10 Ways Your Brain Reacts to Uncertain Times

Uncertain times can trigger a myriad of responses in our brains. From heightened alertness to increased creativity, discover the ten fascinating ways your brain adapts and reacts when faced with the unknown.

Volatility

These four words (shorthanded to “VUCA”) describe the type of high-stress, high-demand scenarios that can rapidly degrade one of our most powerful and influential brain systems: our attention.

• The more you know about how it works, the more able you will be to navigate VUCA events.

Attention wanders

Half of the time, we’re mind wandering

• Our attention gets hijacked by mental content tied to stress, threat, and poor mood
• When this happens, we are more error-prone, our perception is dulled, and our mood sours
• This pandemic has created the perfect circumstances for our attention to get easily, and constantly, hijacked

Attention is essential for connection

We direct the flashlight of our attention to our own sensations, thoughts, feelings, and memories, and to the external environment, but we also direct it toward other people to communicate and connect.

• COVID is depriving us of the essential ways in which we connect.

Attention can be a bad boss

Stress can be especially taxing on our attention, working our attention overtime and degrading it.

• Sometimes your attention may direct you to do something that is not in your best interest, and that can lead you to make a mistake.

Attention is vulnerable to stress, threat, and poor mood

COVID is producing circumstances that accelerate the rate at which attention is degraded as it jacks up attention’s kryptonite

• During this protracted pandemic, we’re all experiencing a heightened sense of threat, new and constant stressors, anxious feelings, and more

Your attention is trainable

Practice mindfulness meditation to protect attention under VUCA conditions

• Mindfulness practice helps restore attention so you can regulate your emotions and relate to them differently by allowing them to arise and then pass away
• The practice trains us to keep our attention in the present moment and increases our ability to maintain an awareness of what’s happening in the mind so we aren’t as easily hijacked or fooled into believing that our thoughts are reality

Your attention is limited-and so is your working memory

Working memory is an essential partner to attention: It’s what allows you to do something with the information you focus on.

• Anything you “write” on your mental whiteboard will start disappearing within a few seconds. If you want to keep it there longer, you have to keep focusing on it.

Your attention is linked to your emotions

When we recall a happy memory or something sad or upsetting, we use our attention and working memory to do so.

• And it goes in the other direction, as well-you need attentional bandwidth to regulate emotions as they come along.

Amishi Jha

Principal investigator, associate professor of psychology, and director of contemplative neuroscience at the Mindfulness Research & Practice Initiative at the University of Miami

Your attention creates your reality

The reason we have “attention” is to solve one of the brain’s big problems: There is far more information in our environment (and in our own minds!) than the brain can fully process

• Without a way to filter, the relentless sensory input would leave us overloaded, incapable of functioning effectively
• Your attention is powerful – it determines the moment-to-moment experience of your life

Your attention can time-travel

We have the capacity to fast-forward our attention into the future, and to rewind back into the past

• Under VUCA conditions, this capacity gets harder to control and we end up-without much choice or agency-trapped in the past and future
• This ends up being unhelpful and unproductive planning

Your attention is easily fooled

Sometimes a simulation can be so convincing and transportive that it leads your attention system to recalibrate many brain networks as though it’s really happening

• During VUCA circumstances, our attention is more prone to being wholly transported into a simulated doomsday of our mind’s own making

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