Dr. Julia DiGangi is a neuropsychologist, who completed her residency at Harvard Medical School, Boston University School of Medicine, and the US Department of Veterans Affairs. Dr. DiGangi has also studied genetics, trauma, resilience and more at Columbia, the University of Chicago, and Georgetown. She has nearly two decades of experience studying the connection between our brains and our behavior.
It was early in my career when a patient of mine, Jerry, said to me, “I never knew for sure when my dad was gonna beat the shit out of me, so I’d provoke him in the morning. Better to get it out of the way.”
This was an early exposure to what I now understand to be one of the most powerful forces in our lives: uncertainty. Uncertainty is life’s promise to us all. For more than twenty years, I have watched people rise from unspeakable pain to venture again into a future that withholds all certainty. I work with people who have endured shocking traumas and, predictably, our early conversations are filled with interrogative pleas for a certain safety: “How can I be absolutely sure nothing like this will ever happen again?” they ask me.
The answer is: they cannot.
After many years, the thing that still takes my breath away is the grace and courage of people who accept this truth and say: I rise again not because I know for sure, but because I hope anyway.
The pain of uncertainty is a well-studied neuropsychological phenomenon. For example, when researchers hook people up to machines that deliver electric shocks, people report that it’s more painful to be uncertain if they may be shocked than it is to be certain they will be shocked. This tells you something important: your emotional feelings surrounding your situations of uncertainty can be, quite literally, more painful than physical pain.
Because uncertainty can be so painful, your brain spends a lot of time trying to avoid it. But it is transforming your relationship with this energy that will empower you. A major shift begins when you understand that uncertainty cannot be powerfully understood at the level of the situation. If you try to engineer your life on a situation-by-situation basis, you will thwart your emotional evolution. Attempts to reduce uncertainty in every situation it pops up sap your energy because you don’t understand the deeper dynamics generating emotional pain across situations.
Uncertainty has a predictable rhythm to its energy, a way it reliably makes you think and feel regardless of situation. You become much more emotionally powerful when you take your focus off solving every unresolved scenario and instead focus more on the person you routinely become in the shadow of uncertainty’s energy.
We’re not trying to avoid uncertainty—because we can’t. Instead, we’re learning to work with it. This is a critically important distinction because, paradoxically enough, it’s the things you do to avoid uncertainty—and not the uncertainty itself—that cause most of your emotional pain.
The “overs”—overthinking, overworking, overdoing, and so on—are a pain-avoidance response. You might work because you enjoy it, but you overwork because you are afraid of what might happen if you don’t. The act of thinking likely brings you plenty of pleasure, but overthinking is brutal. And where giving is enjoyable, overgiving is depleting.
The “overs” are all a defense against anxiety. The logic goes: if I work more, give more, and think more, then I’ll be safe. All forms of anxiety—from the mild to the pathological—can be understood as a dysfunctional relationship with certainty.
To rise powerfully in the face of a life that promises absolutely no certainty, it helps to first realize how the energy of uncertainty universally behaves. Let me give you a clinical example to make this clear and then I’ll apply it to your own life. Take PTSD. PTSD cannot be diagnosed while people are in the throes of active trauma, like combat. You can’t diagnose PTSD in the middle of a war zone because the responses that make PTSD pathological in a non-traumatic environment are extremely adaptive in the midst of trauma. Things like hypervigilance, feeling constantly on guard, or being unable to sleep may save your life if you’re in a war.
It’s when people return home to safe environments but the safety-seeking behaviors persist that the pathology sets in. For instance, I’ve worked with combat veterans who refuse to drive cars, ride public transportation, eat at restaurants, shop in stores, or travel to crowded places like hotels or movie theaters because it feels like it could be dangerous. The (often unconscious) strategy is to stay safe by avoiding things that are uncertain. In other words, the avoidance of these places is a safety-seeking behavior. The problem, however, is it’s not the trauma that’s sustaining their pathological anxiety; it’s the safety seeking. PTSD is not about dangerous things being dangerous; it’s about an inability to see safe things as safe.
In your own life, the things you’re doing to keep yourself safe from pain—the overdoing, overworking, overgiving, overcommitting—are major causes of your pain. Extreme safety seeking is core to every painful form of anxiety: PTSD, social anxiety, generalized anxiety, OCD. The point here is relevant regardless of whether you have clinically significant anxiety or not. There comes a point when the behaviors you’re employing to keep you safe from uncertainty become the very behaviors that injure you.
While the cases in your own life might be less extreme than PTSD, the energy is moving in the same way. For example, you aren’t sure if people really like you, so you overdo it around them, trying to become some version of who you believe they think you should be. And then you wonder why you find being around people so depleting. You aren’t sure if your social media followers care about you and your content enough, so you overproduce, creating content even when you’re drained, and then wonder why you feel so exhausted.
The energy of uncertainty is at the root of all your forms of anxiety. But there’s more. The energy of uncertainty moves through your nervous system in nearly identical ways regardless of the situation that created it. It acts on your brain and body in predictable ways. Neurophysiological studies show that even minor forms of uncertainty produce changes to physiology, including brain activations in regions involved in threat detection and decision-making as well as increased sweating. Do some situations make your thoughts race more or your heart pound harder? Absolutely, but this is a difference in degree, not type. In other words, the energy of uncertainty affects your nervous system in similar ways across a range of diverse situations.
You take back your power when you realize that the energy of uncertainty does not live in the situation but is itself the energy that creates the situation. Your situation doesn’t make you wonder “What if?” Rather, it’s the act of anxiously wondering “What if?” that shapes your situation.
To work with uncertainty’s energy in a way that empowers your leadership, be the hero of your own story.
Reprinted by permission of Harvard Business Review Press. Adapted from Energy Rising: The Neuroscience of Leading with Emotional Power by Julia DiGangi. Copyright 2023 Julia DiGangi. All rights reserved.