In this episode I talk with Jason Adam Katzenstein, a cartoonist from The New Yorker, who just published his book “Everything is an Emergency.” Jason shared his creative process, successes dealing with obsessions, how he faces his fears as they pop up, how he finds themes for his cartoons, how he handles different types of fears, in particular fears about uncertainty, making mistakes, and not doing things right & perfect.
I hope you enjoy the episode. Let me know what you think of it!
Show notes with time-stamps
Here is are some highlights of this conversation with Jason:
5:12 How Jason handles the fear of making mistakes 9:59 The shifts he experienced after facing his fears with exposure practices 13:13 How Jason distinguishes a distressing thought from an obsession 17:18 Jason’s message for teenagers 22:18 How Jason handles the fear of being an impostor as an artist 24:17 How Jason handles the overwhelming sensations that come with obsessions 28:39 How Jason thinks of his creative process as cartoonist 30:21 How Jason comes up with ideas for his cartoons 33:45 A person that Jason would like to have a cup of coffee with …
D espite what most people think, behavioral science is not an abstract concept or a theoretical model reserved for academicians or the bookshelves of a library.
Behavioral science, to me, is a world’s philosophy for understanding our day-to-day interactions.
Every conversation, every thought, every struggle, every moment of joy, and, basically, every experience we have, can be appreciated, seen, and understood through the lens of behavioral science. The reality is that behavioral science – and Acceptance and Commitment skills as a direct application of behavioral science – are part of our lives, from the moment we wake up to the moment we fall asleep.
Inspired by the series Modern Love, I’m sharing with you a contemporary love story and with it, I’m also sharing how skills derived from behavioral science can help you to navigate romantic encounters.
Think about it, as our lives unfold, our quest for purpose and meaning also unfold—and also our quest for love. Who doesn’t want to love and be loved?
We do experience love in so many ways in our lives, and if we’re fortunate, we experience a special type of love: romantic.
Part I: The Dating Story
He and she met after the click of a mouse and the swipe of a screen on their cell phones and in the midst of online dating companies creating a paradox of choice that keeps us chasing the illusion of what love is and perpetuates questions like, Why should I settle for someone who falls short of my expectations when there are other options [just a click away]? Why should I settle for less when there are many more people to meet [just a click away]?
They liked each other’s profiles, and for ten days exchanged texts daily. They agreed to meet on a Sunday morning.
On their first date, they wandered around by the bay; they shared parts of their lives, their backgrounds, and family jokes. They laughed, enjoyed the nice weather, and, after six hours, ended their date by sharing an octopus dish, a salad, and a glass of wine.
On their second date, they went for a hike: They walked through the trees and felt the contrast of the temperature in the shadows and under the sun. They laughed about their weeks, shared their relationship pasts with one another, laughed about being lost, and finished their hike eating octopus and a small salad. They started their date at 10:00 a.m., and by the time they said goodbye, it was 6:00 p.m.
On their third date, a week later, he was sick and had been coughing the whole week, but didn’t want to cancel their date. Their date was in the middle of the week, so he made sure to take a nap before seeing her. They went to dinner, and while sharing a soup, ceviche, a glass of white wine, and a cup of chamomile tea, he discovered her passion for research and she discovered his curious mind. They were the last people to leave the restaurant and finished the night by sharing a good laugh.
After their third date, she didn’t contact him.
He didn’t know what happened.
He felt sad and confused and didn’t know what to do. All he remembered was having fun conversations, sharing laughs, enjoying one another’s company, wandering the streets together, and always looking forward to the next gathering. He didn’t want to bother her or come across as “needy.” After ten days, he decided to call her:
Him: Hi, is this a good time? Can we chat?
Her: Yes, of course. So great to hear from you.
Him: How have you been?
Her: I’ve been doing well, thank you. Busy with work.
Him: I was surprised I didn’t hear from you; I was surprised you didn’t reach out these last ten days. I thought we were having fun.
Her: I thought you didn’t like me.
Him: . . . I’m confused. . . . Of course I like you. Every date has been fun, and I didn’t notice the time flying by. I was surprised not to hear from you.
Her: I really thought you didn’t like me. I don’t know how I arrived at that conclusion. At our last dinner, I thought that maybe you were just being nice to me.
Him: No, I was excited to see you. I made sure to take a nap so I could hang out with you.
Her: I’m so glad you reached out and that we’re talking because I do want to see you again. I enjoyed your company a lot.
On their fourth date, they went for a bike ride, took a break in a park, laid down on the grass, held hands, and then spent the rest of the afternoon wandering the streets of a metropolitan city, grabbing a cocktail at a marroqui bar close to 10:00 p.m. When they said goodbye to each other, they kissed for the first time.
On their fifth date, he said, “I like you and would like to date you exclusively.”
She replied, “I like you a lot too, and it has been so exciting and refreshing to meet you. But I don’t know how things will go between us. I need to know more. I need to know that things will be fine.”
