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Brain-Based Transformational Solutions

Uncertainty: Learning to Live with Butterflies

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uncertainty

The unconscious part of our brain abhors ambiguity and uncertainty. And patience is not its middle name. That’s unfortunate.

We work to eliminate as much uncertainty as we can as quickly as possible. But when we eliminate uncertainty, we necessarily eliminate novelty. And novelty is the starting point for creation and innovation. In eliminating uncertainty, we kill our shot at brilliance. We become derivative. All in the name of not having to learn to live with butterflies. —Jonathan Fields

In our haste to return to the illusory state of certainty, we tend to do things like jump to conclusions, accept the first answer or explanation that comes to mind (consistent with our mental model), act prematurely, or immobilize ourselves in endless rounds of rumination. (Rumination feels like problem-solving but it’s the opposite: problem-prolonging, if you will.)

By refusing to allow ourselves to simply observe the discomfort that accompanies ambiguity and uncertainty, we often deny ourselves another experience: the pure joy of the aha! moment when a solution presents itself. That may take an hour or several days—or even longer—but suddenly what was murky and inchoate becomes bright and clear. The path ahead becomes obvious.

I say the solution “presents itself” because although we tend to take credit for coming up with the brilliant idea or flash of insight, the part of our brain we identify with had little to do with it. It’s the unconscious that figured it out and then clued us in.

It’s interesting that the unconscious is equally capable of jumping to quick conclusions and of wrestling with an issue long after we’ve depleted our conscious capacity to think about it. In situations where a wrong conclusion isn’t likely to make a huge difference, jumping to one is probably more efficient. But when the issue or problem or project is bigger, it’s worth letting the unconscious mull it over for a while.

One of the reasons waiting this process out makes us squirm is that we have no control over it. It isn’t going to occur by the force of our will or on our timetable. When we try to make it happen we usually just end up getting in our own way and muddling the process.

Certainty Is Not Clarity

Although we frequently use the terms interchangeably, certainty is not a synonym for clarity.

Certainty itself is an emotional state, not an intellectual one. To create a feeling of certainty, the brain must filter out far more information than it processes. In other words, the more certain you feel, the more likely you are wrong. –Steven Stosny, Ph.D.

There’s a big difference between being unclear—not knowing which step to take—and being uncertain—not knowing what the outcome of taking that step will be. It’s important to distinguish between the two and to be able to recognize whether it’s a lack of clarity or the fear of uncertainty that’s getting in the way.

Certainty is an illusion—a somewhat comforting illusion, but an illusion nevertheless. There’s no way to predict the future, and randomness plays a much bigger role in our lives than we want to believe. So if we wait until we are certain of the outcome of our actions, we’ll never act because the outcome can never be certain. There are no guarantees in life.

The best laid schemes of mice and men often go awry. —Robert Burns

Clarity, unlike certainty, is not an emotional state. It’s a state of mind: unclouded, unobstructed, unambiguous. Clarity isn’t arrived at via a tortuous route. Unfortunately, since the unconscious part of our brain is biased against uncertainty, we are biased against it, too. This is another example of our brain using us instead of the other way around.

What you can do:

  • Practice tolerating uncertainty and not being attached to the outcome by adopting an attitude of curiosity.
  • Learn to distinguish between being unclear (not knowing which step to take) and being uncertain (not knowing what the outcome of taking that step will be).

It isn’t easy, but rather than trying to get back to comfortable and certain as quickly as possible, we can develop a tolerance for the discomfort. We can even learn to appreciate the uncertainty and the opportunity it presents for novelty. Whatever is on the other side of our current distress may be unimaginable to us now, but it could be brilliant. Why take the chance of missing out on something brilliant just to avoid feeling a little uncomfortable?

Additional reading: 12 Signs that You Lack Clarity

Pursuing Happiness? Don’t Get Stuck on the Hedonic Treadmill

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hedonic treadmillWhen you’re on the hedonic treadmill, you need to keep moving in order to maintain your existing state of happiness. That means acquiring more and more of the things or experiences that initially brought you pleasure. The problem is that attempting to maintain a steady-state of happiness is unnatural. Pursuing happiness may not be the way to attain it.

Here is some food for thought on the subject of happiness and its alternatives.

