Living with Uncertainty: Uncomfortable Emotions

The brain deals efficiently with familiarity, it relies on our memory of dealing with past situations and we can experience a lot of daily life on “autopilot”.

Where the brain detects uncertainty in the external world it starts to do what it does best.

It detects the threat and seeks to protect you.

It protects you by taking the uncertainty and detecting threats, planning for worst case scenarios, identifying future dilemmas, exploring hypotheticals and calculating the risks for each.

But while the brain is flexing its considerable data processing muscle, the poor host (you and me) is left to deal with the emotional fall out.

Fear, confusion, frustration, anxiety, powerlessness, anger, worry, sorrow, distraction, overwhelm, boredom, guilt, irritation, impatience.

From the perspective our emotional experience, there’s no upside to uncertainty.

At the source of emotion, there is thought.

When we can make the connection between the uncomfortable emotion and the thought that prompted it, we can train ourselves to become aware of (and manage) our more unhelpful emotion-triggering thoughts.

So, a feeling of impatience can be tracked back to a thought about the possible consequences of being late for something important, a delay in delivery or thinking that someone on your team isn’t working fast enough.

By identifying the thought, the emotion becomes more understandable and with some more work, the reflexive link between them can be broken.

But in circumstances of great uncertainty, it can be difficult to track down specific triggering thoughts just because there are so many unknowns. When our certainties seem to be evaporating, we start thinking rapidly and all that thinking has an emotional impact.

In uncertain times the brain is dealing with the unknown and sees possible threats and risks. So, if we’re going to try and live well with uncertainty, a good first step is to accept how involved our emotions are in how we process uncertainty.

A lot of these emotions are uncomfortable but we need to acknowledge that it’s ok to feel like that.