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Today Feels Impossible. Here’s How Science Suggests We Cope.
Uncertainty can hijack our planning machinery and weaponize it against us
Election Day 2020 is here, finally. And now, after all the waiting, it’s time to wait some more. Who will win? What will that win look like? When will we know for sure? Hard to say. Throw in all the open questions about the coronavirus, and the current moment’s level of unpredictability feels off the charts.
For many, all this uncertainty is likely to be distressing — if not downright destabilizing.
“Some people have the ability to sit with uncertainty and to let go of it — to not fret about it,” says Michelle Newman, PhD, director of the Laboratory for Anxiety and Depression Research at the Pennsylvania State University. “But others respond to uncertainty with worrying. And if the thing you’re worried about is out of your control, then the worrying doesn’t help anything. It just makes you miserable.”
Human beings are inveterate planners. The brain’s capacity to construct hypotheticals — to imagine future scenarios and adjust behavior accordingly — is one of the defining traits of our species. But while our ability to anticipate and plan can be an asset, it can also act like a bug in our programming. Uncertainty — either a little or a lot…
