Big Feelings: How to Be Okay When Things Are Not Okay - Hardcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Liz Fosslien is the Head of Content at Humu, a company that uses behavioral science to make work better. Liz's writing and illustrations have been featured by the Economist, The New York Times, NPR, and Freakonomics.
 
Mollie West Duffy is an organizational and leadership development expert. She has helped companies and start-ups such as Casper develop good workplace culture. She writes a blog about start-up culture, and has written for Harvard Business Review, Entrepreneur, Fast Company, and Quartz.

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Chapter 1

Uncertainty

Liz: The first headache hit like a jackhammer. I stumbled toward the bathroom, dizzy and gagging.

A week later, the second sent me to the emergency room. After a barrage of blood draws and scans, the doctors ruled out a list of life-threatening issues-pulmonary embolism, brain aneurysm, tumor-and categorized me as a medical mystery.

Searching for a diagnosis is excruciating. "Don't worry until you have something to worry about," a coworker told me. But I worried all the time. I yo-yoed between imagining the worst possible outcome and feeling like a drama queen. Was I dying? Or was it absolutely nothing?

That was my life for months. I shuttled between neurologists; ear, nose, and throat specialists; and ophthalmologists. One neurologist gave me thirty-six injections of Botox in my head, shoulders, and back to prevent neurotransmitters from sending pain signals to my brain. An ophthalmologist thought the muscles around my eyes might be inflamed, and prescribed steroid medication that skyrocketed my blood pressure and made my cheeks flush a dark pink.

Then an internist suggested that I had an atypical case of migraines and put me on a high dosage of Topamax, an antiepileptic drug. The clanging in my skull finally quieted, but the side effects that popped up left me just as out of sorts. My emotions exploded. One afternoon, I stepped onto the L train in Chicago and into the clutches of the worst panic attack I've ever experienced. I clung to a ceiling pole. When the doors opened again, I crawled out onto the Merchandise Mart platform and forced one foot in front of the other until I was finally back at my apartment. I spent the rest of the day in bed, shaken and ashamed.

In the morning, I emptied the pill bottle into the toilet. I was done with Topamax.

I didn't know that it can be life-threatening to stop prescription medication cold turkey.

At four o'clock the next afternoon, my heart lurched. I managed to make it to the lobby of my apartment building before I lost consciousness. When I came to, I was strapped to a gurney in the back of an ambulance. A nurse's face swam before my eyes. She told me my parents were on their way.

"Am I going to die?" I felt the back of my neck prickle in terror as darkness clouded my vision again.

The nurse looked at the jagged line displayed on a nearby monitor. "I don't know."

"I don't want to die before my mom gets here," I tried to tell her, but I couldn't move my mouth anymore. Then everything went black.

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"This is a period of radical uncertainty, [by] an order of magnitude greater than anything we're used to," said Columbia University historian Adam Tooze in April 2020. That October, a New York Times headline announced, "awake at 3 a.m.? we are too." The same year, the most popular Harvard Business Review articles were about how to navigate turbulent times and grieve the loss of a guaranteed future.

As millennials-"the new lost generation," according to The Atlantic-we (Liz and Mollie) have lived through three major economic recessions, have quarantined for more than a year during a global pandemic and a devastating wildfire season in California, and view 401(k) matching (let alone pensions) as a relic. We consider ourselves to be among the fortunate, and even we felt overwhelmed by uncertainty.

Psychologists who study stress have identified three primary factors that make us feel awful: a lack of control, unpredictability, and the perception that things are getting worse. In other words: uncertainty.

In this chapter, we'll deconstruct uncertainty and the emotion at its core: anxiety. To clarify definitions before we continue:

Anxiety is general unease because of an uncertain outcome. We feel anxious when we aren't sure how larger forces will interfere with our lives.

Fear is when we believe that something specific will happen (like tripping over your words during an important presentation, or a loved one dying).

We'll start by walking through three common myths around uncertainty and the anxiety it causes and then offer a few ways to find solid footing even when the world moves beneath you.

Myths about Uncertainty

Myth #1: Certainty is attainable

While sheltering in place during the first few weeks of the pandemic, we felt that we were living through a period of unprecedented uncertainty. (We werenÕt alone: Google searches for the word ÒunprecedentedÓ spiked to, well, unprecedented highs in March 2020.) But the level of uncertainty during the Cuban Missile Crisis or World War I or even the bubonic plague was just as great, if not much greater, than it is today.

Life can change in an instant. At age thirty-three, Liz's CrossFit-loving, teetotaling friend developed a sharp pain in his ankle. Three weeks later, he was diagnosed with bone cancer, and a week after that his right leg was amputated. Or take Liz herself, who decided to buy a treat at Berkeley Bowl, a local grocery store, on her way home from a particularly draining day at work. While beelining through the produce section, she bumped into a friend-of-a-friend she had met once years ago. He suggested they grab coffee together sometime. Five years later, she married him.

We tend to be too confident about our ability to predict the future. Behavioral scientists have shown that we're overly optimistic about things we want to happen, we notice immediate changes but tend to overlook longer-term shifts, and we overemphasize the importance of new information that fits into our existing beliefs. If you really want to travel to Paris, you'll probably see flight prices going down as a sign but then shrug and ignore it if your hotel stay suddenly becomes more expensive. The track record of "expert" forecasters (think economists and meteorologists) is so dismal that some claim that being an expert in something actually makes you worse at predicting the future than if you were a generalist.

The ancient teachings of Buddhism center on this fundamental problem. "We can try to control the uncontrollable by looking for security and predictability," writes Buddhist teacher Pema Chodron, "always hoping to be comfortable and safe. But the truth is that we can never avoid uncertainty. This not-knowing is part of the adventure." And precisely what makes us anxious.

Myth #2: Anxiety accurately reflects risk

ThereÕs often a mismatch between how stressed we feel about something happening and the likelihood that that thing will happen. In an experiment, researchers told one group of people they had a 99 percent chance of receiving a painful (but safe) electric shock and told the other group they had a 1 percent chance. Surprisingly, the two groups were willing to pay about the same amount of money to avoid the shock. In other words, the likelihood of getting hurt didnÕt affect peopleÕs anxiety about getting hurt-or what they would do to avoid the scenario.

The more uncertainty we face, the worse we feel. When the risk level of a decision is unknown, brain activity spikes in the area that processes emotions. Research even shows we'd rather be absolutely sure that something bad is going to happen than deal with ambiguity. Scientists found that people who had a 50 percent chance of receiving an electric shock were three times as stressed as people who had a 90 percent chance of getting the shock. (Seems 100 percent certain that...