Who Can You Turn to When Things Look Bad?

You’ve just gotten some very bad news and aren’t sure what to do next. A job that you thought was going to come through didn’t materialize, so now you have to start your search all over again. Although you’re trying to find the proverbial silver lining, all you can see is some dust-covered tinfoil.

Coping with stressful events often does involve the sort of cognitive reappraisal that could produce that silver lining. However, it’s not always possible to put those gears in motion. Try as you might, all you can see is a long and lonely road ahead as you try to put things right.

The Value of Social Reappraisal

In cognitive theories of stress and coping, appraisal not only affects how you cope with stress but how you decide that something is stressful in the first place. Bad news can take many forms, not just in extreme cases such as the job situation but in the ordinary course of daily life. There are a myriad of possible bad things that can happen that have stressful consequences, from nicking your finger while prepping dinner to running late for an appointment. How do you approach these? Can you turn the bad to good?

According to University of California, Los Angeles’ Razia Sahi and colleagues (2025), “cognitive reappraisal…is a more effective emotion regulation strategy when a friend helps us change our perspective.” In a way, this makes sense when you consider that the original form of cognitive reappraisal was delivered through therapy to help individuals with depressive disorders. The premise was that the therapist could lead you to question your negative assumptions with a few well-crafted prompts. However, in the coping literature, this social piece of reappraisal was dropped, other than allowing for the value of social support as a way to manage stress.

The other problem in relying on someone else, such as a therapist, to help you reinterpret a stressful situation is that this person might not always be around to offer a sunnier interpretation. The UCLA team thought that, in addition to whatever immediate effects a friend's reinterpretation could confer, maybe it would stick around when you're back on your own through the process they call "social regulation." What's more, because a friend is someone you can call on without having to schedule a session, this form of cheerleading could be something people can draw on in ordinary life.

Testing Social Reappraisal’s Benefits

Taking advantage of the available population of undergraduates at UCLA (18 to 39 years old), Sahi et al. decided to test their buddy-system approach to coping on same-sex pairs of friends. The authors designed an experimental paradigm in which one of the two friends (the "experiencer") was exposed to a set of stress-provoking images, such as a photo of a car accident. The other friend (the "helper") was assigned the task of reading a soothing message that would lessen the impact of the image, such as reading a scripted statement indicating that the victim in the photo wasn't hurt. The question was whether hearing the helper's reappraisal would alleviate the negative affect of the experiencer, not only right away but on the following day. As the researchers predicted, social regulation proved to be an effective negative affect-busting tool, though the effect was greater for pairs of women than pairs of men.

Using Social Regulation to Your Benefit

These findings can provide you with some useful ideas about managing the stress you're experiencing right now. You don't have to depend just on your ability to see the sunnier side of life. You can get the same benefit—and maybe more—from letting a friend or someone close to you be the one to issue the comforting interpretations.

The idea of using social support to get through stressful situations isn't new; this method of coping has long been known to provide a useful antidote to chronic life strains or particularly difficult life events. What's new about this study is the idea that people close to you can do some of the reinterpretation that, for whatever reason, you can't seem to accomplish on your own. Perhaps as you think back on times you've been helped by a friend or someone else you're close to, you can recall something this person said that you never would have come up with on your own. When things look their bleakest, it's unlikely that you'll immediately come up with your own good news story.

Another lesson from this study is that it's also possible for you to be that social regulator for people you know who are going through bad times. Social regulation is a two-way street, and the person who's an experiencer one day may turn out to be the helper on the next.

To sum up, there’s no reason to feel isolated the next time you face a difficult challenge. Rather than feel you have to stick it out alone, the boost of someone else’s perspective can provide just what you need to reorient and regroup.