Recently, I was invited to join Dr. Josephine McNary on her “Mindstories” podcast where we discussed how to tolerate uncertainty, particularly in this election season. You can download the podcast here.
Or you can watch the Mindstories Podcast on YouTube here.
“If we lose, I just don’t know whether the country can survive,” my client said. “Things are getting too crazy.” I heard those words before. From clients of the opposite party. The upcoming election has become every American’s—Republicans and Democrats, therapists, and clients— worry number one. To many of us, the idea of losing feels like an existential threat, one that is igniting core fears about our health, our safety, our connections with our loved ones and community. We may be donating time and/or money to our campaign of choice, but it doesn’t feel like enough. We’re still getting regular doses of fight-or-flight neurochemicals and hormones urging us to, Do something! Make certain everything will be OK! So, what are we to do?
Like any worry, election uncertainty is best addressed with a clear strategy. Trying to “wing it” while we are hijacked by the monkey mind won’t get us the peace we’re looking for. When working with my clients, and working with myself, I’ve found the following 3 essential strategies to be most effective.
1. Adopt an Expansive Mindset. When faced with an uncertain outcome like the upcoming election, our mind’s tendency is to contract around all the negative outcomes that may happen—the possibility of losing, disputed vote counts, widespread litigation, protests, and social unrest. If we think we can only rest and relax once these negative outcomes are eliminated, we’ll burn ourselves out with ineffectual activity and worry. To counter this tendency, make an intention to allow unresolved possibilities to remain unresolved. For example: Once I’ve done what is within my control, I will accept the uncertainty that remains.
2. Curb the Urge. Notice the ineffectual activity you’re impulsively engaging in trying to gain certainty about the election—and curb it! Constantly checking news feeds for signs that your side is winning, name-calling, trying to convince others that they are wrong, and replaying political talking points repeatedly in your head—all certainty-seeking behaviors—are triggered by our overactive limbic system, and they only feed the cycle of worry and anxiety. When we curb the urge to reassure ourselves instead, we are cultivating a new expansive mindset, demonstrating to ourselves that we can tolerate uncertainty. Which brings us to our last essential strategy.
3. Welcome Negative Emotion. While the emotions that accompany uncertainty may feel unbearable, resisting or distracting ourselves from them bring only temporary relief; they inevitably show up again, banging on our door to be let in. Treat these emotions as you would a guest, welcoming them by name. Hello, Anger. Come on in, Dread! Use your breath to open up space in your body, space for these feelings to play themselves out. Contrary to what you think, fight-or-flight neurochemicals and hormones do metabolize on their own! To help this process along, redirect your thoughts back to your expansive mindset, which accepts everything you can’t directly control, including your own fears.
Note that each of these three strategies is equally essential. They just don’t work well without each other. It’s a tall order, I know— like learning to juggle three balls in the air. And that last ball may sound more like juggling a chainsaw! But the good news is that the skills you will gain practicing these three strategies will help you learn to relax in the middle of this election’s chaos, so you’ll be more likely to take the wise action that is called for. And moving forward into 2021, you’ll find that using these strategies will bring more peace and clarity to the rest of your life as well. There is no uncertainty too big, or too small, for anyone using these 3 essential steps to master.
Click here to listen to a guided meditation that helps us learn to relax in the midst of uncertainty.
This article first appeared on the ADAA website.
A muffled crack of thunder, followed by a flash of light that lit up the bedroom wall. Then another, louder CRACK! I had been lying in bed awake since 1AM, for three hours, my husband next to me, deep asleep. But now the wind was pushing violently against our windows, and I woke him up. I did not want to be experiencing this alone. We pulled the slider open and stepped out onto our bedroom deck, surveying western Sonoma County. Every thirty seconds another jagged bolt of lightning flashed somewhere on the horizon. In forty years of living in California we’d ever seen anything like this. There were the thunderstorms when we visited my mother-in-law in Florida. But here we were missing a crucial counterbalance to the lightning. Rain.
When the previous night news reports had warned about the possibility of dry lightning it hadn’t seem possible. But now it was more real than anyone would have predicted. Could every strike of lightning start a fire? In our dry, heavily forested landscape what would that mean? “This feels like the end of the world,” my husband said, “Let’s pack the car and get out of here while we can.”
Flashback
Almost three years earlier, in October 2017, we were awakened at 1 AM by a friend calling us to tell us we needed to get out of our home, now! The smell of smoke filled the room. The electricity was out. We frantically pulled on our clothes and within five minutes we were in our car, inching our way through the smoke towards safety. An hour later our home and everything we owned was gone.
Much of the same emotions I felt at that time were here again, telling me to flee. But I knew something was different this time. Now, in our rebuilt home, standing in virtually the same spot in our bedroom, I recognized danger. But unlike the threat of three years before, this threat was not imminent. “Yes, let’s pack the car,” I said, “But I’m not going anywhere just yet.”
Safety and Security Shattered
Over the next 72 hours, the lightning strikes started hundreds of fires in California, Oregon and Washington, some that are still burning. As I write this newsletter, a new fire is raging only five miles from my home. The smoke from these fires is fouling the air, affecting millions of people hundreds of miles away. This at the same time we are suffering the worst pandemic in a hundred years, an economy threatening to slip into a depression, and the worst political and social unrest in decades.
What Should We Do?
As a CBT therapist working with clients who think their world is falling apart, and as a human being who has similar thoughts myself, I know that our natural instinct is to take action. Whether it is fighting or taking flight, or even freezing in place, our first reaction to the threat of loss is usually emotional reaction. We’re hard-wired this way. This leads to behaviors, like my husband wanting to jump in the car and get away. The problem with taking action when we are upset, is that it is unlikely to be wise action. The storm that morning was passing over us, casting bolts of lightning in every direction. Some of them could start fires, but which ones we’d have no way of knowing. Imagine my husband and I driving around Northern California, each time there was a strike of lightning ahead, turning the car around and driving a different direction. Imagine hundreds of thousands of other cars doing the same thing.
