Anxiety, Uncertainty, & the Search for Safety
Anxiety is a normal human response to uncertainty. It tells us that something feels important, unpredictable, or potentially threatening. When working with anxiety, the goal of eliminating anxiety altogether might be unrealistic. After all, in many situations, anxiety is informative. It can help us prepare, pay attention, and respond to challenges and real-life dangers.
When anxiety shows up, we often try to make it disappear. For many of us, we search for certainty, reassurance, or something that feels like a "safe place." And when the anxiety loops get louder in our minds, we overthink, over-prepare, and replay conversations over and over again (that is what is called rumination).
Perhaps anxiety and the discomfort of uncertainty are the same thing?
Often, when we don't know, or when we're faced with the "unknowing," this involves the future, which is in itself unknown. We begin imagining what could happen, what might go wrong, or what we might need to do about it. We begin to move into an anxious space. At the core of anxiety is often this future uncertainty, or the experience of not knowing.
So we become convinced that if we can just solve the uncertainty, we'll finally be able to relax. However, as most of us know, "solving it" for the time being doesn't necessarily stop the anxiety... because anxiety is tricky, and it will find something else to stick to. So the cycle starts all over again. No amount of planning can guarantee how a relationship will unfold, whether we've made the perfect decision, or what tomorrow will bring. When we believe certainty is the only path to feeling safe, anxiety begins running the show.
So what's going on here? Uncertainty isn't a problem to be solved. It's part of being alive. What often creates anxiety is not uncertainty itself, but our relationship to it. Uncertainty itself is not the enemy.
Therapy offers a different possibility. Rather than spending all of our energy trying to eliminate uncertainty, we begin developing a different relationship with it. We learn that it's possible to feel anxious without it taking over our lives. We learn that not knowing can be uncomfortable without necessarily being dangerous. Over time, we begin trusting ourselves more than we trust the anxious stories our minds create.
When working with anxiety, the target isn't to build a life free from anxiety. It's to build a life that's no longer organized around avoiding it. The less we demand certainty from life, the more freedom we often experience within it.