Simone Stolzoff

that not potentially happening.

So let's go back to breast cancer patients, for example.

So you do your biopsy.

No one wants breast cancer, but one of the best things that you can do in that moment is prepare for different situations.

So if I were to get a positive diagnosis, do I know what my insurance is?

Do I know how my kids will get to school if I have to go in to take tests?

Do I have all of sort of my ducks in the row?

Another sort of potential thing you can do in that moment is to look for the silver linings and potentially bad outcomes.

So I didn't get the job, but that means that I might be able to do X, Y, or Z that that job would have precluded me from being able to do.

So that's sort of the next question, like how can you plan for different contingencies?

And then after that, it just comes down to acceptance, acceptance of the fact that you can't know for sure.

And you can do things like breathwork and meditation that can help regulate your nervous system.

You can do things like finding flow state activities that can help you get distracted while you're waiting to receive that acute piece of information that you're waiting on.

There's a really cool study where they had participants play games of Tetris while they're waiting to get results of a test.

And if the game was too easy, they were really stressed.

And if the game was too hard, they were really stressed.

But if it was right at sort of the limit of their threshold, they were able to better cope with that waiting period.

There's lots of examples during the pandemic and quarantine that we can learn from that.

But the last sort of place that that leaves us is the sort of fundamental question of this book, which is

How do we live in a world where uncertainty is unavoidable?