July 30, 2026 • 35 mins
Uncertainty is the defining emotion of our 20s. Career paths, relationships, identity, purpose ... so much of this decade is marked by not knowing. Does that have to be as uncomfortable as we think it does? In today’s episode, we unpack the psychology of uncertainty: why our brains fear it, how it triggers anxiety and avoidance, and why trying to “figure it all out” might be doing more harm than good.
We explore:
- The neuroscience behind our discomfort with the unknown
- Why perfectionism is often a mask for our fear of uncertainty
- The cultural myths that make us believe we need a step-by-step life plan
- How to assign meaning to uncertainty and build resilience through it
- Practical strategies to take action even when the future feels unclear
If you've never felt more confused than you do now, and are unsure 'what's next', this episode is for you.
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The Psychology of your 20s is not a substitute for professional mental health help. If you are struggling, distressed or require personalised advice, please reach out to your doctor or a licensed psychologist.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hello everybody, I'm Jemma Spake and welcome back to the
Psychology of Your Twenties, the podcast where we talk through
the biggest changes, moments, and transitions of our twenties and
what they mean for our psychology. This episode is a rerun.
(00:26):
Hello everybody, Welcome back to the show. Welcome back to
the podcast, new listeners, old listeners. Wherever you are in
the world, it is so great to have you here
back for another episode as we of course break down
the Psychology of Your Twenties today. To just jump straight
to the chase, we are talking about perhaps one of
(00:48):
the most defining parts of our twenties, the overwhelming uncertainty
of just being in this decade. If this decade had
one word to describe it, one theme to trump them all,
it would be uncertainty. We are lost in this very
weird haze of not really knowing who we are, not
(01:09):
really knowing what the future holds, what's going to happen
with our jobs, with our friends, with our finances, with
our love lives, And even once you think you have
some part of it figured out, another part of your
life suddenly crumbles and you're kind of just left feeling
as lost as you were before. So I got this
dam from a listener the other day that I wanted
(01:31):
to share, which really inspired me to talk about this
because going back through the archives, I realized we have
never sat down and done a full episode dedicated to
this feeling, despite it being I would say universal. This
is what her DM said, Hi, Gemma. I'm in my
twenties like I'm sure most of your listeners are, so
there must be others who relate to this feeling. My
(01:53):
dilemma is that everyone tells me to just try something
and that it doesn't matter what path I'm taking in
my twenties as long as I'm moving forward. What really
paralyzes me, though, is not knowing whether the path I
choose to take will make me happy or at least
happier than any other path. When I visualize my future,
it just feels like a big, ominous gray cloud, and
(02:15):
I can't help but feel like if I just knew
one part of the story, I could decide once and
for all what direction to take. How do I deal
with my fear of uncertainty? It's the biggest thing holding
me back. I just knew, like instantly upon reading this,
how many of us, and I can include myself in
this group, can relate to that feeling, the feeling that
our futures are not necessarily exciting but actually really scary
(02:40):
and really ominous, and a lot of that fear of
the unknown really fuels indecision, and it fuels not making
decisions that are important to make at this stage in
our life, which of course fuels later dissatisfaction. But I
think when you understand why we feel such uncertainty, to
begin with why it is human nature to turn away
(03:02):
from the unknown, but also how we can shift our
feelings about uncertainty so that it feels less scary. That is,
when this sensation has less control of you, you know
you're no longer fighting a losing battle against it. Uncertainty
can become perhaps your sign that you're going in the
right direction. It can be a sign of growth. It
(03:24):
can be a sign that you are trying new things
and you're expanding as a person. So you welcome it.
You welcome the sensation rather than running away from it.
If that sounds kind of implausible and out of reach,
let me explain how exactly we can get to that point.
