Although easier said than done, accepting what is out of our control is going to be necessary to keep ourselves from falling apart in these unpredictable times. ⁣

Right now, we are full of uncertainty – when will all this end? When will things go back to normal? WILL things go back to normal? What if I lose my job? What if I catch the virus?

This is bad news, because our brains love certainty and control - at least, to a certain point.

(Skip to the bottom for a practical exercise to help you separate what you can control from what you can’t)

Too much vs too little control + what is Learned Helplessness?

You have likely experienced that too much responsibility and control can be very stressful. This is particularly true when you feel responsible for the lives of others, such as children or parents - the fear that one wrong move might have disastrous consequences for your - or someone else’s - life.

But on the other hand, when we feel completely powerless – as if nothing at all is within our control – we are likely to fall into depression. Some particularly horrifying experiments with dogs (in 1967) found that when dogs couldn’t do anything to predict or stop random electric shocks that they received, they pretty much just gave up on anything – they lay there, lifelessly accepting their fate, but showing high levels of anxiety and depression. Later, when they could have stopped shocks by jumping over a barrier, they continued to lie there, passively accepting their fate - they had learnt that they could do nothing to stop their own suffering. Psychologists call this “learned helplessness”.

There are plenty of studies that show that people are happier, and even live longer, when they feel that they have control and autonomy over their lives - this can be as simple as the difference between giving an elderly person a plant to look after and choice over who they spend time with (compared to having nursing home staff make all decisions for them).

Why is uncertainty so hard to handle?

There are many reasons why we struggle to embrace uncertainty – for example, we may have experienced a particular trauma that made the idea of loss of control or uncertainty very scary to us. We might struggle to give up control can be from having had particularly ‘control freak’ parents or teachers when we were growing up. Having lacked control over our lives then, we seek to prove to ourselves in adult like, over and over again, that we are masters of our own destiny.

On top of that, it is likely that we received messages from our culture and society about the level of control and certainty that we could expect to have. For example, a friend of mine who visited Nepal told me that although the capital city appeared to be dirty and falling apart, people were happy. When she spoke to some of them – in particular about the state of the city – many shrugged, smiled and said “what will be, will be”. Around the world some form of this belief – “God willing”, “God has a plan”, or “it’s karma” seems to protect people from feeling that it is up to them to shape their future.

Neuroscience shows that when we feel stress, or are faced with uncertainty, our brain seeks that with which it is familiar…this is essentially a survival strategy. It takes a lot to shift us out of our comfort zone, so we may seek to simply accept the ‘new normal’ so that we don’t have to confront the implications of what the ‘new normal’ might throw at us.

What messages were you given about how much you could control your destiny?

For many of us, society has taught us that we are in charge of our own destinies. This is all very well and good when it's true - we can, to some extent, choose where we live, what job we do, and how we act… at least, when things are going well. But this message also ignores the effects of privilege, nepotism, and plain old luck… and can also give us unrealistic expectations about the degree of control we actually do have over our lives, meaning we feel awful when our five-year-plan doesn’t work out exactly as we had mapped it.

When our need for certainty and control is taken away…

A pandemic strips us of a great degree of control. Instead of feeling that our destiny is in our hands, we are suddenly waiting for a vaccine (if one is possible or on the way), waiting to find out whether we still have a job. We are “grounded” in our homes - some of us not even allowed to go out for walks or to visit friends. For many of us, this is likely to reawaken trauma that we may have from childhood, making us feel as if we are being punished or imprisoned.

When we feel a lack of control in one place, we might start to try exerting our control over whatever we can manage. OCD is a good example of what happens when the brain’s desire to control every possible outcome goes 'too far' – but you can also look at ‘superstitious’ behaviour (e.g. believing you can control the outcome through magic), bullying others (maybe over social media) as an attempt to control their behaviour, or the development of harsh control over our own bodies (e.g. skipping meals) as an attempt to convince ourselves that we ARE the masters of our own destiny.

Embracing Uncertainty
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How does it feel to surrender to the unknown? Scary? Unthinkable?

