Struggling with uncertainty? Here’s how to deal

Posted on 30 December, 2020

This year has tested our mental health like no other.

Of course, there’s the ever-present stress of a global pandemic. Then there are the fires. The Beirut explosion. Hail. Floods. Cyclones. Oil leaks. Riots. Aeroplane crashes. Protests. The financial crisis. Trump.

It’s a lot.

None of us has escaped unscathed. Each of us falls somewhere on the spectrum of how it has affected our lives—from stress and overwhelm to losing businesses, homes or jobs.

The one thing that seems to be shared is an immense sense of uncertainty.

When can we travel again?

When will life feel normal again?

Will we be forced into lockdown again?

“I think that we’re always living with uncertainty,” says Cath Hutchinson, a psychologist at Fisher, Evans & Associates. “But what COVID has done is highlighted and made more visible, and more visceral, the sense of uncertainty.”

“We distract from the emotion of uncertainty because we’re able to get out and about and do things and hang out with people, and when we go into a COVID situation and there’s a limit to our liberty, we become more aware of the emotions of uncertainty.”

I can certainly relate. Having been through early lockdown in the UK, forced to return home and forego a honeymoon and year of travel, and having lost the vast majority of my work, I consider myself somewhere on the low to middle range of the aforementioned scale. And yet, my mental health has suffered enormously.

In amongst the sourdough baking, puzzle-solving, and home workouts, COVID forced us to look within: to painfully revisit and examine the parts of our feelings and thoughts that we’d pushed to the back of our mental filing cabinet.

Wounds that we’d thought had healed over felt cracked wide open, and low-level chronic stress and anxiety, once a quiet whisper, reverberated with an ear-splitting peal.

This is the trouble with uncertainty: it casts a dark and doubtful lens over what once felt like a bright future.

“There’s been anxiety, depression, and distress,” says Cath. “Which have been exacerbated by COVID as opposed to created by it.”

“These things can lay dormant or can be moderate, but when you throw in having to go into isolation or having to reduce social contact, then they can rise up because the regular coping mechanisms are not available.”

If you’re one of the many Australians who lost their job or faced uncertainty around your employment, you’re surely familiar with the blow that it can have on your confidence.

“People are definitely struggling with a lack of confidence. Work gives us a connection, and with connection comes feedback, and then confidence comes from that.”

“Too much time without feedback for people who—and this is a very large percentage of the population—have a problem with hypercriticism, they go into negative self-appraisal.”

But what if—bear with me here—what if somewhere in the crisis was a silver lining; an opportunity to equip ourselves with the tools to cope with uncertainty not only now, but into the future?

“The Chinese symbol for crisis means danger and opportunity; so in every danger, you have an opportunity to create something different,” says Cath.

“In the first world, we have a tendency to want to go back to restoring things to the way that they were to make ourselves feel more comfortable, but that’s not really the answer. The answer is to ask yourself, ‘how can I evolve from this?’, ‘How can I create a better life for myself?’ rather than living in insecurity or fear or avoidance.”

“Maybe the silver lining of COVID is to be more present with our emotions.”

Unsurprisingly, Cath says she’s seen a swell of issues as a result of COVID, from infidelity and relationship uncertainty to job loss and even mental health emergencies.

“A lot of the time when I’m consulting with people I say, ‘what have you done historically to manage your feelings?’ and they say, ‘Well I used to do A, B, and C.’ and I say ‘are you doing A, B, and C?’ and they say no. So my biggest tip is to do what used to work.”

“We have strategies, but when the going gets tough, we can give up. If you don’t have what used to work, see a psychologist and get some strategies or talk to a friend to get some strategies. But do something.”

The fact that we’re not alone in our suffering is both a relief and a burden: we’ve reached an all-time empathy high, but at the same time, are acutely aware that others have it far worse than we do.

It’s left many people feeling as though their situation isn’t ‘bad enough’ to warrant seeking help, but Cath says that this couldn’t be further from the truth.

“We could talk about that in the context of a personal trainer: I don’t wait until I’m 180 kilos to see a personal trainer. I see a personal trainer because I think ‘I want to be fitter’.”

“This is the debunking that we need to do around psychology: it is a fitness. A mental, emotional, psychological fitness.”

Cath says that when people visit her in a dishevelled state, it takes a lot more work to get them back functioning, as opposed to if they come in when they are feeling ok, but perhaps noticing some issues that are beginning to surface.

“This is where COVID has given us a couple of ideas, an opportunity to see what might be in need of addressing in our emotional, psychological, and mental wellbeing that we can address before it gets to a crisis stage.”

Now is the perfect time to download that meditation app, crack open your journal, call that supportive friend, and take action to improve your mental health.

The stigma around psychologists is outdated and unwarranted. As someone who has repeatedly sought the help of psychologists, I can say, hand over heart, that it’s made an overwhelmingly positive difference to my life. Pick up the phone, make the call, and change your life for the better.