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Why are you Uncertain, Unfocused and Anxious?

In our fast paced modern world, most of us wouldn’t think of constraints as something to be happy about. Things in the past on the other hand, were much more concrete and constrained, you knew what you had to do, you could see your work. Cows needed to be milked, shoes needed cobbling, fields needed plowing. It was clear when you completed your work and there weren’t too many ways to do it. Nowadays, our work is fuzzy and doesn’t have clear edges.

With a goal like 80% more sales, Should you hire more salespeople or improve the marketing strategy? Which part of the marketing strategy should you work on first? Do you have the best designer and AB testing strategy for your website? With an explosion of things that could be should be done comes a nagging sense of incompleteness. I’m betting it’s rare for people to finish the day and feel like everything is complete.

In this video we’ll take a look at the consequences of this and the three concepts that help form a solution. Surely I can’t be the only one who has this nagging feeling of uncertainty about my actions. According to my email inbox I have 253 things to take care of. Is the book I’m reading now really worth my time or is one on the shelf better?

Should I prepare for the 3PM meeting, call that new client, answer that email or just go on lunch break? What does this uncertainty about our actions feel like? Well, according to Jordan Peterson, Jacob Hirsh and Raymond Mar, it feels like anxiety. “…So your attention for example is mediated by unconscious forces.

Sitting down to study - you know perfectly well that all sorts of distraction fantasies are going to enter the theater of your imagination, nonstop. You’ll be sitting there reading and your attention will flicker away, you’ll think about I don’t know maybe you want to watch Jane the Virgin on Netflix or maybe it’s time to have a Peanut Butter Sandwich or Maybe it’s time for a cup of coffee.

It’s like - all these subsystems in you that would like something pop up and try to take control of your perceptions and your actions non-stop.” We’re also distracted by “productive” tasks. I’m here to read this research paper, but maybe I should clean my room instead or reply to my accountant or send out that invoice. More things you could or should introduces more uncertainty, and this makes you anxious. Now, by anxiety I don’t mean something like a panic or an anxiety disorder.

For this video we’ll think of anxiety as a sliding scale: It could be a very small worry that you’ll pick something crappy off the menu, then worrying about picking the right refrigerator to buy would be a little more anxiety and a life or death choice would make you far more anxious.

The Green Goblin is holding up Spiderman’s girlfriend and a cable car full of innocent people. He gives Spiderman a time limit of 5 minutes to pick who should fall to their death. Faced with such a big decision, Spiderman must be very anxious and his anterior cingulate cortex should be going wild as this is a part of the brain linked to decision making. The anterior cingulate cortex, the ACC is activated when people are uncertain. And, this part of the brain is known to generate anxiety.

In fact, as this paper says, “…anterior cingular cortex hyperactivity may related to the experience of symptoms common to all anxiety disorders.” So, this same part of the brain that deals with decision making also generates anxiety. Psychologist Dr. Barry Schwartz published a book titled the Paradox of Choice. In it he talks about how yes having some choice makes us happier, but having too much choice makes us feel worse.” “Work.

We are blessed with the technology that enables us to work every minute of every day, from any place on the planet. So what this means is that we have to make a decision again and again and again about whether we should or shouldn’t be working.

We can go to watch our kid play soccer and we have our cell phone on one hip and our laptop presumably on our laps and even if they’re all shut off, we are also asking ourselves should I answer this cell phone call, should I respond to this email should I draft this letter. So everywhere we look, big things, small things, material things and lifestyle things, life is a matter of choice.”

In the year 2000, psychologists Sheena Iyengar and Mark Lepper published a study about jams. On one day at a local food market, they set up a display table with 24 different kinds of jams. On another day, they set up a table with only 6 types of jams. What effect did this have on the sales? When shown 6 jams, 30 percent of the people actually made a purchase. With 24 jams, only 3 percent made a purchase. The table with many more choices drove 10 times less sales.

People become paralyzed by too much choice. Barry Schwartz says people often fear regretting their decisions. How do you completely avoid regretting a decision? You don’t make one. Schwartz has a graph showing how the number of choices affects how we feel. We don’t like having no choices. So the moment you start to increase the choices, we’re quite happy about that.

