Question: Being uncertain without worrying?
I currently face a pretty major life decision. After some careful analysis, I’ve concluded that my final decision depends on the answers from some queries that I have made, but whose answers I won’t receive for days or perhaps weeks.
In the meantime, I’ve had great difficulty not obsessing over the pending decision. It warps my priorities and kills my motivation; I’m doing less, with less vigor, and enjoying it less. I’ve noticed, in the past, that compulsion to worry correlates tightly with depressed mood; given what I know about the mind, I assume that each can cause the other.
In general, this connection seems to make changing one’s mind painful, and probably conditions people to hold their ideas with certainty, rather than uncertainty. As such, ways to stave it off should be of major use to this community...
I know some things to do to stave off a depressed mood (e.g. get exercise, eat well, talk to friends, achieve small-but-satisfying goals). I don’t know any ways to avoid the compulsion to worry about an uncertain future decision, except, possibly, to notice the worrying and tell myself, verbally, that uncertainty is ok. Which brings me to my
Question: Does anyone know any methods for avoiding fruitless worrying over properly-uncertain facts or actions?
I write until thoughts stop coming to mind. It often takes a few hours, but it is really therapeutic. I mind-dump everything that I think of, without editing or stopping. Usually, the topic ends up centering in on the place where I have the most amount of uncertainty. It often gets pretty meta, which actually does tend to be helpful.
I find that getting recurring thoughts on paper (into a text editor) can make them feel ‘handled’. The mechanism for this is basically mysterious to me, but it came from GTD.
Another idea is to dedicate time in your day to worrying. Set aside 20 minutes to do nothing but worry. I haven’t tried it, but I’ve heard good things.
I recall there being a lot of evidence for writing therapy as an effective treatment of depression. Perhaps that research has found a mechanism.
One standard suggestion is to imagine the worst outcome possible and come to terms with it.
This is a great suggestion and the practice dates back to Ancient Greece and the Stoic philosophers, if not before. It is often called “negative visualization”. You can read more about it here: http://gettingstronger.org/stoicism/ Scroll down to the “Meditation” section with the video of Tim Ferriss.
I’ve learned this on my own in dealing with anxiety, but although it works in numbing the anxiety it also makes me more akratic. Basically, “hey, that shitty situation isn’t so bad. Wait… where’d all my motivation to avoid it go?”
I understand this pretty clearly, and so I think I can draw a useful distinction.
A little bit of anxiety or worrying is a useful signal to my whole mind to sharpen my focus. For brief stresses—with projected duration of a week or less, usually—this is good, and I can actually experience it as a pleasant challenge to rise to.
If that same “little bit of anxiety” stretches out over weeks or months, though, I become numb to the motivation, but not to the negative effects of worry. Also, if I’m worried enough about something that might take a while to finish—more than about three or four days—then I’m prone to shutting down entirely. It’s as if some part of me is convinced that it is important to worry for its own sake, and I’ll wind up spending up to three or four hours a day doing nothing but staring off into space, worrying unproductively. This sort of worry is unhelpful, and demotivating, and what I’m trying to curb.
Of everything here that I’ve tried, this worked the best. Once I did this, I found enough distance from the decision to be able to think more clearly about it. Thanks!
Along those lines, compare the worst outcome to the big screw ups you’ve already made and survived in life.
I’m also rather cheered up by fatalism. “Enjoy yourself, it’s later than you think”—very catchy tune.
There are some very interesting notions about depression from an ev-psych perspective here, the gist of which being that depression is “effort to reconstruct models of the world so that future action can lead to payoffs, in part through stripping away previous valuations that led to unwelcome outcomes”. As a result depression results in “suspension of behavioral activity accompanied by very intense cognitive activity”.
In somewhat more detail,
In other words, depression is the manifestation of the brain calling a “Halt, melt and catch fire” event.
What I’ve been wondering for some time now is whether the causation can go in reverse—i.e. whether intense thinking about your life’s overall strategy can be recognized by your brain as “that mood” and actually trigger the emotional ensemble associated with depression.
I can’t think of any sensible advice, though. What I tend to do about decisions (mostly minor) that are waiting on further information is to put them into my GTD system with an appropriate “decide by” date, and annotate them with information as it comes in. I find this a big help in offloading concerns from conscious thought. I have no idea how that system would cope with a life-changing decision.