If you want to get to that place, we're going
to have to make uncertainty feel like an asset, and
(03:47):
we need to have a better strategy for coping with
this feeling. And so that is exactly what we are
going to talk about today. How we can celebrate rather
than fear the unknown, How we can integrate this feeling
into our life plan, see it as a sign, but
also some of the origins of why we feel this way,
not just in our twenties, but as a species. All
(04:09):
of that and more and so much psychology, So stay
with us. My fear of uncertainty, I think definitely shifted
when I realized that uncertainty is the opposite of boredom
and predictability. If I knew exactly how my life was
going to turn out, if I knew what was around
(04:31):
every single corner, the name of every single friend, I
would meet, my entire resume until the time I retire, Yes,
I would feel less uncertain, But what would the point
of being alive even be? I think the newness of life,
the experiences, the surprises, they are really what makes this
whole thing worthwhile. In a sense, you can't have surprises,
(04:53):
you can't have unexpected joy, you can't learn, you can't
have excitement and anticipation with uncertainty. It is a core
ingredient in so many otherwise really amazing and pleasurable experiences.
And that's what I'm personally learning to appreciate and focus
on when I do have those very natural moments of
(05:14):
being paralyzed by all that I don't know yet. I'm
kind of jumping the gun here. Yes, uncertainty may have
its upsides, we definitely can think about it differently, But
why do we even experience it to begin with and
what makes it so freaking uncomfortable? That's really what we
have to nail down first. Like I said in the beginning,
(05:36):
uncertainty in our twenties are basically two peas in a
pod for a variety of reasons. Firstly, I want you
to give yourself some grace. You are doing everything for
the first time ever. Basically you are basically an adult
toddler or an adult child who yes, can read hopefully
and can write and is hopefully potty trained and all
(05:56):
those things. But you are now experiencing the next level
of situations, the next level of learning, experiences that are
emotionally complex and not straightforward. And as you're experiencing that
You also are without the same safety net that you
relied upon when you were younger, and you're without the
reassurance and the security of teachers and parents and a
(06:20):
school system and a societal system that hopefully isn't going
to let you fall through the cracks. You're on your own.
An uncertainty therefore feels a lot more alarming because you
feel like you're the one who is going to hold
the burden experience, the full burden of any poor decision
or any poor outcome you made. It's all on you
(06:44):
at this point. Another element of this is that because
you are an adult toddler, you haven't had enough life
experience yet to know that things will eventually work out
for you, even if they don't the first time, even
if they are not working out right now. People in
their forties and their fifties and later, they know that
the breakup isn't the end of the world because they've
(07:06):
experienced them and survived before. They know making a major
mistake or losing a friend or losing a job isn't
the end of the world because they have evidence from
previous life experience to tell them that. But you, you
don't have those same data points. You don't have that
same catalog of examples that tell you everything is going
(07:28):
to be okay. Uncertainty for you, and uncertainty for a
lot of us in our twenties doesn't have a conclusion
the way that it has for people who are older. Then,
of course, just to add even more fuel to the fire,
there's the fact that you're kind of living between milestones,
and this decade is definitely one of perpetual transition. You know,
(07:51):
you're no longer a teenager, but you know, you don't
really feel like an adult yet. You're not at that
financial level, you're not settled in a career, you're not
settled in a relatelationship the way that you expect adults
to be. What are you really It's what psychologists call
a liminal space, the in between and liminal emotional spaces
(08:11):
are by nature, by definition disorientating because they don't come
with a clear script, and of course there's no accurate way,
and there's no one who's going to be able to
tell you like, Okay, you're doing you're doing well, you're
doing fine, you are successful. Earlier in life, this is
(08:32):
something I talk to people about all the time. Earlier
in life, your entire days, weeks, months, are set up
in a structure that will tell you if you are
doing well. There are clear benchmarks for life performance, things
like grades, things like passing to the next year level,
(08:53):
things like a whole cohort of people in the same
situation at the same time and the same age as you,
with whom you can mark your progress against, and they're
probably all in the same environment like at school. You
don't have that anymore. You don't have that same framework
to look around and think, Okay, I'm doing okay or
(09:14):
I'm not doing okay, and these are the areas I
can improve on, these are the areas that I'm excelling.
