介绍:
面对不确定的事情时，人们容易烦恼，容易纠结。无论是回想过去，还是预测未来，过度的胡思乱想都容易让人疲劳，然而担忧却是人类的天性。后疫情时代，一切仍然充满不确定性，我们该如何应对这种不确定性？一起来听今天的讲解。
英文原文
How to function in times of uncertainty
在遭遇不确定性时，我们该如何自处
By Kate Morgan
This has been a year marred by deep and all-encompassing uncertainty. The brain, after all, is designed to react negatively to uncertainty.
这一年，千疮百孔，因为浓重的不确定性无处不在。毕竟，我们的大脑生来就会对不确定的事情产生消极反应。
“We’re wired to worry,” says Margaret Cochran, a psychotherapist based in San Jose, California. “It’s a survival mechanism.”
“我们天生就容易烦恼。”加州圣何塞的心理治疗师玛格丽特·科克伦说道，“这是一种生存机制。”
When you begin to worry, says Ryan Jane Jacoby, a staff psychologist at Harvard Medical School, you can fall into a rabbit hole of perseverative thinking, mulling the negatives over and over in your mind.
就职于哈佛医学院的心理学家瑞恩•简•雅各比表示，当你开始烦恼的时候，就会陷入执念的深渊，在脑海里各种消极的想法中反复纠结。
“You’re trying to problem solve in the past, or trying to predict what’s going to happen in the future,” she says. “It’s not that either of those are inherently bad, but the mental load of that worry and rumination can get exhausting.”
她说：“你想要解决过去的问题，或想要预测未来会发生什么。这两者固然都不是坏事，可是忧虑和胡思乱想带来的精神负担会让人精疲力竭。”
Instead, Jacoby says, those concerns should get deferred.
人们应该做的，是把这些顾虑推迟，雅各比说道。
“Use worry postponement: tell yourself, ‘I can’t make this decision now, I’ll think about it in X-number of weeks’, and commit to tolerating the uncertainty until then.”
“使用延缓焦虑法：告诉自己，‘我先不做决定，在接下来的几个礼拜中，我再考虑考虑。’在做出最终决定前，尽量接受这种不确定性。”
The best way to handle uncertainty is to try to get comfortable with it. Consider it exposure therapy: the more you’re able to “sit with it, rather than trying to fix it”, says Jacoby, “the more you learn you can handle it”.
处理不确定性最好的方法，就是去适应它。把这当作暴露疗法，就像雅各比所说，你越能“与它和平共处，而不总试图纠正它，你就越容易学会接受它”。
And you do have to handle it – we all do – because things don’t seem to be getting any less ambiguous, anytime soon. “The only certainty in the universe is change,” says Cochran. “To fight it is unproductive and destructive. If there’s a big windstorm, trees that bend and flex survive. The trees that don’t bend crack and fall down and die. Human beings are the same.”
不仅是你，我们所有人都得与不确定性和解，因为在短期内，事情似乎并不会变得更加明确。“世界上唯一不变的就是变化本身。”科克伦说道，“一味地抗争是徒劳的，甚至会带来毁灭。如果一场巨大的风暴来临，柔顺弯曲的树木会存活下来，而那些不弯曲的树则会开裂、倒下直至死去。人类同理。”