You know, this is something that we can test. Keep some measure of mood for a while—randomly sample “how are you feeling” on a 1-5 scale, say, (or better, on one of these). After a couple of weeks for calibration. spend a couple of weeks where you write out hopes, fears, and ramifications about your overall life strategy for 20 minutes or so, every morning or night. Try other, similar tests. See what results.
Hm. I should start doing this.
I’ve been using MercuryApp to track my mood on a daily basis for a few months now.
One problem: it’s very noisy data. I consciously recalibrated my happiness set point sometime in january following Alicorn’s strategy, and it’s really hard looking at the curve with its ups and downs to tell when that happened.
ETA: I’m not sure the experiment you propose is wise. As far as I’m concerned this is definitely “don’t do this at home” science. Depression sucks.
Actually, given some of the information linked from Alicorn’s post, I’ll just take increased worry as a solid trigger for depression, and act on that where possible. The added value of information is pretty high, but probably not that high. :P
how do you feel right now on a scale of 1 to 10? (I don’t think 1-5 has enough gradation but I think those circle things make the whole process too involved).
Pretend you’re looking back on your current situation from 40 years in future, where even the big outcome you’re worrying about seems fairly trivial but you still wish you had used this time well? (Doesn’t make much sense though does it...)
Meditate?
In your description I am missing a link between uncertaintly and worrying. In my model, uncertainty alone does not have to be unpleasant, for example if you don’t care about the outcome, of if both outcomes would make you happy. But this one specific uncertainty makes you worry, so maybe that has a specific cause, and a specific solution. My guess: are you afraid that you will (have to) choose a path you don’t like?
I find worrying excessively over plans is often a result of not trusting the future self. People try to plan for every contingency as if as soon as the plan is finalized they will robotically follow it without reassessment. Your future self will have more data, more resources, and will have had more time to analyze. Ve will be at least as competent as you are now and probably more so. Worries about being locked into some course of action are usually overblown, and indicate that you expect to fall victim to the sunk cost fallacy in advance.
ANGTFT: future you is awesome, present you can relax a little.
Future you “will have had more time to analyze” only if present you decides to actually spend that time analyzing.
I’ll let me+1 worry about me+2.
Not really what the topic is about, but I think it’s always important to remember that there is a countering factor if the timescale is long enough (years) - your cognitive abilities will decrease with age, so decisions made earlier may benefit from this.
I imagine that there might be some age at which your (always-increasing, but perhaps subject to diminishing returns) experience and your (always-decreasing, after around 20 or 25) cognitive ability cancel, resulting in a peak in decision-making ability ceteris paribus.
I intend for them to increase linearly :p
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This actually helped me.
Brilliant!
Have you decided how your actions will depend on the uncertain facts, so that once you learn what they are you will simply carry out your already determined plan for that case?
Maybe these comments are relevant. My advice is to jump headfirst into some other important task, but this advice isn’t backed by any deep theories.
You sound like someone who could benefit from Stoic meditation. If you are interested, I could recommend some readings.
I am interested!
Now that I have the time to respond, my replying will probably be superfluous. aelephant (explicitly) and shminux (implicitly) have already mentioned this technique. On the off chance that I am wrong or you want to know more, then you might want to check out the following texts: A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy by William Braxton Irvine contains an entire chapter on how to perform Stoic meditation, A New Stoicism by Lawrence C. Becker tries to explain the efficacy of Stoic meditation (among other Stoic techniques) using principles from evolutionary psychology and neurophysiology, and A Man in Full provides a fictional account of a practicing Stoic.
I’m about to get on a plane. If I have access to zero price internet where I’m going, then I’ll post some links pointing you in the right direction. Otherwise, you might have to wait a few days.
Create a space repetition card that says something like “uncertainty is fine” or “I want to be comfortable with uncertainty” with some of those words occluded?
Reflect on the fact that you don’t have any control over the outcome?
You know the way people say “be in the moment” and all your worries will disappear?
That’s utter insanity.
But.
There is a case to be made for thinking in the moment. Think about what you can do right now, to alleviate your worry. Putting some kind of Plan B in place maybe?
People seem to crave direction and purpose. If you can put in place a plan that you can begin working on right now that will lend some greater direction to your life regardless of this new change, you may alleviate the worry.