Part II: The Overthinking Problem
We all have been taught to understand things with our minds, to make sense of everything and everyone around us with our thoughts, and to think through things and situations carefully. We have also learned to think of our minds as these omnipotent organs that know what is true at all times.
She responded in a way that felt natural to her brain.
It’s so tricky.
She deeply wanted to develop romantic intimacy in her life. She deeply wanted to be seen and to see another person through caring and passionate eyes. She deeply wanted to develop a romantic relationship and grow together with another person.
Yet, despite being clear on how romantic relationships are important to her and making the commitment to go on dates, her mind was overthinking.
You may go on a date and, for a long time after, replay in your mind what the other person said, how you responded, how the other person responded. If you’re running late to a gathering, you may have thoughts like, I’m the worst friend ever; they’re going to be disappointed in me. I cannot do anything right.
Does that sound familiar?
Going back to one of the main characters in this dating story, her mind was overthinking in two particular ways:
Searching for certainty about the future of the relationship.
Wanting to “know more” – meaning she wanted to learn more about the possibilities of that relationship by thinking about it.
Let’s take a look at each one of these thinking patterns:
(a) Searching for certainty
We all have a need to make sense of the unknowns that show up in our lives for instance, when you go to a new restaurant and don’t know how the food is going to taste, or when you go on a date and don’t know if your date is going to like you or if you’re going to enjoy their company.
Our experience dealing with confusing situations is unique to each one of us; there are no two people that feel ambiguity the same way and with the same intensity. Intolerance of uncertainty feels different from situation to situation, and we can react differently to it from one moment to the next.
Some of us are more sensitive to uncertainty than others, and our reactions can go from extreme aversion to even extreme attraction. When we feel an extreme aversion to confusing situations, we may experience high levels of fear, rejection, and emotional negativity; on the other hand, when we feel extreme attraction toward an ambiguous situation, we may be curious, we might welcome the challenge, and we may even enjoy the process.
The mind of our main character has a low tolerance for uncertainty and organized a thinking pattern of committing to the possibility of exploring how the relationship will go only if she knew it would go well – a tricky business.
(b) Wanting to know more
The human mind also tends to try to understand, analyze, and collect endless data, as if it is a 100 percent reliable organ and everything needs to be filtered through it.
Let’s unpack this a bit: Our brains have been protecting us since the beginning of humanity. Our ancestors’ minds developed survival functions that kept them alive – anticipating potential enemies, remembering old threats, and considering all of the what-if possibilities of wild animals and enemies.
As time passed, and we moved from prehistory all the way to the industrial revolution and the information age, our minds – as sophisticated as they are – didn’t have a chance to catch up with all those changes. So these days, each of us is walking around with a brain designed in prehistoric times, and with protective functions that equipped us for those times, not necessarily for our current situations.
In other words, our minds never got the opportunity to be upgraded to our current living conditions, or to the environment we live in now, and, as a result, we’re more prone to thinking errors than ever before.
Daniel Kahneman (2011) has described this phenomenon in detail when describing slow thinking and fast thinking, and Eastern philosophies have recognized for years our minds’ limitations.
In our dating story, our main character’s mind had four direct experiences of fun, exciting, and rich dates, and yet, her mind wanted to “know more,” as if having more thinking data would help her make the right choice, and as if her mind somehow had the truth about how to effectively handle that situation.
Part III: The Consequences
There is experiential knowledge, and there is the hope that responding to thinking with more thinking will give us all the information and certainty we need to make a decision.
Once again, it’s a tricky business.
Both overthinking patterns – searching for certainty and wanting to know more – while helpful at times, can keep us stuck in our own heads and can feed into our rabbit hole of worry.
When applied to dating, these overthinking patterns may reinforce serial dating behaviors – moving from one person to another, searching for a long-lasting feeling of excitement, avoiding commitment, and confusing lust for love.
But what’s worse is that these patterns can keep a person from one of the most transformative experiences we can hope for – true love – and the intimacy and connection that comes from being with a partner.
Part IV: Key Questions to Undo Those Overthinking Patterns
Few people know that thoughts are letters and words together that our minds come up with and that we can choose how to respond to them. Acceptance and commitment skills invite you to learn how your mind does its own minding and how it has a life of its own.
And, when you learn to choose how to respond to your thoughts, everything changes. This is when you take charge of your actions (instead of being bossed around by your mind and letting it take you in the opposite direction from where you want to go.)
(a) If you’re dealing with a low tolerance for uncertainty:
Stop battling against those uncertain thoughts.
Ask yourself: Am I willing to go on from here, carrying all these uncertain thoughts wherever I go, noticing how they come and then simply having them?
Do not assume something is wrong when you feel uncertain.
Observe those uncertain thoughts as though they were printed letters on a page.
Make a decision to feel the uncertainty, even if it’s uncomfortable.
Check the consequences of your actions when you’re being driven by uncertainty or reacting quickly to it.
