LOUISA SIMMONDS

The only certainty in life is death, so stop worrying about what might happen.

This was the message from resident psychologist, Dr Emily Musgrove, on The Certainty of Uncertainty, a recent episode of the podcast The Imperfects. Sounds pretty scary if you suffer from an anxiety disorder, doesn’t it? But if you look more closely, the benefits of this approach to anxiety outweighs any initial discomfort. The real message here is the futility of worry.

Worrying about worst-case scenarios is my life. I can’t help myself. My mind has the creativity of Picasso when it comes to painting pictures of what may go wrong.

Telling me to stop worrying makes me worry about why I worry so much

The worst advice someone can give people like me is to stop worrying. Not only is that reductive, telling me to stop worrying makes me worry about why I worry so much. I am an Olympian in overthinking, and controlling my spiralling thoughts is just not that simple. It is also exhausting.

Whether anxiety is inherited, caused by trauma, stress, or even the influence of social media, it is a mental health condition that is affecting more and more people. For some, it can prove debilitating.

Anxiety can be debilitating

What anxiety isn’t is that butterflies in the stomach feeling that you feel sometimes ahead of an upcoming event. That’s normal. And like most mental health conditions, there is a spectrum. Symptoms can range from a constant fear or predisposition to overthinking the worst-case scenario about… well, pretty much everything in your life… to not leaving the house.

The good news is the wealth of treatment options available for anxiety. These can help improve impairing symptoms like poor concentration, nausea, irritability, insomnia, perfectionism, and even panic attacks. Options like psychotherapy and counselling, Bio-feedback, breathing exercises, physical exercise, mindfulness, medication, sleep therapy, and diet tweaks can be game-changers for those who suffer.

However, the brain is a complex organ, and in my experience, what works for one person won’t always work for another. An integrative approach is best practice, and if you commit to the process, you will see results.

Without treatment, anxiety rarely gets better

What we also know about anxiety is that it rarely goes away without treatment. Indeed, the opposite can happen. Despite the range of treatment options available, there are still times if I’m in a fight, flight or freeze situation, when there’s no knowing how my brain will respond.

This lack of control is what inspired me about Dr Emily’s thoughts on anxiety and the importance of embracing uncertainty. Although her views on “Our new-age uncertainty tolerance, and why we continuously seek reassurance and data to drive our decision-making process” sound morbid, the acceptance that the only certainty in our lives is that we’ll die is strangely cathartic. Liberating even.

Parenting taught me that I can’t control everything

Her ideas confirm that very little in our lives is within our control, something I began to suspect when I first had children. At some point, most of us come to understand that life is not the linear progression we anticipated in our younger years. Rather, it is a steady progression of surpassing societal milestones until the long-awaited holiday of retirement. It is a journey of ups and downs and highs and lows that we must deal with the best way we can.

Two main components stall that perfect line of progression: the curveballs that life throws at us – poverty, death, health issues, the impact of global disasters – and access to too much information. Our reaction to Covid was the perfect example of the powerlessness everyone feels in the face of an unknown enemy.

Technology provides information about our health, global and local news and business, and politics. We can even see what mischief our pets are up to whilst we’re not home. Nevertheless, we have little real control over any of those things. And ultimately, all of that surplus information, in addition to the daily grind of work and our responsibilities to family and friends, are leading to stress and overwhelm.

It is causing our systems to trip.

We stop trusting ourselves to make even the most basic decisions

As a Gen Xer, the years of my young adulthood were “golden”. Without mobile phones and 24 hr access to information, I took responsibility for my own choices, usually without worrying about the consequences. Taking risks makes us more resilient. I was focused on living life to the full rather than obsessing about the pointless shit we worry about now. Sadly, our younger generations have missed out on that age of innocence.

Despite what my (young adult) kids believe, we still had worries about money – interest rates, which were 14% at one point, our health (HIV), terrorism (in my case, the IRA bombings), and parenting. But we didn’t have voices in our head telling us how we should be living our lives – other than those of our parents!

I’m not negating the benefits of technology and social media – the accessibilty it offers to most people is life-changing – but there is a price for that inundation of knowledge and we must learn to navigate it healthily.

But, as Dr Emily explains, uncertainty is healthy because it encourages exploration and creativity. It stops you worrying about what your friends think, which are the safesty airlines, best restaurants or movies. It sounds nonsensical, but in the words of Nike, “just doing it”, frees us from worry.

“Just do it”

Anxiety creates an unhealthy need for control. Although a highly-rated restaurant is unlikely to disappoint, that choice can deny you a unique experience in a lesser-known venue. Of course, taking risks and spontaneity are scary sometimes, but they are also exciting and offer a level of fulfillment that only comes from challenge. And some decisions may not live up to our expectations, but most won’t kill us.

Hiking with an older friend in the Blue Mountains last weekend, I was shocked by the “moderate” trail he led us on. Whereas I had been anticipating a gentle stroll, the path was rugged and quite steep in parts for someone in runners that had seen better days. If not for the trust I had in our intrepid leader, I would have turned back – several times. Out of my comfort zone, sliding down gravel and clambering over fallen trees and rocks, my anxiety built. What if I broke a limb in the middle of the bush without mobile reception? What would it cost for a helicopter rescue? What if I was bitten by a snake? However, I put some of the strategies I’ve learned in therapy into practise, steeled myself and pushed through. I would have been disappointed in myself if I let my anxiety win. Furthermore, I would never have experienced standing under the spray of a waterfall or watching a group of excited Millennials tackle a terrifying rockface above us.

Growth comes from challenging ourselves and that usually involves embracing uncertainty.. It means ignoring that voice in your head that insists you’re too old or you’ll injure yourself. Though I’m not condoning behaviours with high risk, eliminating every uncertainty guarantees neither a happy, healthy or long life. People who have never smoked get lung cancer. Everyone loses loved ones. Kids get cancer (FFS!)

Dr Emily also points out the futility of looking back or forward when none of us are fortune tellers. We cannot predict outcomes, and if we had chosen that other path, she explains, there’s no guarantee it would have been better.

The only certainty in life is that one day we’ll die is a sobering thought, but it also makes a mockery of worrying about everthing else.

We can’t avoid many of life’s curveballs. At different junctures, each of us will face a challenge we are unprepared for. So we need to be ready. If our resilience isn’t strong enough, there’s nothing wrong in getting help for it. Radical acceptance is another idea I’ve benefitted from. A DBT approach, I strongly recommend it to anyone experiencing tough times at the moment.

No one is immune to life’s ups and downs, but how we handle them is what matters. Imagine how dull our existence would be if we could predict our future.