The human animal, like others, is adapted to a certain amount of struggle for life, and when by means of great wealth homo sapiens can gratify all his whims without effort, the mere absence of effort from his life removes an essential ingredient of happiness. The man who acquires easily things for which he feels only a very moderate desire concludes that the attainment of desire does not bring happiness. If he is of a philosophic disposition, he concludes that human life is essentially wretched, since the man who has all he wants is still unhappy. He forgets that to be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness. —Bertrand Russell, The Conquest of Happiness

Constraints give your life shape. Remove them and most people have no idea what to do: look at what happens to those who win lotteries or inherit money. Much as everyone thinks they want financial security, the happiest people are not those who have it, but those who like what they do.
–Paul Graham, Programmer, Writer, Investor

Happy chemicals did not evolve to be on all the time. They evolved to promote your survival. …Happy chemicals flow when you see a way to meet your needs. …Unhappy chemicals feel bad because that works. It gets your attention fast. —Loretta Graziano Breuning, Ph.D. Meet Your Happy Chemicals

Uncertainty can preserve and prolong our happiness, thus we might expect people to cherish it. In fact, the opposite is generally the case. —Daniel Gilbert, Stumbling on Happiness

We know now that external circumstances don’t predicate happiness. As we know, there are many poor people who are very happy and wealthy people who are extremely depressed, suicidal. What I’m talking about is the daily experience of a meaningful life. I find that when people feel like they have meaning in their lives, they define themselves as happy. They want to get up in the morning. It’s not just a fleeting experience because they had a glamorous holiday or won the lottery or something, but they actually have meaning. Meaning brings fulfillment. So the first imperative is self-awareness. —Max Strom, author of There Is No App for Happiness

The moments of happiness we enjoy take us by surprise. It is not that we seize them, but that they seize us. —Ashley Montagu, Anthropologist

Imagine that you are part of a grand experiment in which you are provided with everything you need. At regular intervals, you are given gifts of money, food, love, sex, fame—whatever you want. The only catch is that you can do nothing that increases or decreases the likelihood of obtaining these rewards. In fact, in order to receive the rewards, you have to spend eight hours a day in a room doing nothing—no career to occupy your time, no one to talk to, no books to read, no paintings to paint, no music to compose—in short, nothing to engage you. Even though you can get any reward you want, this would be a hellish life. —Timothy D. Wilson, Strangers to Ourselves

There are as many nights as days, and the one is just as long as the other in the year’s course. Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word happy would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness. —Carl Jung, Psychiatrist/Psychotherapist

Happiness is beneficial for the body, but it is grief that develops the powers of the mind. —Marcel Proust

We are living in an era in which the Happiness Industry invades and permeates society and every unpleasant aspect of life is frowned upon, and dismissed as an unnecessary social ill. Rather than learning to cope with or contemplate certain aspects of life – fear, sadness, loneliness and boredom – we avoid them, gradually removing our ability to tolerate even the most mundane of the difficult aspects of life.  —Siobhan Lyons, Philosophy Now

Sunshine dulls the mind to risk and thoughtfulness. —Adam Alter, Drunk Tank Pink

The Anticipation Machine Isn’t All It’s Cracked Up to Be

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anticipationPhilosopher Daniel Dennett describes the human brain as an “anticipation machine.” He says that making future is the most important thing it does.

Most of us do not struggle to think about the future because mental simulations of the future arrive in our consciousness regularly and unbidden, occupying every corner of our mental lives. –Daniel Gilbert, Stumbling on Happiness

Unfortunately, the process the brain uses—adding the past to the present to equal (predict) the future—is far from a fail-safe method for figuring out either what actually lies ahead or how we will feel should what we anticipate come to pass. Our “anticipation machine” creates what we experience as expectations: estimates or forecasts of future situations based on present or past experiences. Expectations are beliefs we have about what should happen or about the way things should or will be.

But the future is fundamentally different from the present; therefore, it isn’t something we can accurately imagine. Our images of the future are firmly lodged in the now, in what we already know and are familiar with. Our visions of what may be possible in the future are heavily constrained by what has already been—or rather, by the stories we’ve constructed about it. We’re not influenced by the past as much as we’re influenced by our stories about the past.

Who I am is the habit of what I always was and who I’ll be is the result. –Louise Erdrich

Not only is the future not the same as the present, but according to Daniel Gilbert, our future self is not the same as our present self (nor is our present self the same as our past self). Our future self may want nothing to do with the commitments our present self is busy making for it or the plans our present self is setting into motion at this very moment.