(b) If you’re dealing with a reliance on your mind as the arbiter of truth:
And this is pushing you to respond to doubt with yet more thinking, ask yourself:
What am I going to trust: my experience or my mind’s desire to know more?
What am I going to act on: my wish to know more or my knowledge gained from direct experience?
Behavioral science deals with all of our behaviors – private and public – and while there is much more to say about this dating narrative, and there are different lenses through which we can look at it, I can only speak to and reference my areas of expertise.
Final words
And if you’ve made it to the end of this article, I would like to share two more thoughts with you:
I’m not a thinking renegade, but I’m all about a thinking revolution.
To be loved and to love, we need the awareness and the courage that behavioral science can help us find in the busyness of our minds.
I leave you with this quote:
“I want to know if you are willing to live day by day with the consequence of love.”
Most people use the end of the year as a time for reflection, planning, and assessing how things have been for them. I personally like to set mini-quarterly reviews on my schedule along with reset time and spend more time in a mid-year review. I very much welcome a moment to pause, reflect on what has happened, what’s next, and how I want to live my life.
So, instead of looking strictly at goals or accomplishments, I like to reflect on the:
The actions I took – whether they took me closer to or further away from my values
That’s why I called this process “values-based year review,” and you can do it any time that works for you. More than having a specific time to complete this review, it is more important to reflect on how you have been living your life, what makes it challenging, what happens under your skin when pursuing what matters, and what you need to do next to be the person you want to be.
If you want to do your own values-based mid-year review, here is a 21-page template you can use; it includes a description of 9 areas, a values thesaurus, a values dashboard and reflective prompts for each area in your life.
As I reflected in the last couple of moments, below are the theme, highlights, and key learnings that emerged for me.
Chaos and connection
2020 and the beginning of 2021 were very challenging times. The pandemic unfolded, Black Lives Movement, a presidential election in the United States, unexpectedly losing close friends, and my health being affected made it one of the hardest years and also, one of the most compassionate ones.
You see, as a full-time psychologist, specialized in fear-based struggles – I’m sure many of my colleagues relate to this – we breathe and live situations related to all types of fears every single day. But, when you have an insurmountable amount of stressors around you, those experiences augment exponentially.
Yet, for over 12 months we all did our best to show up to the people we work with and care about while acknowledging our vulnerabilities, limitations, and common humanity. If you’re a provider in mental health reading this newsletter, my sincere appreciation for all that you did the last couple of months!
In the midst of all the political, environmental, social, cultural, and economic chaos we went through, in one way or another, my connections with others were also reinforced, for the most part, revitalized in some cases, and renewed in others. It was in those catching-up moments that I realized, once again, that life is all about connecting with others and creating memories with the ones we love. It was in those moments that I experienced “chaos and connection” co-existing next to each other.
Key learnings
Savouring every moment that comes my way allows me to find new rhythms
Life is much more manageable when I’m around people that get me
Showing up to my friends as the best I could is essential to growing my friendships.
Being flexible when unexpected things happen is fundamental to keep doing what matters.
I undeniably have a low tolerance for bureaucracy and institutional fakeness.
Being self-employed is one of the best things I have ever done in my life.
Being real with people is fundamental to building long-lasting relationships
Highlights
My thirst for creating resources and owning my content has grown tremendously. Here are the highlights from the last 6 months and some from 2020 – 2021:
I discovered Ness Labs and for the first time, got exposed to a group of kind, bright, and incredible collaborative people from all over the world, interested in science-based ideas and related fields. It was absolutely mind-blowing and still is, that this group is non-hierarchical and non-clicky by nature; it’s 100% collaborative.It doesn’t matter which school you went through, who you’re associated with, who you collaborated with, what’s your expertise, or who is in charge.Ness Labs is a culture of collaboration.You know something that could be helpful to another person, you offer it; you have an idea that could be helpful to another person you offer it. You don’t know something, you ask for it. You don’t need to be the expert but a co-creator of knowledge. And trust me when I say that this was mind-blowing to me, I mean it. While I’m not an academician, I have been part of academic and professional environments that, as nice as they are, all are structures around hierarchy, seniority, and under-spoken clickiness.
My book Living beyond OCD got published and with it, a comprehensive resource to tackle Obsessive Compulsive Disorder using Acceptance and Commitment Skills.
Co-authored a book on process-based therapy that will be released in 2022.
Collaborated in two research projects looking at the effectiveness of the interventions described in two of my books (papers have been submitted already, yay).
Playing-it-safe has been one of the highlights of what has been a weird year.
In 2020, I launched the Playing-it-Safe newsletter and the Playing-it-Safe podcast without knowing how these projects were going to be received. For the last few months, I’ve sent out this newsletter every Wednesday in an effort to share research-based skills derived from behavioral science, Acceptance and Commitment ‘Therapy, reflections, and resources related to fear-based struggles.
