Murk In Progress

I'm in a weird place in my life: My work situation's up in the air, and there's a lot of uncertainty in my romantic life and my living situation. Friends are telling me to be patient and live in the moment, but I'm finding all of this not knowing extremely upsetting. Is there anything I can do to feel less anxious?

--Distressed

When everything seems uncertain, it's easy to go really dark: "Please forward my mail to the refrigerator box in the underpass where I'll soon be living with my fiance, the cat." Decision researchers have consistently found that we humans have a strong "ambiguity aversion" or "uncertainty aversion." We get seriously unsettled by the big foggy monster of the unknown: not knowing what's going to happen or not having enough information or expertise to reasonably predict it. As for what's going on under the hood, brain imaging research by neuroeconomist Ming Hsu and his colleagues found that the amygdala -- an area of the brain tasked with spotting threats and mobilizing our response to them -- was more activated in response to "ambiguity" (that is, when research participants asked to make decisions had information withheld from them). This freakout by our brain's Department of Homeland Security would have been a good fit in the ancestral times in which it evolved. Back then, an uncertain world was an especially life-threatening world, because there were no antibiotics, fire departments, or rubber-soled shoes. These days, however, we're living in a world vastly safer than the one our psychology is adapted for. This one's got countless cushions which make disasters go down less, well...disastrously. To tamp down the queasiness of uncertainty, verbalize your fears. Research by neuroscientist Matthew Lieberman suggests this depowers the amygdala by putting the prefrontal cortex, the brain's reasoning center, to work. Tell the story of your worst fear in each of your uncertain situations: Your boss not only fires you but chases you out of the building with a broom. Then, carrying a box of your stuff, you come home to your roommate in bed with your boyfriend. Then you go out for a beer, only to return to a smoking pile of ash where your apartment used to be. Obviously, you'd prefer that none of this happen. However, you aren't unemployable or unloveable, and you have friends with couches, and there's Airbnb. (Worst-case scenario -- and of course, I'm not actually advising this -- you go to the hospital and tell them George Washington is talking to you through your eyeglasses and get three hots and a cot for 72 hours.) ... For pages and pages of "science-help" from me, buy my latest book, "Unf*ckology: A Field Guide to Living with Guts and Confidence." It lays out the PROCESS of transforming to live w/confidence.