I have a love-hate relationship with uncertainty.
I love it when I CHOOSE it, but I hate it when I don’t.
What’s the difference, you say?
Plenty!
I love the kind of uncertainty where I’m exploring and not just waiting helplessly for an outcome. That’s the good stuff. Like the uncertainty of an amazing meal I’m about to eat, or a creative project I’m consumed with. As long as it’s an uncertainty of my choosing, I can’t get enough.
Having entered the experience willingly, my mind can expect something rewarding, and then flush with excitement instead of anxiety.
But imposed uncertainty is the worst. It’s like being dropped into the jungle blindfolded and told there’s probably nothing dangerous out there. And it still produces the same energy as excitement, but turns it to worry.
If excitement is anticipation for a good thing that’s coming, then worry is just anticipation trying to protect me from a bad thing.
The bone beneath the flesh of this idea is control. Control gives me the ability to enjoy the possibility, while uncertainty, being void of control, is impossible for me to enjoy. I mean, I can enjoy wondering what will happen as long as I choose to enter the experience of my own free will and know that I can leave at any time I want. But when uncertainty is thrust upon me, all I want to do is get it off of me.
I know I’m not alone in this because there is even a name for it: “intolerance of uncertainty,” that thing that happens when your brain sees not knowing as a problem that needs to be solved.
That’s because the human brain has a limited attention budget. It can’t keep everything equally important, so it downgrades the predictable because, well, it’s predictable. You don’t have to worry about the sun coming up because it will always come up.
But uncertainty makes unresolved stuff emotionally visible and therefore upgrades it to suspicious. That explains why I worry. I worry so much because I see so much to worry about. Why? Because life is filled with an almost unlimited supply of uncertainty, that’s why we have Google! My brain never runs out of material because there is always something I don’t know or can’t control, which gives me a huge search category for worry.
I mean, as long as I sort reality into what I can’t know or control, and what I do know and can control, the possible worry topics are endless. Because clearly, there’s danger everywhere.
The trouble is, I have allowed the predictable stuff to disappear from my view. I stop noticing the sun rising, the comfortable bed, the running water, because none of it needs me. In other words, the better something behaves, the less attention it gets from me. My heart beats correctly 100,000-ish times a day? Yawn. One weird palpitation? It’s a heart attack! My husband comes home safely thousands of times. Background noise. He’s twenty minutes late, and I don’t know why. Car crash.
Having gone nose blind to the everyday wonders of life, all that’s left for me to do is to manage uncertainty with worry.
But I don’t think the answer to uncertainty is necessarily having more certainty. At least, it hasn’t worked for me yet. I think the key is learning that not knowing isn’t as dangerous as I’ve made it out to be. And that the answer to uncertainty isn’t control, it’s exploration. Exploring the possibilities instead of controlling them gives you the ability to interpret your feelings as excitement instead of anxiety.
Researchers have studied what happens when we encounter something so big, physically or conceptually, that our existing understanding isn’t big enough to contain it. Which sounds suspiciously like anxiety. But being faced with something beyond your understanding can produce another powerful human experience: awe. And awe doesn’t require you to resolve your uncertainty before you can stop treating it like a threat. In fact, “I don’t understand” is part of what makes awe possible. Awe just changes your perspective.
According to researchers, awe produces what they call the “small self.” When you experience your small self, your problems don’t necessarily get smaller, but your brain remembers that your problems aren’t the whole world.
People experiencing awe report less daily stress, and researchers have even measured less fight-or-flight activation while people talked about their stress.
Fortunately, you don’t have to wait around for awe to find you. You can look for it. In one study, researchers had people take fifteen-minute awe walks, deliberately looking for things that exceeded their usual way of seeing the world.
So look up, look farther, notice what has become so familiar you stopped seeing it. Let something bigger than your immediate worries back into the picture.
And then do the same thing with your life.
Instead of staring so hard at the uncertainty in front of you, widen the view by looking at your history. Look backward at the things you were sure were disasters at the time, and follow them where they have led you.
Then look at where you are now and instead of asking, “How am I going to control what happens next?” ask, “Where could this be leading me now?”
In other words, don’t judge the end of the book by the middle page. That’s the problem with jumping to the ending. You can see the loose ends, but you can’t see the connections until you live them.
Awe doesn’t promise that those loose ends will connect the way you want them to, but it can be a constant reminder that reality is bigger than the tiny piece you’re currently seeing.
There are things that happened years ago that make sense to you now only because you know what happened next, like when I lost the career of a lifetime only to find the child of my dreams.
Look back, and you can follow the thread from the thing you never wanted, through the door you never planned to walk through, to the person you met, the place you landed, the life you have now, but you couldn’t see any of that from the middle page, and you can’t see it from this page either.
Worry wants the meaning now, the ending now. It wants the guarantee now! But there’s more happening than you can see from where you are standing now.
Awe gives us something that worry never will: the humility to admit that our view is not the whole view.
Worry looks at what it can’t understand and sees danger.
Awe looks at what it can’t understand and sees something bigger.