You have witnessed the evolution of my style in the podcast as it’s a new way of creating resources for me and have heard me trying different formats. Little by little, right?
The response from all of you to these resources has been bigger and much better than I could have expected. Thank you for keeping in mind these resources!
It’s my goal that Playing-it-safe continues to grow and get better in the next months. I have some exciting plans in the works for it. Stay tuned!!!
Thank you for spending some time with me each week.
I think learning to relate skillfully to fear-based emotions is a very important topic and I’m excited to continue creating more resources about it in the coming months. What am I missing? Is there something that you’d like to see me write about in the future? If so, please send me an email at doctorz@thisisidoctorz.com.
As always, if you think a friend of yours would be interested in fear-based reactions, please share this newsletter with them!
Every single thing around you taps into your need for closure, the anticipation of the unknown, and your desire for certainty.
HARDWIRED TO SOLVE UNCERTAINTY
We all have a natural need to make sense of the non-sense, unknowns, and conflicts that show up from the moment we wake up to the moment we go to sleep. For instance, if you open your laptop and it doesn’t turn on, that’s a nonsensical situation that your brain will quickly try to solve by running different options:
Is the battery dead?
Is something malfunctioning within the laptop?
Did I press the power button hard enough?The reality is that every day in our life, there are many situations in which we have little information, or there is a mismatch between what we encounter and what we think it should be.
Our wonderful brain, among the many protective functions it has, comes with a special one that is in charge of giving meaning to our experiences: a meaning-making system. This meaning-making system quickly gets activated when encountering a situation that disturbs our sense of order and immediately triggers our sense of uncertainty, not-knowing, and ambiguity.
Else Frenkle – Brunswik (1949) introduced the concept of ambiguity tolerance as the ”tendency to resort to black and white solutions, to arrive at premature closure as to valuative aspects, often at the neglect of reality…”
Later on, Budner (1962) referred to intolerance of ambiguity as ‘the tendency to perceive ambiguous situations as sources of threat’ and tolerance of ambiguity as ‘the tendency to perceive ambiguous situations as desirable.” Arie Kruglanski (1989) studied the “need for closure” and defined it as “desire for a definite answer … any answer as opposed to confusion and ambiguity.”
Our experience dealing with confusing situations is very unique to each one of us; there are no two people who feel ambiguity the same way and with the same intensity. Intolerance of uncertainty feels different from situation to situation and we react differently to it in a given moment.
Some of us are more sensitive to it than others and our reactions can go from extreme aversion to even extreme attraction. When we feel an extreme aversion to confusing situations, we may experience high levels of fear, rejection, and emotional negativity; on the other hand, when we feel extreme attraction towards an ambiguous situation we may be curious, welcome the challenge, and maybe even enjoy the process.
No matter which end of the spectrum of uncertainty our responses fall – fear or excitement – it drives us to take action, to solve a situation, to get out of unknown territory. At times, we want to solve a situation right away and we want that response to last for as long as possible so we don’t experience distress any longer. (These characteristics are academically known as urgency and permanence tendencies; Kruglanski and Donna Webster (1994) described urgency tendency as an “individual’s inclination to attain closure as soon as possible,” and permanence as an “individual’s inclination to maintain [closure] for as long as possible.”)
THE IMPACT OF UNCERTAINTY IN OUR DAY-TO-DAY LIFE
Think about these scenarios:
How long would it take me to fly to Bali?
Would this person want to go out with me on a second date?
What if my boss fires me?
Is my reaction justified?
Does this piece of the puzzle fit here?
Does she like me?
Who is the killer in this movie?
How much salt is “a pinch of salt”? (I seriously have asked myself this question so many times)
If you look at the variety of situations in which we encounter uncertainty, each one of them happens in different contexts – they happen in different settings – and while they’re all ambiguous situations, they all have a variety of shades of ambiguity, mystery, and confusion that tap a slightly different nuance of uncertainty.
As Kruglanski (2004) suggested, our “need for closure” is not static or permanent but malleable, dynamic, and a moving entity which will explain why our “need to solve unknown situations” shifts from situation to situation, setting to setting.
Facing the unknown of how a love story ends versus the unknown of my boss firing me – are both ambiguous – but have different consequences in our lives so they feel different and feel different at different moments too.
HOW DOES UNCERTAINTY WORK?
Have you ever gone to a restaurant and ordered your favorite go-to dish – the dish that you know how it tastes because you order it regularly – but when you have the first bite, it tastes differently?
Every time our expectations are violated and there is a mismatch between what things should be and what they are, our wonderful brain gets activated and tries to solve that error, even when the mismatch is good news (e.g. like when you expect to be fired but your boss just wanted to tell you about a new project).
Then after this mismatch happens, here is what happens:
We enter into a state of alert because our brain wants to solve this discrepancy and this is when we look at all types of clues we can get access to – information, past experiences, memories, old conversations – to solve this ambiguity
We are pushed to solve this dilemma by taking action.