The person you are right now is as transient, as fleeting and as temporary as all the people you’ve ever been. The one constant in our life is change. –Daniel Gilbert

But wait; there’s more.

We try to repeat those experiences that we remember with pleasure and pride, and we try to avoid repeating those that we remember with embarrassment and regret. The trouble is that we often don’t remember them correctly. –Daniel Gilbert

So the bottom line is that we don’t remember the past—which we’re basing quite a few of our expectations on—correctly, we’re no good at imagining what the future is going to be like, and we can’t accurately imagine how we’re going to react to future events when they do occur.

When we spy the future through our prospectiscopes, the clarity of the next hour and the fuzziness of the next year can lead us to make a variety of mistakes. –Daniel Gilbert

But that doesn’t stop us from believing we can predict the future or from feeling certain we know what will make us happy or satisfied once we’re living in it. Our brain, after all, does crave certainty.

We tend to accept the brain’s products uncritically and expect the future to unfold with the details—and with only the details—that the brain has imagined. –Daniel Gilbert

There’s simply no way to guarantee our future happiness. There’s no way to guarantee anything. But quite a bit of research suggests that one of the biggest things that gets in the way of happiness is our firm belief that we know what will make us happy. What would it be like to loosen the reins, to let go of that mistaken notion? What would it be like to allow ourselves to stop trying to guarantee our happiness and allow ourselves to…stumble on it?

Do You Confuse Clarity with Certainty

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road ahead

Although we frequently use the terms interchangeably, certainty is not a synonym for clarity.

Certainty itself is an emotional state, not an intellectual one. To create a feeling of certainty, the brain must filter out far more information than it processes. In other words, the more certain you feel, the more likely you are wrong. –Steven Stosny, Ph.D.

There’s a big difference between being unclear—not knowing which step to take—and being uncertain—not knowing what the outcome of taking that step will be. It’s important to distinguish between the two and to be able to recognize whether it’s a lack of clarity or the fear of uncertainty that’s getting in the way.

There’s another big problem with trying to be certain, which is that we can’t be. There’s no way to predict the future—and randomness plays a much bigger role in our lives than we want to believe—so we can’t be certain about the outcome of anything we do. We end up tying ourselves in knots and wasting precious mental resources chasing an illusion.

So if we wait until we can be certain of the outcome of our actions, we’ll never act because the outcome can never be certain. There are no guarantees in life.

The best laid schemes of mice and men often go awry. —Robert Burns

Unlike certainty, clarity is not an emotional state. It’s a state of mind: unclouded, unobstructed, unambiguous. Unlike certainty, clarity isn’t arrived at via a tortuous route. Unfortunately, the unconscious part of our brain (System 1) is biased against uncertainty, and so we are biased against it, as well. This is another example of our brain using us instead of the other way around.

What you can do:
  • Practice tolerating uncertainty and not being attached to the outcome.
  • Learn to distinguish between being unclear (not knowing which step to take) and being uncertain (not knowing what the outcome of taking that step will be).

Additional reading: 12 Signs that You Lack Clarity

Hard Choices: What Are You For?

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hard choice

People who don’t exercise their normative powers in hard choices are drifters. We all know people like that. I drifted into being a lawyer. I didn’t put my agency behind lawyering. I wasn’t for lawyering. Drifters allow the world to write the story of their lives. They let mechanisms of reward and punishment—pats on the head, fear, the easiness of an option—determine what they do. So the lesson of hard choices: reflect on what you can put your agency behind, on what you can be for, and through hard choices, become that person.

Far from being sources of agony and dread, hard choices are precious opportunities for us to celebrate what is special about the human condition, that the reasons that govern our choices as correct or incorrect sometimes run out, and it is here, in the space of hard choices, that we have the power to create reasons for ourselves to become the distinctive people that we are. And that’s why hard choices are not a curse but a godsend. —Ruth Chang, philosopher

Click here for the full transcript of Chang’s TED talk or to watch the video.

I’m for learning everything I can to help me use my brain more effectively. And I’m for making a difference by helping others to discover what matters most in their lives and to write their own stories.

Are you writing the story of your life? If not, who is?

Contact Me

joycelyn@farthertogo.com
505-332-8677