Facing an unknown future is on all our minds. I’m reminded of the adage: “Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t.” Recently, awaiting medical results for someone I love, I was swamped by feelings of uncertainty and apprehension—the devil I didn’t know. Waiting and wondering felt more charged than learning the results, good or not so good. (Thank goodness the outcome was positive!) Once I had the facts, I trusted my warrior self would step forward and cope with whatever the future held. Perhaps this resonates with you? My experience inspired this blog to enlarge our understanding of uncertainty and offer some tools to ease distress.

Uncertainty. Why does this word make us shudder? One reason is that we are living in a time of accelerated and radical change. When our personal and communal lives feel at risk, when uncertainty is a frequent visitor, anxiety is likely to follow. As Dr. Mazen Kheirbek, an associate professor in UC San Francisco’s Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, tells us, “Uncertainty is not knowing what is going to happen.”[i] The combination of uncertainty and threat generates anxiety.

Evolution has wired us to adapt to uncertainty but what in our brains activates the sense of being uncertain? Researchers at the University of Cambridge in the UK have been investigating this in humans and developed tests that demonstrated that the neuromodulator noradrenaline is the key chemical that underpins behavioral and computational responses to uncertainty. Their research focused on a small area in the brain stem, the locus coeruleus, that regulates noradrenaline and enhances sensory learning.[ii]  Another set of researchers at University College London created human experiments that found two other neuromodulators, acetylcholine and dopamine, which affect uncertainty.[iii] Understanding of how these neurotransmitters work is evolving.

Our brains are agile and can sometimes assess an uncertain situation by remembering and comparing it to a past experience—Oh, when my partner goes quiet like this, I know they are about to explode; I’d better change the subject—but for other situations we can’t rely on past experience. They require quick thinking and a new approach to uncertainty. Understanding how our brains adapt to volatile and changing situations will be ever more important as food and water scarcity, climate disasters, wars, and migrating populations challenge us at an unprecedented pace.

When we feel uncertain, our brains are trying to figure out how to balance risk and loss. Our capacity to decide is hindered by doubt, anxiety, and avoidance of a perceived threat. Anyone who has waited for medical results for themselves or loved ones might feel, as I did, that when we know what we are facing, even when it’s difficult news, we can make a plan and take action. We are no longer holding our breath.

According to Dr. Aoiefe O’ Donovan, an associate professor of psychiatry at the UCSF Weill Institute for Neurosciences who studies the ways psychological stress can lead to mental disorders like post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD): “Uncertainty means ambiguity, which means that we have to expend effort in trying to predict what will happen in addition to preparing to deal with all of the different outcomes.”[iv] The stress of uncertainty, especially when prolonged, is among the most insidious stressors we experience as human beings, said O’Donovan. But, when faced with these feelings, it can help us to recognize that gnawing uncertainty is the amplification of a cognitive mechanism that’s essential to our survival.

At her Life Events Lab at the University of California, Riverside, Dr. Kate Sweeny focuses her research on “high stakes waiting.” “[Psychologists] don’t know that much about waiting and uncertainty,” according to Sweeny. In 2019, her lab looked into whether engaging in “flow,” a state of complete immersion in one activity, helped people during anxiety-provoking periods. They found that engaging in “flow” boosts a person’s sense of well-being and makes the waiting period easier.[v]

To answer questions about how we function, science researchers probe the structure and mechanisms of our brains. Spiritual traditions address the nature of being from a different perspective. Their inquiry is not centered on neuroscience or molecular biology but on how to live a full and joyous life that includes difficult or unpleasant experiences. These traditions help us recognize that uncertainty can have a positive side. Uncertainty can be an aid to curiosity, creativity, and inner peace. When we are overwhelmed with feelings of uncertainty and dread as we face an unpredictable future, we can expand our perspective and consider reframing our belief: what we habitually regard as a distressing state can be a benevolent friend.

