Part 3: Our brain's number one job is to predict the future

Feeling anxious from constant change? Here’s the third installment of my series on coping with uncertainty.

This excerpt is from my book, The Work Happiness Method:

‍Our brain’s job is to predict the future and eliminate uncertainty.

It doesn’t feel natural to be present and to hold space for the unknown. That’s because our brain is obsessed with predicting the future. Our brain’s number one job is to guess what’s next so we can stay alive. This is energetically taxing. It’s why too much uncertainty can lead to emotional exhaustion. A little anxiety is not bad, nor is it a disorder. In fact, it can keep us from danger and making reckless choices. But too much anxiety, the kind that won’t go away, can keep us stuck and avoiding opportunities that might be worth exploring. As humans, when facing the unknown we reference our past experiences—that’s how our brain makes predictions. Try a quick experiment here to witness your brain at work. Glance at the following text and say aloud what you see:

Th1s b0ok iz gr8t!
1 wsih iy laernd tih$ s00n3r
1tz aLr3@dy h3Lp1ng!

What are really in the lines above are black-and-white shapes, a combination of letters, punctuation marks, and numbers. Technically, there is not one real word written there, and yet your brain probably strung together three sentences. You may have read:

This book is great!
I wish I learned this sooner
It’s already helping!

Your brain substituted letters for numbers and shapes and even some letters for other letters to stitch together meaning where there was none.

Our brain’s main job is to quickly make sense of the ever-changing environment and then orchestrate responses to aid in our survival. We do this automatically so that we know whether to explore further or avoid a situation or person altogether. However, this tendency to jump to assessing, judging, and labeling a situation, person, or collection of letters and numbers may lead us down an incorrect path altogether. For example, a client’s boss was acting irritably and yelling constantly. My client was convinced that she’d done something wrong and that it was costing her a promotion. She started to explore working in other departments. It turned out that her boss’s wife had been diagnosed with breast cancer, so his behavior had nothing to do with my client. She was relieved and stayed.

What we see is almost always a matter of perspective and not an objective reality. ‍