t worry, be happy” might not be a comprehensive philosophy of existence, but there’s something to be said for it as an ideal to be striven towards.