Daniel Gilbert (2000), a psychology professor at Harvard, and his colleagues found that even though uncertainty is related to a positive event – e.g. receiving an anonymous gift – we’re generally convinced that we’ll be happiest when all uncertainty is eliminated.
Here is the tricky part: sometimes, even when taking action, there is the feeling that a situation is still unresolved, so we get stuck between acting as if we have understood a dilemma and feeling/sensing that we haven’t.
We handle those lingering feelings – anxieties – in different ways. Those ways – in which handle our anxious feelings – are not insignificant matters but important ones that distinguish an effective response from an ineffective one to uncertainty and the difference between single problems with unknowns from chronic ones.
WHY HANDLING UNCERTAINTY MATTERS TO ALL OF US?
Think about what happens when we are confronted with political dilemmas in which candidates with different views on the same issue; or consider what occurs when encountering an existential dilemma, e.g. is there life after death?
Research suggests that when lacking skills to handle ambiguous situations, we tend to quickly act on one or all of these responses:
Search for more information (watch news channels, google, ask others)
Dismiss what we don’t know
Hold with white knuckles onto strong beliefs of what we know
Make decisions based on our strong urge to minimize the unknown
Make decisions to avoid loss (loss aversion)
This process is described as the affirmation process: it’s the intensification of beliefs, whatever those beliefs might be, in response to a perceived threat (Jamie Holmes).
Without asking why others think the way they do, we lock ourselves down into our own beliefs, surround ourselves with people who agree with us, and listen to viewpoints that make us feel good. This is one of how extremist ideologies are reinforced.
If you go to the doctor and describe symptoms that don’t fit with a particular medical diagnosis, if the doctor has a low tolerance to ambiguity, they may quickly dismiss the ambiguous symptoms and diagnose a condition based only on the symptoms they’re familiar with (for more references check Trisha Torrey’s work on patient’s advocacy).
Here is another scenario: If you’re going on a date, and don’t know whether your date likes you or not, the moment this person makes a facial expression that you perceive as this person is disengaged, you may start criticizing yourself, act as if there is no need to invest in the date, and dismiss a potential relationship in the long-run.
UPSIDES OF UNCERTAINTY, AMBIGUITY, AND UNKNOWNS
“Uncertainty is the only certainty there is and knowing how to live with insecurity is the only security.” ~John Allen Paulos
If I had a long day and want to relax by watching “Jane the Virgin,” it makes sense that after pressing the “on” button on the remote control to the TV, I’m supposed to see a signal on the screen that shows that the TV is on; but what happens if after pressing the button, the screen remains off and I don’t see anything?
I may quickly wonder,
Is something wrong with the Tv?
Is the outlet working?
Is the Tv cable functioning properly?
There could be so many reasons that are causing the TV not to function, so I have to make sense of this nonsense situation. I experienced confusion between what I was hoping to happen and what happened. My confusion doesn’t occur in isolation, it comes with its companion, a sense of urgency.
Our urge to solve the unknown, it’s not necessarily a bad thing, but an adaptive response; in fact, without it, we wouldn’t get anything done.
Proux and Heine (2009) conducted various experiments to gain an understanding of how people react to confusing and ambiguous events. In one of their experiments, they asked one group of readers to read a re-written version of the story “A Country Doctor,” one of the most disorienting short stories he has written by Franz Kafka’s; the second group of readers was asked to read a more coherent version of Kafka’s story that followed a standard narrative structure.
After reading the story, all participants, from both groups of readers, were shown a series of letter-strings and asked to copy them down; then they were asked to place a mark that matched the original string and the one they copied (participants didn’t know about the patterns that the string of letters included).
The results of this study showed that those who had read the surreal/disorganized version of Kafka’s story checked off 33 percent more letter-strings than the other group; they also identified more patterns, more connections, and more associations.
Now imagine that you’re writing a novel, helping your kid with school work, or discussing with your partner an upcoming job opportunity, in all those situations, managing ambiguity effectively will lead you to consider more options and opportunities, increase your creative outputs and motivate you to do more stuff than you think you can do.
DOWNSIDES OF NOT KNOWING HOW TO NAVIGATE AMBIGUITY
Imagine for a moment that you’re at a party, you’re hanging there with friends and getting to know new people; then in front of you, there is a person that looks different and speaks differently than you and the rest of your friends. Your brain, as a meaning-making system will naturally identify that confusion between what you’re used to and what’s in front of you, as a mismatch. It’s not your fault, it’s just what our brain does.
If you don’t know how to handle the not-knowing moments you may quickly jump to conclusions – positive and negative ones – about who this person is or their character. (see research on prejudice conducted by Jason’s Luoma)
In romantic relationships, if you don’t know how to tolerate uncertainty when encountering ambiguous information in your relationship, you may have a harder time trusting your partner.
What’s called for during uncertain times is greater flexibility.
