Yesterday I introduced the idea of Uncertainty Plus — when uncertainty creates anxiety for me it’s because I’ve added a negative prediction to it. Another way to say this is that I’m entertaining a negative “what if” scenario:
“I don’t know what will happen, and what if it’s bad?”
What ifs are future-minded, not present-minded, obviously. But they also seem to be exclusively negative. It seems that if I’m going to entertain “what if” type scenarios, why the bias for the negative?
At least consider all what-ifs, the bad and the good, right?
It reminds me of people I’ve met who say “everything in moderation.” Sounds pretty reasonable, right? The problem is they don’t mean everything in moderation. They seem to only mean things they want to justify like eating chocolate cake and drinking alcohol. But moderation for them doesn’t include things they don’t want to do like eating raw vegetables or exercising.
I have the same kind of bias with my What Ifs. So what if I consciously entertained a dream “what if” scenario for every nightmare scenario I created?
“What if I don’t make any sales this month? And what if I make 50?”
“What if I never fall in love again? And what if I bump into Nicole Kidman on the street and it’s love at first sight for both of us?”
Logically, I see that the positive predictions are no more unrealistic than the negative ones. Yet emotionally, the negative ones feel much more realistic.
I’ll play with this idea today and see what I experience.
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