My rule when I get bad news — a project got cancelled, a friend got sick, a plan fell through — is that I do not act on it for 48 hours. I can talk about it. I can process it. I can vent to my partner. But I do not make any decision that would have been different 48 hours earlier. Nothing gets emailed, nothing gets bought, nothing gets sold.
The rule came out of watching myself make three bad decisions in a row in my twenties. All three were the day I got bad news. All three involved doing something dramatic and irreversible while still in the state of “I have to do something”. The dramatic thing did not fix the bad news. It added a second problem on top of the first.
Two things happen in those 48 hours. First, the initial shock recalibrates — the news is often less bad, or more bad, than the first reading. Second, the correct next step often becomes obvious in a way that it was not while I was actively upset. The correct next step is almost never the dramatic one. It is almost always a small conversation with a specific person. But you cannot see that on day zero. On day two, you can.