You don't have that anymore. And it might seem really arbitrary,
but those social structures and those environmental structures and that
context actually provides a great deal of and a great
sense of calm and stability. So you have during this
decade almost suddenly lost a lot of what previously allowed
(09:38):
to just stay grounded, security, structure, direction, and of course, finally,
what may feel like a curse but certainly isn't, is
the fact that as a generation we have more choices
than ever we really do, and it's a beautiful thing,
and everyone tells us we're very privileged. We also know
that that creates a real paradox of choice that can
(10:00):
be quite stifling. You know, it is amazing that when
we're in our twenties, like eighty percent of the doors
are open to us. Definitely, there are some things that
we probably can't do anymore. You know. Unfortunately, you're probably
not going to become an Olympic gymnast if you haven't
been training since you were a trial. But in general,
you know, you're at the start line of pretty much
(10:21):
everything else. All the doors are open. Do you know
how utterly terrifying that actually is. We probably do it
because you're experiencing it, but it certainly does feel like
with each decision you make, the more doors you seem
to close, with no certainty around whether you might actually
want to go back through that door later, and no
certainty around what might happen next, closing those doors seems
(10:46):
a lot more scary than it does fulfilling, so you
do nothing. You're paralyzed by choice and the endless pro
cons list that we know as decision paralysis. That's really
the twenty something explanation for uncertainty. There's also a more
human explanation as to why uncertainty in any capacity, not
(11:08):
just when it comes to the big ticket items of
our twenties, is so uncomfortable for us as a species
to firstly, really state the obvious. Our brains they are
wired to seek out stability and clarity, because when something
is known and familiar, there are of course less opportunities
for danger and threats. Now, the part of our brain
(11:30):
that controls this primal urge, there's true specific regions. Actually,
it's the prefrontal cortex, so right up here at the front,
and the limbic system, which is really deep inside our brain.
It's part of what we call the old brain. A
series of studies done in the early two thousands basically
found that when we are exposed to ambiguous things like
(11:51):
an ambiguous image or ambiguous scenery, the limbic system, particularly
the amygdala, light up. Even when these participants were in
a laboratory setting where there is no immediate danger, your
brain is always going to respond over cautiously and over
zealously to something it doesn't understand, such as the unknowns
(12:14):
of the future. But that feeling is also something that
we can't suppress. It's automatic, and for good reason. You know,
we want that part of us that assesses danger to
not be reliant on our judgment and to be able
to act quick. And you know, the reason that we
have such an aversion to uncertainty is primarily rooted in
the fact that we needed to in order to survive.
(12:38):
When you face an unknown you know, your brain will
immediately seek out as much information as it can, real
or imagined to fill the gaps. Our brain is wired
to do this. You might know this by another term,
which is catastrophizing. Your brain is trying to figure out
what's every possible thing that's going to happen here. It's
going to simulate outcomes, generate predictions. The problem is it
(13:03):
actually has no idea what's going to happen, So it
serves up all these situations, some of them completely impossible,
some of them may be more likely. We can't always
discern or tell the difference between what is more likely
and what is less likely. We are just receiving information
from this very old, ancient part of our brain, and
(13:24):
we're experiencing it as it comes. We're experiencing all the
fear as it comes without being able to interrupt that
and say, wait, how do I why do I think this?
How do I know this is going to happen? Oh? Wait,
I actually don't. So this brings me to a next point.
A lot of our anxiety and our fears don't actually
emerge from necessarily something having gone wrong in actuality, but
(13:48):
from the question of what if, what if this happens?
What if this even worse thing happens, What if the
worst thing happens. This is because our brain will stay
in this loop of providing us with potential outcomes until
it has some kind of resolution or closure. It doesn't
want to switch off the alarm system until the reason
(14:11):
for the alarm has been given meaning or it's identified
what the problem was. And like I said in the past,
that was useful. Now it's just plain annoying. It's annoying,
and your uncertainty is meant to feel that way. It's
meant to feel annoying and awful and frustrating, because again,
it wants to keep you alert. It wants to grab
your attention like a big shiny billboard or a big
(14:34):
red stop sign. It wants you to be looking straight
at it. It wants you to be directing. It's focused
onto the thing you don't understand and that you're unsure about,
so that you can provide it with a sense of closure.
