Simone Stolzoff

That might mean something like meditation that will help you get to a grounded place or trusting in your future self to be able to handle any sort of uncertainty that comes your way.

So those are all sort of for the acute category of you will get a piece of information.

Yeah, it's biological.

It comes back to our roots as human beings.

You can imagine one of your ancestors in the jungle, and there's a rustling in the bushes, and they're not sure the source of that rustling, or they reach for a fruit that they don't know whether it's poison or not.

That uncertainty can be lethal.

And so our brains are wired in a way for certainty to make us feel safe and secure and uncertainty to naturally see as a threat to put us into this sort of fight or flight response.

But a few things that I learned through the research has really helped me deal with those sorts of scenarios where you might think about the worst case scenario.

One is that humans are really bad at what's called effective forecasting.

Effective forecasting is thinking about how we might feel about a future event.

So there's this researcher from Harvard named Dan Gilbert, and he's one of the sort of foremost researchers on happiness.

And one thing that he's found is that people, for example, that get left at the altar are

or people that didn't get that job that they really wanted to get, often with some benefit of hindsight, can look back at that experience and see it as a blessing in disguise, or maybe even the best thing that ever happened to them.

So the first thing that I'd tell you is if you're really in this catastrophizing mindset,

to think back about past periods of uncertainty.

We all know a friend who maybe went through a breakup and then saw that breakup as the thing that allowed them to meet their partner that they actually ended up with, or maybe didn't get that job that they thought they wanted and then ultimately got something that was even better.

Yeah, so the sort of ambient uncertainty of the world.

So if you're feeling that the world is incredibly uncertain right now, you are not alone between COVID and wars and Ukraine and Iran and tariff policy, what have you.

We live in this incredibly uncertain world.

And the other side of the coin is that our tolerance for uncertainty is in decline.