But as you continue to increase the choices, our happiness about the situation decreases until we’re actually more unhappy than we were with far less choices. I don’t know about you, but picking a movie on Netflix is kind of stressful for me. So what if we think of all these incomplete things buzzing in our heads as choices to make?

These  unanswered emails, scattered obligations as well as personal and professional goals to pursue - Is it a stretch to think that these choices of things to do are generating some uncertainty, anxiety and general discontent?

First, maybe you’ve heard of Decision Fatigue. Many experiments have found that making several difficult choices requires effort and depletes you mentally and physically. This means you make worse and more impulsive decisions as the day goes by, but it also means it’s harder to exercise willpower and resist temptations.

This is why after making a ton of choices at the grocery store, you’re presented with candy at the checkout. Another consequence of too many choices of things to do is it makes it hard to focus when you need to. Let’s say your brain is focused on a goal - writing a script for a youtube video.

It’s harder and taking longer than you though. The orbitofrontal cortex, the OFC in your brain makes you feel that the effort isn’t worth the reward. You start to remember your other could do or should do things. Maybe a different goal would have a bigger payoff for less effort. Your ACC makes you feel uncertain that writing this script is the best goal to pursue. You feel a little anxious.

The ACC and OFC notify the noradrenaline system of your lack of certainty. This releases Noradrenaline. Noradrenaline is another component in making you anxious. Noradrenaline is also the hormone that kickstarts the fight or flight response. The effect of this is that weak signals unrelated to your current goal are enhanced. Simply put, you become distracted because noradrenaline is making other things more interesting. Let’s get to part 1 of the solution: Constraints.

Peterson and colleagues explain in their paper that as shown by recent studies, more religious people have less activation in the ACC and therefore experience less uncertainty in their lives. The reason for this reduced uncertainty is that “Highly religious individuals are more likely to have a clear explanatory framework that constrains their interpretation of the world.” Religious and non-religious people have values and goals for the same reason - to constrain our behaviors.

If one of your values is faithfulness, then you don’t have to contemplate the choice of whether to go to the bar for a hookup. If you have a serious goal to make a living as a graphic designer within two years, then you’ve got a big constraint. Sure you’re less free do a year long trip around the world, but you’ll be more certain that it’s worth it to spend your time reading graphic design books or taking courses.

Dr. Barry Schwartz says one of the most reliable indicators of happiness is having good relationships. “The single most important determinant of happiness is our network of friends, family, loved ones. Close relations don’t liberate us, they limit us.

They constrain us. The more connected you are to your town and to the people in the town, the more you’re gonna limit your own possibilities. If you are close to your family, you’re gonna look for a job within a 100 miles of where your family lives. You’re not going to look for a job anywhere on the planet.

When you are constrained, all of a sudden you are not faced with an infinite number of options, you’re faced with a smaller number of options.” You can think of constraints as a choice made in advance.

For example with the popular trend Minimalism, the choice made in advance is “I won’t buy something if it’s unnecessary.” This makes shopping a lot easier. Steve Jobs popularized the constraint of wearing the same outfit. He made a choice in advance and then had one less choice to make every day.

The second concept in the solution is understanding satisfaction. In my last video, we talked about the biological point of the experience of “satisfaction.” For example why should it feel good for us to hit the bullseye with an arrow or get satisfaction from a job well done? These actions don’t necessarily help with our survival.

Well, the idea I proposed was that that pleasurable feeling of satisfaction acts as a biological signal that you completed something correctly. If you never got this feeling, how would you know when to stop doing something? In fact, this seems to be one of the problems with OCD.

For people with OCD,  something will propel them to feel really anxious and feel that they need to for example to wash their hands. But washing their hands once doesn’t give them satisfaction. They have to repeat the behavior over and over again until it feels right - until they’re satisfied.

In fact, the people with OCD know that their behavior is irrational but it’s like an itch - just because you know in your head that you shouldn’t scratch it doesn’t make it any less itchy. The interesting thing about satisfaction is we often think of it in terms of something specific being introduced to the body.