“Our excessive confidence in what we believe we know, and our apparent inability to acknowledge the full extent of our ignorance and the uncertainty of the world we live in. We are prone to overestimate how much we understand about the world and to underestimate the role of chance in events. Overconfidence is fed by the illusory certainty of hindsight.” – Daniel Khaneman
WHAT MAKES OUR NEED FOR CLOSURE WORSE?
Our need to resolve ambiguities is essential to our ability to function in our day-to-day lives, but like any psychological trait, this need can be heightened under certain circumstances.
Feeling tired, recent changes, hunger, insomnia, deadlines, loss, and other stressors can easily increase this urge to solve a confusing situation and increase our experience of wanting to know a solution right now, right here, and for as long as possible (the urgency and permanence characteristics of our need for closure).
Being exposed to different stressors combined with a low tolerance for ambiguity and a lack of skills to handle ambiguity makes a combo for inflexible responses, tortured minds, and ongoing problems.
DOES EVERYONE STRUGGLE WITH UNCERTAINTY THE SAME?
When we all encounter ambiguity, we do what’s necessary to solve that situation and move on with our day.
In general, we instantly identify the confusing event, scan for all potential information to reduce the gap between how things are and how we were expecting them to be, arrive at a conclusion, and then let go.
However, for some people, biological vulnerabilities make them prone to struggle more with wanting to know for sure, right now, and right here. Multiple studies have demonstrated that the tendency to fear the unknown and ambiguity is a strong predictor of anxiety for every single human being.
WHAT TO DO TO DEAL SKILLFULLY WITH UNCERTAINTY?
Like height, some people have more tolerance for ambiguity than others. So what you do depends on how you see your ability to navigate uncertainty, unknowns, and ambiguity.
If you’re moderately okay with tolerating uncertainty …
(a) Forcing continuation and low-level confrontation with uncertainty (b) Providing exposure to serendipity of unexpected desirability
How do these principles translate into bringing uncertainty into your day-to-day life?
Do it often
Do it small
Do it with openness
If you create unpredictable exercises and choose unknown routes for activities that have low-stakes and approach them with openness – without attachment to a particular outcome – that’s a great way to augment your tolerance to uncertainty.
Here are some examples of day-to-day activities you can do to create an uncertainty mindset:
Drinking tea; try a different flavor
Going to a restaurant and trying a new dish
Cooking a dish; try an ingredient from a different brand
Make a guess when you don’t know something and stick to your guess
Talking to someone who holds different beliefs than you and asking more about their views before defending your opinion
As you have read, our urges for solving the unknown are dynamic and shift from situation to situation; they color every single thing we’re exposed to and naturally, we do experience them differently in different areas of our life. As you develop an uncertainty mindset, you can also do an inventory of:
Areas and activities of your life in which uncertainty is exciting, and fun, and you welcome it
Activities in which it’s hard for you to tolerate ambiguity
Activities in which you noticed a shift in your ability to handle the unknowns.
If you have a low tolerance for uncertainty and a high need for closure…
You can increase your tolerance for ambiguity by practicing the following micro-skills:
(a) Stop the battle against those uncertain thoughts
When dealing with ambiguous situations the most common troublesome thoughts are:
Believing that bad things are going to happen
Assuming catastrophic endings
Assigning meaning to those thoughts
Assuming those thoughts are true
Instead of arguing back against those thoughts or being consumed by them, here is an exercise you can do to stop wrestling with all those thoughts.
Experiential exercise for dealing with uncertainty
Find a quiet place and schedule 10 to 15 minutes of your time; it’s helpful if you have a device to record yourself reading the directions slowly and in a soft tone. Then listen to your recording and follow the directions.
Get in a comfortable position. Close your eyes or focus your gaze on a single point, then take a few slow, deep breaths. Allow yourself a couple of moments to get centered in this exercise.
For the next moments, get in touch with a thought, image, or memory that you usually run away from, try to get rid of, or avoid at all costs. Let’s call this your target thought. While focusing on this thought, do your best to stay in touch with feelings, sensations, and any other reactions that come along. Do your best to watch how your body responds. Do you notice any urges to suppress, eliminate, or push away the thought? How intense are the urges? Are they mild, moderate, or intense? Are there any bodily sensations arising?
You can briefly and gently scan your body from top to bottom. While focusing on your body, your mind may come up with all types of mind noise, including fantasies, forecasting, hypotheses, dreams, and so on. See if you can notice them without getting trapped by them and shift your attention back to your target thought, image, or memory.
Notice where the urge to get rid of this thought begins and ends. Notice exactly where it is in your body. If you could make a sculpture in the shape of this urge, what would it look like? Observe whether this urge is pushing you to stay with your target thought or to suppress it, push it down, or distract yourself from it.
After noticing the urges that come with the target thought, see if you can completely “drop the battle” and stop the fight by simply noticing, describing, and observing the thought, memory, or image to yourself silently without doing anything about it.
What about if instead of fighting against it you chose to have it, exactly as it is? If you
are still resisting, do your best again to just drop the battle, drop the fight against the thoughts.