With an imminent threat, like a smoke-filled bedroom, our emotions are well equipped to guide us. But most of the threats we face today, though real, are not imminent, and thus, require wise action. And to unlock our own innate wisdom, we need to be able to tolerate the fight-flight emotions telling us to Do something now!
The therapy I provide for my anxious clients is simply teaching them to relax and lean into fear. Unless it becomes clear that action is called for, just being, not doing, is how we free ourselves from the trap of chronic fight-flight reactions to our anxiety.
Emotion & Meditation
In a perfect storm of uncertainty that we are all living in today it is of some comfort to me to know that spiritual masters agree. Pema Chodron, a Buddhist nun, has written extensively on how to find peace amid crisis. She says we must stay with our broken heart, our fear, our anger and outrage, that only by sticking with uncertainty do we learn to relax in the middle of chaos. This is the essence of mindfulness meditation—to place our attention on the thoughts, feelings, and emotions that are disturbing us in the moment, without attachment, judgment, storytelling, or problem-solving.
Many of us are familiar with the exercise of watching our thoughts without attachment, but it is often more difficult for us to do the same with our feelings. To curb our urges to resist and/or control our negative emotions, we must learn to experience the sensation of emotions in a grounded way, dropping our awareness out of our heads and into our bodies. The simplest path is to use our breath to open, surrender, allowing our muscles to soften, making space for our emotions to metabolize. Only when we can relax amidst the chaos of our emotions, can we conceive what is wise action.
Wise Action
The morning of the lightning storm, we packed our car with emergency supplies, water, tent, sleeping bags, and food. But we didn’t drive off looking for a safe place. We went for a silent hike in a wooded area that had burned the year before. In the distance we could see the storm continuing, but we could also see new growth coming back and many of the old oaks had survived. Nature has a way of healing itself. We too have a natural ability to heal ourselves. And I believe, that collectively, we will be able to heal from the crisis that we face—from fires, from the pandemic, from the political polarization and social injustice, to whatever we face in the future. The first step is for each of us to move from a fight-flight reaction to wise action.
Meditation for Emotion
By opening up to painful emotions, we are learning to relax into discomfort itself. This meditation will help you to be here for yourself, no matter what you are feeling. You can listen to this meditation by clicking here.
This article first appeared on the website of the Anxiety and Depression Association of America.
A CBT colleague of mine wrote a powerful piece called Thoughts Anonymous Philosophy, applying a 12 Step model that address our inability to control our thoughts. I found it inspiring and I hope you do too. ~ Jennifer
“What is Thoughts Anonymous?
“Thoughts Anonymous” is a philosophical movement that is both psychological and spiritual, emerging from the simultaneous principles of evidence-based Psychology and 12 Step Recovery Programs.1
Like alcohol (AA); food (OA); and people (CoDa), thoughts are prevalent and something we must navigate around. Are thoughts, therefore, to be regarded as a substance? Perhaps. Just as the addict can’t completely “control” their addiction, the thinker can’t completely “control” their thoughts. And when thoughts yield more influence than our hopes or intentions, our lives become unmanageable. For those who have experienced difficulty with our thoughts, we turned to the guiding principles of Thoughts Anonymous. We admitted we were powerless over thoughts, and that our minds had become unmanageable. We then came to choose Reality as a power greater than our thoughts – a power that could restore us to sanity.” Continue Reading…
My client Tom had been working from home since the pandemic hit in March, but now his boss had set a date for returning to the office, in only three weeks. Tom felt anxious about prolonged exposure to his co-workers, as his partner had an underlying health condition. He was stuck on what to do. Should he negotiate to continue working from home, or comply with his boss’s request to go back to the office? One choice could put his job at risk, the other his partner’s health.
When there is no downside to a decision, we can feel confident about our choice. But many of the decisions we face today have pros and cons, complex situations like school options for our children, vacation and wedding trips, and making doctor and dentist appointments. Our limbic system is designed to warn us away from negative consequences with negative emotions like anxiety and fear. The only agenda of this monkey mind is safety.
Trying to please the monkey keeps us stuck in a loop of worry and indecision. Before we can make complex decisions with confidence, we need to understand that our purpose is not to eliminate choices that have cons, but to accept the uncertainty that accompanies them.
To help my clients move from of obsessive worry to confident decision-making, I’ve developed this 4-step decision making protocol.
Step 1. In two separate columns, write down the pros and cons for one of your choices. My client did this for returning to the office.
Step 2. Assign a numerical importance to each pro and con, on a scale of: 3=Very Important, 2=Important, 1= Somewhat Important. Don’t overlook this step; not all reasons are equal. Tom had more pros than cons, but putting a numerical value on each helped him weigh the importance of each.
Step 3. Total up each column.
Pros 4, Cons 6. For Tom, clearly the cons of returning to the office outweighed the pros.
Step 4. Make a final decision.
Tom decided he would negotiate with his boss to continue to work from home. This triggered anxiety about displeasing his boss and appearing demanding, but the exercise he’d done had convinced him he’d chosen as wisely as was possible. Rather than retreating from his decision, Tom chose to accept the cons that came with negotiating with his boss.
The confidence that Tom sought could only be gained by standing up for his choice, owning it, despite the uncertainty of the outcome. Only when we accept the risk inherent in every choice, can we grow from the decisions we make. This is how to make the “right” decision and how to gain true confidence in ourselves.
Download a printable Pros and Cons Worksheet here!
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