Humans have the unique ability, so far as we know, to think abstractly about the future and make plans around those possible outcomes.
Abstract thought is a driver for human growth and ingenuity. Without it, you wouldn’t be able to plan for the future. You wouldn’t be able to tease apart cause and effect. You wouldn’t have scientific advancements and would be forever stuck in a world of superstition.
This same abstract thought allows you to weigh unknown threats and make plans to avoid those threats.
In fact, you’re better at imagining negative, catastrophic outcomes than you are at imagining positive outcomes — it’s a benefit to your survival if you always prepare for the worst.
Stop: Hamster Time
That ability to predict the future and prepare for the worst —even when your track record isn’t so great— is a survival mechanism. But it often works against you. These imagined outcomes can fill your thoughts, going around and around while not getting you anywhere.
The hamster on its wheel.
And, intentionally or not, you feed this hamster.
As Aurthor Brooks pointed out in The Atlantic, you’re confusing Uncertainty with Risk:
Uncertainty is when you cannot know the probabilities of an outcome, and you try to fix that by adding more and more data. What’s the news have to say? What on social media? What are they hiding from us? Can you believe what Mr. So-and-so said?
Risk is when you can determine probabilities and make informed, calculated decisions.
It’s essential to see the difference. When you do, you can allow yourself to give up trying to master uncertainty, and free yourself from the time wasted on worry and the media.
Accepting Uncertainty
Leo Babauta at ZenHabits.net writes often of living with uncertainty. How you can feel that the world is swirling around you, out of control. How it makes you feel anxious or small or afraid. And how, among it all, if you can just allow it to be… you can reduce that anxiety.
Stoics worked, not to be afraid of death, but to be afraid to live now while you have life. They taught that you control very little in this world… other than your actions and reactions. By practicing your reactions to every possible outcome, knowing that the worst ones are highly unlikely… you’re preparing to deal with reality without surprises. Prepare, accept, and work to improve what you can.
Dale Carnegie wrote the book on worry. His 1948 book How to Stop Worrying and Start Living is filled with examples from real people and how they’ve been able to conquer worry.
Carnegie’s timeless advice includes
- Accept what you cannot control,
- Rest before you’re tired,
- Decide how much focus to give a thing, and no more,
- Cooperate with the inevitable,
- Accept criticism as someone’s envy of the work you’ve done
- Prayer
Prayer is possibly the most dismissed tool that people have at their disposal. Instead of living in a world where you can call on your creator for supernatural support, the world now tries to push you down, to make you believe you’re no better than a worm in the soil.
Doesn’t that put me back into a world of superstition? you might ask. I would counter that there is far more to the world than what science can teach us, and it’s foolish to close our eyes to the spiritual reality that has been with humanity since our beginning.
Not everyone will agree with me. I myself didn’t always agree with this.
But anyone who may be willing to attempt prayer… to find a time to pray every day for 30 days… will find the astonishing power it has in our lives.
Don Dolindo Ruotolo, a Catholic priest, gave us this short prayer to fill our hearts and our heads with peace and not with worry:
O Jesus, I surrender myself to You, take care of everything!