Do your best to notice what comes when you drop the fight against the thought. See what happens if you choose to have this particular thought. You don’t have to like it or dislike it; you don’t have to love it; you don’t have to deny it. You just have to do your best to let it be as it is.
As you drop the fight with this thought, see if you can get in contact with the person behind your eyes, the person having this experience. Let’s call the person “the observer you.” See if you can notice the observer you that is watching this thought, memory, or image, and is watching your mind having them. What do you notice?
Now, from the place of looking at that thought and having it, notice what it feels like to notice the pull to take action, without actually taking action.
Now ask yourself, “Is there anything in this thought that I cannot have or that could hurt me?”
Notice how it is to unpack this thought, what it does, how it feels, and how you can have it without doing anything.
Reflect for a couple of moments on these questions. As you prepare to finish this exercise, notice your breathing. Take a few good, deep breaths with the air coming in through your nose and out of your mouth. Gently open your eyes and bring yourself back to the room.
As you move forward, ask yourself: “Am I willing to go on from here, carrying all these thoughts wherever I go, noticing how they come, and then simply having them?”
Do not assume you’re certain of a situation when feeling uncertain.
Watch the thoughts instead of being consumed by the thoughts.
Watch the process of thinking instead of being consumed by the process.
(b) Stay with it, accept it
Staying with uncertainty means making a decision to feel it, stay with it, and make room for it all the way, even though it feels uncomfortable. It’s like saying yes to the yucky stuff that comes when feeling uncertain.
You can use acceptance mini-prompts in the midst of feeling ambivalent, confused, and struggling with a strong urge to have a response right away so you don’t feel stressed.
An acceptance prompt is a sweet, soft, and gentle way to make room for those fears, anxieties, worries, and any other overwhelming reaction that shows up when you are encountering a confusing and ambiguous situation, without fighting against those feelings. The idea is to really open up to them so you can expand your day-to-day living.
Acceptance moves can include short acceptance prompts that you tell yourself, such as:
I want to give my best at this moment to ride this wave of uncertainty.
I want to do what I can to let this fear of not-knowing come and go.
Here is what I find fascinating about acceptance skills at a brain level (apologies for my nerdiness): Neuroaffective science of emotions has demonstrated that the skill of watching an overwhelming experience and then letting it go—is extremely handy and even faster than other skills in reducing the activation of our nervous system.In other words, acceptance prompts require fewer brain resources to help our emotional system slow down and allow the frontal lobe to kick in, so we can choose how to handle a troublesome situation.
Keep in mind that using an acceptance prompt is never to eliminate the feeling of uncertainty; it’s just a cue for you to check whether you’re fighting your experience instead of making room for it, and then letting it be.
(c) Check the function of your actions when driven by uncertainty
When having a push to solve an ambiguous situation, instead of sinking with the strong urge, do your best to ground yourself and ask yourself if acting on that urge to solve ambiguity takes you further or closer away to the life you want to live, the person you want to be or your values in that moment.
As impossible as it feels, emotions don’t need to drag you like a puppet; every time you commit yourself to use that moment of ambiguity as an opportunity to increase your skill to handle it and ask yourself about the impact of acting on it, and whether it helps you to be the person you want to be, you’re building the ambiguity muscle.
Our minds love to argue, debate, and question, especially when dealing with uncertainty, annoying, and overwhelming feelings. Yet, you’re the only one that can choose: do you waste time acting on those emotions or you let them be there while you carry on with what matters to you?
(d) Do something different, do what matters
The urge for closure, solving, and reducing ambiguity can drive you into a hyperdrive that pushes you to take action right away. You may do things like:
Asking others what to do (asking for reassurance)
Replaying in your mind multiple scenarios
Listing in your mind potential questions
Making lists with actions you have to take to prevent bad things from happening
Doing something different doesn’t mean having a perfect plan ready to go when having these strong urges. It means, asking yourself the question, what matters to me right now?
No matter where we are, who we’re with, and what time of the day it is, there is stuff that matters to us and there is life happening in front of us. So doing what matters is choosing to pay attention to that stuff in those moments.
(e) Keep an eye on life stressor
Keep an eye on micro-shifts in your sleep quality, recent changes, and levels of stress because those three factors will push for a higher need to solve the unknown and take action right away.
Give yourself 24-hours before jumping onto decisions (or conclusions)!
Your fear of uncertainty will show up when you’re emotionally invested in doing something that matters to you and you’re pushed against your growth edges.
What could you achieve if uncertainty wasn’t holding you back?
How would it be if you stopped playing-it-safe by searching for certainty, asking others what to do, or avoiding making decisions?
Make sure you’re making room for uncertainty every day so you can live a fulfilling, intentional, and joyful life.