In the Buddhist practices, uncertainty is a certainty and considered a wise teacher.[vi] The wisdom of uncertainty is that it teaches us that the nature of reality is impermanence; all things arise and disappear. All things are transient. Flux and change animate the universe and are not under our control. No matter how careful we are crossing a street, we cannot control the maniac driver who sweeps around the corner and hits us. No matter how much we exercise or eat broccoli, we cannot control the time or manner of our death. These are uncomfortable truths. Most of us have not been schooled in trusting the unknown and surrendering to life as it presents itself in the moment. This is the challenge of “calm abiding” as we meet uncertainty.

The benefits of yoga, breathing exercises, and meditation to settle a jittery nervous system are well known. From a place of stillness, we become aware of a larger presence within us that observes life as it ebbs and flows without constricting into fear. We simply observe and note this is the way life is—unpredictable.

A specific Buddhist practice that helps ground us during times of uncertainty is Metta. Considered a concentration meditation, it is also called a loving-kindness practice. When we focus on a repetition of phrases, or a mantra, or the sensations of breathing, the frontal part of our brain responsible for attention is activated and the areas responsible for excitatory emotional response stop overfiring. The body relaxes. The Greater Good Center, Science-based Practices for a Meaningful Life at the University of California, Berkeley has a seven-minute Loving-Kindness-Meditation that can get you started.

Can you think of a time when uncertainty sparked a sense of aliveness and adventure in you? Or perhaps an insight arose during a period of waiting and not knowing? Uncertainty begs for a playful attitude toward life, invites the inner child to step forward without fear of success or failure. Uncertainty calls on us to do something that may be difficult but rewarding: to embrace unpredictability as a constant companion

[i] Reynolds, Brandon R., “There’s a Lot of Uncertainty Right Now — This is What Science Says That Does to Our Minds, Bodies,” UCSF News, November 1, 2020.

[ii] Lawson, Rebecca P., et al., “The Computational, Pharmacological, and Physiological Determinants of Sensory Learning under Uncertainty,” Current Biology, January 11, 2021.

[iii] Marshall, Louise, et al., “Pharmacological Fingerprints of Contextual Uncertainty,” PLOS Biology, November 15, 2016.

[iv] Reynolds, Brandon R. Ibid.

[v] Rankin, K., Walsh, L., and Sweeny, K., “A Better Distraction: Exploring the Benefits of Flow During Uncertain Waiting Periods,” Emotion, Vol 19, No. 5, 2019.

[vi] Rinpoche, Anam Thubten, “The Wisdom of Uncertainty,” Buddhist Door, April 17, 2020.

This post appeared in a slightly different form on Dale’s blog on Psychology Today. You can find all of Dale’s blog posts for Psychology Today at 

If you found this post interesting, you may also want to read “What Ancient Traditions Can Teach about Coping with Change,” “Can Mindfulness Bring About Real Change?” and “Waiting: a Source of Anxiety or Opportunity for Discovery?”

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What is one of the first stories we learn as children of Western culture? The cautionary tale of Adam and Eve’s banishment from Eden, a story that sets us fretting, evoking fears of abandonment and loneliness, worries about identity and belonging. So we get our first taste of what happens when we lose our sense of home.

When we speak about home, we usually mean a physical place, a dwelling, a place of shelter or refuge. But home also has a symbolic meaning: we are at home in a particular landscape: forest or mountains, desert or beach. We are at home in a nation, on a continent, among others who share our values, our language, a cultural context. Our bodies are also our homes, spirit and soul, mind and heart. To be at home in one’s body is to feel one’s authentic and whole self, our flesh and blood animated with the invisible aspects of Being.

For the sin of seeking knowledge, the God of the Old Testament pointed His finger at Adam and Eve and expelled them from paradise to wander the earth in exile. Many great artists have envisioned on canvas the ravaged faces of the mournful couple. When we stand in front of these paintings, we are struck with a primal feeling of sorrow, the ping of our own fear of desertion and displacement from home.

