10 Ways Your Brain Reacts to Uncertain Times

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.

Attention wanders

Half of the time, we’re mind wandering

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.

Attention can be a bad boss

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

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

Your attention is trainable

Practice mindfulness meditation to protect attention under VUCA conditions

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.

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.

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

Your attention can time-travel

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

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

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