War in Iran. Sleeper cells. Soaring gas prices. A new virus. ICE arrests. The acceleration of AI. And a rogue food delivery robot. Is your heart racing yet?
Amid one of the highest-stakes, most chaotic news cycles in recent memory, it’s hard to keep calm while scrolling through the day’s doom-saturated headlines.
Fear not. A team of British scientists, two authors and a group of thought leaders once deemed societal outcasts are here to help. Sam Conniff and Katherine Templar-Lewis’ new book, “The Uncertainty Toolkit: Worry Less and Do More by Learning to Cope With the Unknown,” presents evidence-based strategies to help you not only tolerate uncertainty, but thrive in the face of it.
Conniff, a self-described author and “social entrepreneur,” and Templar-Lewis, a neuroscientist, partnered with the University College London’s Centre for the Study of Decision-Making Uncertainty as well as real world “uncertainty experts” — former prisoners, drug addicts, hostages, refugees and others — to execute the most extensive study to date on “Uncertainty Tolerance,” which published in 2022. Their web project, “Uncertainty Experts,” is an interactive “self development experience” that includes workshops and an online Netflix-produced documentary, through which viewers can test their own uncertainty tolerance.
Their “Uncertainty Toolkit” book, out April 7, addresses the three emotional states that uncertainty puts us in — Fear, Fog and Stasis — while blending personal stories from the subjects they interviewed with the latest science on uncertainty, interactive exercises and guided reflections.
“The Uncertainty Toolkit” aims to help you keep calm amid chaos.
(Bluebird / Pan Macmillan)
“We are scientifically in the most uncertain times,” Templar-Lewis says. “There’s something called the World Uncertainty Index, which charts uncertainty [globally]. And it’s spiking. People say life has always been uncertain, and of course it has; but because of the way we’re connected and on digital platforms and our lives are so busy, we’re interacting with more and more moments of uncertainty than ever before.”
We asked the authors to relay three strategies for staying calm in challenging times, as told to them by their uncertainty experts.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Advice from an ex-addict: Be grateful: Morgan Godvin is an ex-addict and human rights activist from Oregon who served four years of a five-year sentence in a federal prison, Conniff says.
“She developed a practice of ‘Radical Gratitude.’ Even in a world that feels so overwhelming, we can all find an object from which to derive a sense of gratitude,” he says. “As an emotion, gratitude provides a counterweight to anxiety that is almost as powerful as breath work or any of the other [anti-anxiety] well-known interventions.”
In prison, Godvin — who suffers from anxiety — created a daily practice to help her cope. “She began being grateful for the blankets, the only thing she had — and they were threadbare blankets,” Conniff says. “And by digging deep and really emphasizing the warm sensation we know of as gratitude, it became a biological hack. When the body starts to feel grateful, the hormones the body releases brings it back into what’s known as homeostasis or a sense of equilibrium; it activates the parasympathetic nervous system. It’s a very humbling and very healthy practice when the world’s just too much.”
Advice from a survivor of suicidal depression: Lean into the unknown. Vivienne Ming is a leading neuroscientist based in the Bay Area who faced a web of personal challenges in her early 20s. Ming, who was assigned male at birth, dropped out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, became homeless and was “living out of their car with a gun on their dashboard,” Conniff says. “They faced homelessness and near suicidal depression before finding a path that took them through gender transition to a place of real identity, marriage, family and success as a scientist.”
How? They developed and cultivated an awareness of “negativity bias,” Conniff says. “We all have a predetermined negativity bias. And in times of uncertainty, that negativity bias goes off the charts and we start to limit ourselves and shut ourselves down. By understanding this, we begin to be able to make a choice: Am I shutting myself down to the opportunities of life? Am I not getting back to people? Am I not taking the chances that are presented to me?”
What’s more, uncertainty, Dr. Ming pointed out, is actually good for you. It unlocks parts of your brain.
“Uncertainty drives neuroplasticity, our ability to learn,” Conniff says. “So [it’s about] resisting negativity bias — that this is all dangerous and difficult and we’re told not to trust each other — and instead, Dr. Ming’s response is to lean into the unknown. She says ‘the best way forward is to all walk slowly into the deep end of our own lives.’”
Advice from an ex-refugee: Reflect on your gut. Rez Gardi grew up in a refugee camp in Pakistan, before her family relocated to New Zealand. She’s now a lawyer and human rights activist working in Iraq.
“Rez correctly identified the scientific explanation for what we all call ‘gut instinct,’” Conniff says. “It’s known as ‘embodied cognition.’ The idea is that we have two brains — the gut instinct is an incredibly complex system of data points and it literally is in our gut and it’s connected to our brains via the vagus nerve. What it does is it brings your intuition in line with your intellect.”
So how to tap into it? “Rez talked about reflecting on her gut instinct,” Conniff says. “So when you have a feeling that you are right or wrong, go back to that feeling: What color was it? What shape was it? Where was it in your body? What temperature was it? Rez honed her gut instinct to become incredibly accurate: Should she trust this person? Was she safe? And that gut instinct became a highly tuned instrument. When we are trying to solve problems, when we are trying to communicate, these signals are as accurate as the best of our cognitive problem-solving abilities.”
Conniff and Templar-Lewis spoke to nearly 40 uncertainty experts in all. And with all of them, Conniff adds, “they kind of learned these techniques themselves, but the scientific evidence really backs it up.”
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Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: latimes.com