The thing is, if you give your anxiety and your
fear of the unknown and answer, if you give yourself
(14:55):
a reason for the uncertainty, more specifically, you give it
a purpose, it will actually go away. We are going
to discuss that more in a second, which just bear
with me, but it's also important as well before we
move on, to understand that how you experience uncertainty in
your twenties is not the same as how everyone else
is going to experience this feeling. So you can't beat
(15:15):
yourself up if you feel like you are struggling with
it more than others. Psychologists in the early nineties they
identified what they called an intolerance for uncertainty spectrum. Basically,
they found that where you sit in terms of your
tolerance or intolerance for uncertainty will determine how much information
(15:36):
you think you need before you make a decision. They
discovered this spectrum almost by accident. They were actually trying
to determine what personality traits caused anxiety, and in that research,
what they kept realizing that was that a number of
their participants all reported this same experience, this sense that
(15:57):
they weren't necessarily scared about what was going to happen,
They just really wanted to know what was going to happen.
And these same people were the ones who would read
ahead in books even if they were excited by the plotline.
They would read spoilers in the papers of movies that
they were really eager to see, even though they knew
it was going to kind of ruin the enjoyment. They
would also at times make more impulsive decisions in their
(16:19):
relationships when they felt something was fading or feeling off,
not because they necessarily wanted the relationship to end, but
because to them and it's kept coming up over and
over again, a known bad outcome was better than an
unknown good outcome. These same individuals were also, surprise surprise,
(16:40):
more likely to have a diagnosis of generalized anxiety disorder.
Most people in society and in our world will score
in the middle of this spectrum for an intolerance for uncertainty,
but people who score higher, probably like you and I,
tend to spend a lot more time ruminating on the
(17:01):
future than being in the present moment. And they just
can't help it. Someone with a high intolerance for uncertainty,
they might make lists repeatedly, They plan out conversations in
their head. They look at food menus well before they're
going to a restaurant, just to make sure that they
know that there's something they're going to like and they
know what they're going to order. They triple check driving routes.
(17:22):
They do all these things basically to calm this sense
that if I don't know well, then something's going to
go wrong. This cloud ahead of me, it can only
be dangerous if this is you. Your twenties are naturally,
and I'm sorry to say it, they are going to
(17:42):
feel a lot more stressful and they're going to feel
harder than someone who can naturally go with the flow,
because you are constantly being bombarded with unknowns and it's
not you, it's this decade. I promise you. I'm going
to give you some good news and some solutions in
just a second. But I do want to talk about
what can happen if we let uncertainty force us into
(18:04):
a corner or force us into a place of an action.
Because uncertainty is so uncomfortable, it can be a very
powerful maladaptive motivator, i e. Something that motivates us to
do things that are actually against our interests, and it's
really important that we are aware of that so that
when we pause and are choosing whether to act whether
(18:26):
not to act, we can carefully examine whether this isn't
our best interest or just because we are scared of
an outcome that is no more or less likely than
any other outcome. The ways this shows up in our
twenties could be a very long list, but I'm going
to keep it brief, and I want to scare you.
I'm just going to touch on two of the big
consequences of letting this feeling rule your life. Firstly, you
(18:50):
accept what you don't deserve and also less than what
you're capable of and less than what you've actually worked for.
It's like what I said before, a no bad outcome
over an unknown good outcome is what you prefer. And
how that might look like is accepting the first grad
offer because you're scared of not getting another, even though
you don't really want the job. Accepting the first person
(19:14):
who I don't know starts talking to you on hinge
because you're scared that no one else will talk to
you when you're scared of what it will mean to
be single after a certain age. You choose the first
apartment you see, the first car you try out. You
go to the same places on the same trips over
and over again, because an uncertain outcome, even if there
(19:36):
is chance that it could be amazing, you don't want
to take that risk. Bear in mind, I have no
judgment on this. I have done this myself. All of
that is basically anecdotal. All that is basically my lived experience,
because I am someone who's this in the same boat
with you. The second consequence of a failure to embrace
uncertainty in our twenties is that we actually don't act
(19:59):
at all. We don't choose any job, we don't choose
any partner, because what if it's not the right one.