Famine, climate change, natural disasters, political violence, and governmental upheaval uproot thousands from their homes and homelands and force multi-generational populations to undertake arduously dangerous journeys to find a new home. The Jungian analyst John Hill tells us that the loss of home is a quest for identity. As he writes in At Home in the World: Sounds and Symmetries of  Belonging, “As home is intrinsically connected to a sense of self, its loss may have devastating effects on people’s lives.”

My friend Myron Eshowsky, M.S., an expert in working with refugee and marginalized populations, most recently Syrian refugees in Jordan, suggests that “historical trauma is remembered in the land.” What is missing from the discussion of treatment for communal and personal trauma is an understanding that as “citizens of the earth,” we are extensions of the landscape we call home. Eshowsky writes, “When a sense of home is upset . . . individuals and communities may exhibit what may be commonly understood as psychological trauma, but the root of their experience—and healing—may call for the inclusion of place and all it can hold.”

In a paper titled “Place, Historical Trauma, and Indigenous Wisdom,” Eshowsky tells the story of a healing ritual on the site of the now-demolished building in Milwaukee where years earlier serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer committed macabre acts of dismemberment and murder. “The sense of death at the site was overwhelming,” he writes. The lot was barren and devoid of living plants. In a communal prayer accompanied by a priest, the family of victims and neighborhood people joined with tears and prayers in shared grief. The blessings included a wish for the land to return to life. A year later, flowers and grass were poking up through the rubble.

The lucky among us who have been not compelled to flee and resettle are faced with a different kind of loss of home. The landscapes we have grown accustomed to, the daily landmarks that were once as familiar as our own hands, have disappeared. The grocer on the corner has gone out of business, as has our favorite pizza parlor, barbershop, and drug store. Our toddler’s daycare center has shut its doors. Where raging fires have consumed the earth, entire towns have vanished, the woods we once hiked turned to ash. Floods and hurricanes have remade our beaches; new apartment complexes are springing up to replace old neighborhoods of duplexes and one-family homes.

Is it any wonder our bodies, our most intimate homes, are reacting to these dramatic and swiftly occurring events? Home is a felt reality as well as a physical reality. Consistency, reliability, attachment to beloved objects and persons are essential aspects of our well-being. When we feel groundless and distressed, our bodies display physiological markers of stress. Currently, we are plagued not only with the COVID virus, but with elevated blood pressure and blood sugar, restless nights, depressed and anxious moods. Our minds struggle to rise clear of a perpetual fog. Like other animals who have experienced a change in habitat, we respond.

Since the pandemic, our homes have become the site of both our public/work/social lives and our private/domestic lives. Paradoxically, while we may be spending more time in our homes, we are less “at home” in the world.

What does it mean to be more at home in the world? How can we create a sense of belonging and identity despite our rapidly changing environment? One way is to enlist our imagination. “Home” is rooted in our core self as memories, dream images, reveries. Home is linked to kinship bonds, to the landscapes of our origins, to collective archetypal patterns that exist at a level of being unaltered by external circumstances. These foundational archetypal patterns are like secret treasures buried within.

French philosopher Gaston Bachelard in his book, The Poetics of Reverie: Childhood, Language, and the Cosmos, argues that reveries carry us back to our childhood. He writes, “childhood remains within us {as}a principle of deep life, of life always in harmony with the possibilities of a new beginning. . . From our point of view, the archetypes are reserves of enthusiasm which help us believe in the world, love the world, create the world.”

We can revisit images of home and well-being through guided meditations. We can imagine ourselves walking along the river path of our ancestors. We can imagine ourselves in the treehouse where we spent time as a youth. We can choose a special tree or rock or sit in a garden and imagine roots growing from our heels into the hot magma at the center of the earth to which we belong. We can embrace the belief that we are never without a home because we carry our home inside us.

This post appeared in a slightly different form on Dale’s blog on Psychology Today. You can find all of Dale’s blog posts for Psychology Today at 

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