People who watch "end of world" movies deal better with COVID-19

This isn't that surprising if you think about it.

Let me first describe what the study did and found:

Researchers from Uni of Chicago, Penn State and Aarhus (Denmark) analyzed how people who watched "end of the world" movies are coping with the psychological stress arising from the COVID-19 pandemic (link to study at bottom).

What they found out was quite interesting: people who recently watched such "end of the world" movies appeared to have a "higher levels of resilience to the real-world pandemic".

The researchers theorized that "exposure to certain scenes in a movie psychologically prepared viewers for some of the events that unfolded as the real pandemic got underway".

If you read my recent article about how mental tools drawn fro Stoic philosophy has helped successful people build resilience against life's most stressful times, you may remember that a key component of that is: "mentally rehearse the absolute worst case scenarios in your life" and do it regularly.

This is a tool psychologists called "stress inoculation" (i.e. stress vaccination, where you "vaccinate" yourself against highly stressful events).

You can read the research study here.