A couple of months ago, I didn’t have a choice other than having a complicated conversation with a friend. Four nights before having the conversation, I couldn’t sleep, was worried about the impact it would have on our friendship, future collaborations, and felt sad about having to sit and discuss something that could potentially make things hard for us to continue our friendship. I was scared!
Relationships are a messy business, period!
A life well lived has strong connections with the people we love. The reality is that we have survived as a species not only because of biological adaptation, but also because of our connections with others. Our ancestors learned very early on that in order to survive they required the group, and to be part of the group they needed to learn to foster different types of relationships.
I honestly think that building connections with others is one of the most precious things we can do in life; without these connections, we are vulnerable to suffering, loneliness, and isolation.
But relationships are not just like flowers and butterflies; they are difficult to look after, maintain, and be in. I think that most of us go through life using a trial-and-error approach to creating healthy, caring, and fulfilling connections with others. But do we really know what we are doing all of the time? Probably not.
Creating a relationship from scratch is not an easy project; it’s actually a complex undertaking because, as fun as relationships are, we also get hurt, disappointed, frustrated, and discouraged at times. And every time there is a rupture, there we are again: covered in visible or invisible tears, trying to pull ourselves together in the midst of the emotional turmoil and simply surviving from moment to moment.
In my case, I was scared about losing the connection with a person I love, care about, and cherish in life.
My fears, worries, and anxieties about this upcoming conversation came with images of us fighting, arguing, and crying; thoughts of “it won’t go well; What if everything ends here? How would it look when we are at the same party and still disconnected? Would this person speak badly about me? How awkward would that be? What if other friends have to choose who they continue in a friendship with? Would they choose me? Would this affect my work?”
My mind was quite busy anticipating what would happen, what would happen if this or that, and generating all types of hypotheses about a potential outcome, as it was supposed to do. My mind was working fast, quickly, at the speed of light, and doing the best it could to protect me from any hurt related to this friendship and soon-to-have conversation, all driven by fear.
But my fear – and all the thoughts that came along with it – was taking me away from asking myself key questions to handle this clashing moment:
What’s my value in this relationship?
How do I want to show up to this moment of fear that is consistent with who I want to be?
How do I want to respond to the distress that a person I care about is going through?
Our fears take us into all types of future scenarios, negative outcomes, and gloom-doom outlines; but the good news is that, instead of going along with all those thoughts, by bringing ourselves back to the present and checking what sort of relationships we want to build, we can learn to approach conflict as a source of growth, connection, and even as an act of love!
Sweet connections, rough conversations, & fearful moments can happen all at once, and all together can be opportunities to live our interpersonal values.
Living our interpersonal values is about discovering how we want to be within each relationship we have – especially when having a contentious moment – and while making room for our fears, worries, and anxieties as they come.
Because of Covid-19, many of the conferences I usually attend were done remotely. So, thousands of people were able to attend from the comfort of their home and without having to deal with the hassle of traveling. I was one of those people, with the caveat that, I was presenting at some of these conferences.
Webinars are such an interesting format for delivering a presentation; they’re trendy these days, they’re raw, and they’re real. They’re definitely different than what I’m used to. When I’m teaching, I have students to discuss, analyze, and unpack ideas. When I’m doing therapy or coaching, I have clients that I’m interacting with.
However, when delivering a webinar, I’m looking at a screen and a chat box, hoping to read all messages so I can interact with the attendees. I cannot see anyone’s face because most of the platforms don’t allow you to see the participants while using another application for your presentation; that’s very tricky for me given that I’m all about engaging with others when presenting.
While these webinars allowed me to connect with so many people all over the world, they also triggered fears of not doing things right and perfect for me – because of the format, the challenge of reading the messages, the technological problems, and so on. From time to time, my mind was shouting at me “oh boy, no one will take me seriously; aughhh I look and sound so informal.”
At the end of each one of those webinars, despite the newness of the format and the background noise my mind was making, I finished excited, revitalized, and amazed by people’s participation; forty-eight hours later, the views of the webinar were much higher than what I anticipated and received very interesting follow-up questions.
So, here is a reflection that I would like to share with you and hope it’s helpful to you in dealing with all the fear-based reactions you may encounter on your way:
-When doing what’s important to us, we naturally feel anxious.
– We feel anxious, because we care about what we’re doing.
– When doing what we care, our mind naturally comes up with thoughts like “it will be bad, terribly bad.”
Our mind is not our enemy, but a very protective device that wants to make sure we don’t mess up. At times, it comes with thoughts about the outcome of a situation with strong focus on what could possibly go wrong, terribly wrong so we are more careful, more cautious, and more intentional about what we do. The challenge is that while those thoughts are a possibility, there is no way for us to know whether they might happen or not, those are just hypothetical thoughts. So, dwelling on them is dwelling on pessimistic hypotheticals, spending time on negative possibilities, and ruminating in unwanted outcomes.
Not everything is, as we think it is.
I want to invite you to check the narrative, thoughts, or stories you’re willing to watch – and make room for – when doing what you care about this week.
You want to consider 
