I have a problem that is not unique to me. I have this problem as a startup founder, an individual living through a pandemic, and a human being. The problem is that I don’t know what is going to happen in the future. 

Anxiety About Uncertainty

Obviously, there is no way of knowing the future, so living with this fact—and living with it effectively—is pretty important. I’ve found that uncertainty, and its ensuing anxiety, can throw you into a downward spiral of paralyzing negativity. However, there are ways to halt this downward spiral, and instead move in a positive upward trajectory. I’ve experienced this anxiety and have overcome it a few times in the past. I feel it’s time to define this phenomena of uncertainty creating anxiety, and how to overcome it, so that we can recall it when we need it most. 

Self Deception

One of my favorite books is called Leadership and Self Deception. I read this book as part of an executive training session at a previous company. The book explains how leaders oftentimes deceive themselves in order to justify their actions and put themselves in a “box” (the box being an impediment in our ability to overcome self deception, negativity, and inaction in our personal and professional pursuits) how to recognize this, and how to get out of the “box.” The key lessons from the book are  applicable to my story. 

Imagine you are at your job and for some reason you’re just “not feeling it” that day. You’ve been working on something for a while and the next few weeks look like a really steep climb and you’re not sure if all this effort will pay off. Maybe you would rather be with your friends or family but you know you need to be at work. So, you put off doing some work that you know you really should do because of these feelings. 

This act of procrastination is common. We’ve discussed in previous blog posts that procrastination is  actually caused by a survival mechanism, the fight or flight response, where your mind tries to keep you from getting hurt by either fleeing or fighting a potential threat. The trouble with avoidance or procrastination (flight instead of fight) is that it feeds a vicious cycle. The more you don’t actually do the thing you think you should, the worse you feel, which ironically causes you to put off your responsibilities further, and the vicious cycle continues. 

The cause of this cycle is cognitive dissonance. This is the need for our actions and feelings to match in both directions. We smile when we are happy, and we become happy when we smile. The action and the feelings must match, it’s how our brains work. The same is true with procrastination.

Do what you think is right

So how do we stop this vicious cycle? The only thing we have control over is our action (or lack of action) but not what will happen as a result. Leadership and Self Deception had some very wise advice, “Do what you think is right.” It seems so simple—and it is—but it requires that we ignore our emotions for a short period of time. We must ignore the negative feelings that keep us from doing the thing we know we should do and instead, take action and do them. Knowing intellectually that this is the way out of the vicious cycle is helpful.

I have experienced this vicious cycle firsthand. I struggled with this situation for a couple of weeks until I remembered this advice and I did what I felt was the right thing to do, which was to do the work anyway, and magically all the negative feelings disappeared. You’ve probably already experienced this yourself during a period when you avoided something but you managed to just get started, and realized it wasn’t so bad once you got started.

Principles

So I want to codify this principle, self-evident natural law, “If you do what you think is right, you will feel good, and it will become easier to take action.”

This comes with a caveat. What is right may be very different for everyone and lately it has been very confusing with all the blatant lies and conflicting advice related to the pandemic that are seen in US politics. I am reminded of Stephen Covey’s book (7 Habits of Highly Effective People) that choosing your center/core to be principle centered can help guide in these confusing times. Principles don’t change, they are self-evident natural laws with long-term consequences. We can rely on them when we don’t know what to believe or what to do. With this great principle/advice to keep in mind, we have another tool in how to deal with uncertainty. The next time anxiety about uncertainty takes hold, hopefully we will use principles to guide us in doing what we think is right, and break the vicious cycle of procrastination.