I give a lot of people bad news. As a family doctor, a fair amount of my job is letting people know that they have something they wish they didn’t. You might think that hearing a hard diagnosis is the hardest thing someone encounters, especially if you’re lucky enough to never have been in that situation. For everyone who has been in that situation, though, they know that the diagnosis itself – while hard! – is usually not the hardest part. Most often the hardest part is knowing something is going on without having an answer about what it is.
“We’re waiting to find out.”
Whether you’re waiting to find out biopsy results or about college acceptances or to hear back after an interview or you’re in that breathless pause between a marriage proposal and the answer… you know the pain of uncertainty. I’ve sat with people – and lived myself – through all kinds of uncertainty and it’s hard for a basic neurochemical reason: your amygdala is in charge in those moments.
We’ve talked before about our brain’s reaction to change: the amygdala lights up with stress chemicals that drive us to think about loss, distrust, discomfort. And we’ve talked about the calming mechanism for the amygdala: the (ventro-medial) prefrontal cortex lights up when we think about choices, options, actions. The prefrontal cortex activity slows the amygdala and we start to feel better.
So what do you do in that liminal place before you know enough to consider choices, options, actions? There are several things you can do that work. Today let’s focus on one.
Acknowledge the uncertainty. To yourself, out loud, to your people – name the discomfort and think about how you can manage that discomfort while you wait to find out. Just acknowledging the feelings this uncertainty brings up for you, the fact and difficulty of it, will build your tolerance to it and help you get through the waiting.
How do you manage the discomfort of uncertainty? Next week I’ll give you some of my own strategies and I’d love to share yours as well.
All my best,
Dr. G