I’m imagining that if you haven’t already slipped into Learned Helplessness, then every fibre of your being is screaming “no!”… and that’s good. We should not let our governments slip Totalitarianism through the back door - we should remain vigilant, and we should honour our anger as a powerful message that tells us that injustice may be happening.

And yet, what is the impact on your own health if you try fooling yourself into thinking that it's up to you to create the perfect outcome from this situation? ⁣
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Some things are in your control. Some things aren't. The trick is to let go of those that are not, and think about what you can do towards those things that are. ⁣

A useful exercise here is to think about:

· What I can control – e.g. how much news I watch about the crisis

· What I can influence – how my family are feeling about the crisis

· What I cannot control – when the crisis will be over

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This requires us to be realistic about what we really can control. It also requires that sit with the fact that there is no way for us to know how the future is going to play out. Yes, we can do what we can to try creating a better future, but there are no guarantees.

This is hard for our emotional minds to accept… especially those of us who have been raised in a culture that tells us “You can be anything you want to be! The future is within your hands!”

But here’s one exercise to get you started - (I’ve taken it from my Staying Grounded in Times of Crisis 30-day e-course, which is starting again on the 10th of May, but of course this has been adapted from other popular coaching techniques):

1) Start by writing down every worst-case scenario that you are worrying about.

2) Try to score each one for how likely you think each item is to happen.

3) Once you have written them, start to answer honestly to each one – what if that did happen? Don’t just think about the immediately aftermath. Ask yourself what would happen after a year, after two years, after five. Would things still be awful, or would they start to get better again?

You might find that what seems scary turns out to be more faceable once you realise that, even though it would be really hard in the days or weeks following it, things would slowly get better.

On the other hand, you may have found that at least one of your worst-case scenarios has an unbearable end that you can’t face the thought of.

4) Take the worst scenarios and write two new lists connected to them: Things I can control, and Things I can’t control.

5) In Things I Can Control, list actionable steps you can take that will make the worst-case scenario less likely to unfold, or more bearable if it does happen. Think about how you can start to implement some of these steps from today, in your day-to-day life.

If it's hard to think of solutions, do something that makes you feel good (meditating, exercise, a bath, a nice video call with a friend) and come back to this. It's hard to think "big picture" when we are anxious - our brains hone in on fear and are far less likely to come up with creative solutions.

6) Under Things I Can’t Control – let’s take a look. Notice how it feels in your body to reflect on the fact you can’t control these things.

In my Staying Grounded course, I go into a lot more detail on ways that you can work with the uncertainty - feeling the emotions in your body, breathing through the difficulties, challenging exactly what it is that makes certain events (such as a perceived lack of control) so scary, and practicing mindfulness to focus on the present moment rather than “time-travelling” to a hundred worst-case futures.

Don’t push yourself to magically be OK with uncertainty - that’s just another need for control sneaking its way in there, telling you something like “well, if I can’t control what’s going on out there, I can control my emotions and thoughts” - which may lead to a lot more stress and disappointment. Instead, try to gently introduce new elements of uncertainty into your life.

If you’re somebody who craves absolute certainty in everything you do, what’s one small way you can replace certainty for mystery in a way that still feels safe? I find that the more we gently nudge ourselves out of our comfort zones, instead of trying to blast ourselves out in one dramatic move, the more we are able to feel comfortable with a little more uncertainty in our lives.

If we are afraid of uncertainty, it will be hard for us to think about it as an opportunity for growth. We may want to stay with old patterns of behaviour, but what would it be like to break out of those old patterns and see the world even just a little bit differently?

Feeling connected with our own emotional intelligence will support us as we recognise that perhaps now is a good time to make those changes. Connect with yourself, recognise the choices you have and step forward with purpose – and in so doing we will be better equipped to manage these uncertain times

—Written with contributions from Ruth Whiteside, EQ Coach focusing on teacher resilience and schools (Twitter @ruthcoaching) -

—Find out more about what I do and to book a free 30-minute discovery call