For example various hormones like ghrelin, leptin, and insulin affect your hunger and you satisfy the hunger with food. Salt deficiency generates a salt craving that you satisfy by eating salt. So here’s what’s interesting about anxieties leading to behavioral cravings in OCD. As explained in a paper by Woody and Szechtman, “…engagement in behavior, in and of itself, is the condition that stimulates [satiation].”

They say that the brainstem is what generates crucial feedback that the people experience as a feeling that they did enough action and this satisfies them to where they stop feeling anxious. Also, they propose this feeling is generated through the serotonin system.

You’ve probably heard about the neurotransmitter serotonin being associated with happiness. In a study looking at healthy people not taking medication, they found that people with higher serotonin synthesis in the brain reported higher levels of happiness. And you may alredy know that antidepressants are supposed to raise serotonin levels.

Woody and Szechtman say “…there is evidence that serotonin may act as a satiety like terminator signal.” They are proposing that serotonin is the signal that makes OCD people feel satisfied and stop feeling anxious.

They say “…a serotonergic feedback signal is also consistent with an expected relief-of-anxiety effect.” Indeed, research has found serotonin itself reduces anxiety. In fact, serotonin reuptake inhibitors which increase serotonin in the brain provide beneficial effects for people with OCD.

So to apply these concept to ourselves: For some people it might be a little, for others it might be alot, but we have this background anxious feeling generated by the various goals, obligations, and to-do’s floating in our head. So in order to get satisfaction and reduce that feeling of anxiety, we actually need to physically do some action related to those unfinished tasks.

One of the points from the OCD research is that once that anxious feeling starts, they can’t think it away with logic or rationale. Something must be done. Thinking is not a solution. They know in their head it doesn’t make sense but they have to wash their hands 25 times to make the anxiety go away.

This sounds similar to how when I’m procrastinating on something, even if I think to my “I’ll just watch one episode and then get started,” that small anxious feeling will continue to nag you while you’re watching your show. You have to do some action on the thing or it won’t go away. “…Well duh.”

This might sound really obvious, clearly we would feel better if our taxes were done, if all our emails were replied to and so on. Heres where comes the third concept in this solution. What does the brain consider sufficient action?

Well, Social Psychologist Roy Baumeister and E.J. Masicampo published a paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology discussing the mental difficulties caused by unfinished goals. They found “unfinished goals caused intrusive thoughts during an unrelated reading task…” Unfinished things distract people while they are trying to focus on other things.

But here’s the good news: they found that “allowing participants to formulate specific plans for their unfulfilled goals eliminated the various activation and interference effects.” The simple act of making a plan - of physically putting pen to paper and writing down when and where they will actually do the thing, seems to be satisfying enough to remove that nagging anxiety surrounding the unfinished task.

Baumeister specifically says this plan making resolves “…the uncertainty of the unfinished task…” This is such a simple concept but it has pretty powerful implications for people like me who don’t have the habit of writing all their plans down. But does this mean we have to list out every single step for all the things we need to and want to do?

Well, No. In Baumeister’s model, all you need to do is write down the next step in the process. That is enough get that nagging unfinished task off your back - it’s sufficient enough action to satisfy the brain and make you less anxious.

Personally, I’ve always been a disorganized person who figured everything would get done whether I was organized or not. I thought it was better to just keep the things that I needed to do in my head and get on with my day. However, understanding specifically the consequences of this approach finally got me to be significantly more organized and actually more relaxed.

I’ll make another short video addressing how to make this information more specifically actionable. How to organize yourself to reduce uncertainty and your mental burden, and hopefully incorporate more flow into your work day. I’ll also explain why we should think of ourselves as a 6 foot tall mound of ants.

But for now, let’s recap this video:  Thanks to technology and the internet, the possibilities of things we can do and should be doing are only going to increase. With that means more and more choices and more uncertainty which can fatigue us mentally. One of the benefits of values, goals, and even relationships is that they reduce uncertainty.

Rather than leaving all our options open in an aim to have our cake and eat it too, introducing the right constraints can make us calmer, more satisfied and more focused. Constraints could be goals that narrow your focus to activities that at least don’t interfere with the goals.

They could be a morning routine that means you don’t have to think about what to do each morning.  It could be a lifestyle that says you will choose not to buy things you don’t need. Or, it could be an organization method that narrows down the things you can do in one day.