You know, in the first scenario, we chose the first thing,
and this scenario, we don't choose anything at all. It
probably won't surprise you that perfectionism and the fear of
uncertainty are actually, in fact sisters. Are They're incredibly aligned.
(20:24):
In fact, I personally think that perfectionism is basically just
the fear of uncertainty with a different name. It's like
a subgenre of the feeling. Perfectionism often disguises itself as
ambition or higher standards or great expectations for yourself, but underneath,
it's usually just fear. It's just a fear of the unknown,
(20:44):
the fear of what failure might bring, the fear of
making the wrong move. It is actually less about doing
things perfectly and more about trying to eliminate the possibility
of regret. That's what makes it a close relative of uncertainty.
They both come from a deep discomfort with not knowing
how things will turn out. Think if perfectionism in this
(21:05):
case as kind of like an emotional armor. If I
just plan enough, if I delayed the decision long enough,
if I do everything just right, then maybe maybe I
can avoid disappointment. But what you're really doing is just
trying to outrun uncertainty. A twenty twenty two study actually
looked at a group of students to determine whether perfectionism
(21:27):
meant people were less quick to act when it came
to making a decision. They asked these students to complete
a questionnaire which would essentially rank each student based on
perfectionist tendencies. So the most perfectionist down to the least perfectionists,
and then they asked those students to consider a bunch
of would you rather questions? So would you rather I
don't know this or that? Would you rather X or y?
(21:50):
There was about I think fifty of them fifty scenarios,
and they measured how long it took them to complete
these entire range of scenarios. The top twenty five five
percent of perfectionist took the same amount of time combined
to complete the exercise as the remaining seventy five percent
of students. They took so much longer because they were
(22:13):
sat there considering, wanting to make the perfect choice. The
thing is, opportunities don't always wait for us to make
up our minds. Big decisions aren't always going to let
you delay them. They will find the next person, or
they will disappear. A big part of our twenties is
(22:35):
being able to say yes to that thing that feels
really scary. Yes, I'm going to try. Yes, I don't
know what's going to happen, let me just do it anyways.
But when you are battling the fear of all fears,
the fear of the unknown, it's going to be a
lot harder for you. Finally, I'm here to give you
some good news. This is actually something you can change,
(22:59):
and it's something that any people have proven to themselves
that they are able to overcome. So I want to
explain exactly how you can do this, including something you
could literally do in the next five minutes if you
wanted to, that will allow you to better act on
your dreams, on the opportunities, on the desires of our twenties.
(23:19):
So we're going to talk about all of that and
so much more after this shortbreak. Okay, so we are
back talking about uncertainty in our twenties, and luckily for us,
we are actually not the first generation to feel this way,
nor will we be the last. And that's good news
(23:40):
because it means that there are a lot of people
who have come up with some really amazing approaches to
this feeling that helped get them through this period of
discomfort and which will hopefully help you as well. The
biggest thing we can do for our uncertainty in our twenties,
and I've been hinting at this for the entire episode,
is to basically assign it a purpose, because that satisfies
(24:05):
our deeper desire for a reason, a meaning, and kind
of just a sense of why, why is this happening?
The purpose you assigned to your uncertainty. It could be
that you see this as a learning opportunity. It could
be that you view uncertainty as a rite of passage.
It could be that uncertainty is a sign that you're
(24:26):
opening yourself up to new things which are scary. It
could be a call to surrender and just to accept
life as it is. It could be a real spiritual thing.
It could be that uncertainty just makes for a really
good story, and you value a good story and you
can't have one with that uncertainty. Whatever it is, whatever
makes uncertainty feel meaningful to you, hone in on that.
(24:52):
Anytime you feel overwhelmed by the feeling, remind yourself, okay,
but this has a purpose. This has a meaning for me.
I personally think of uncertainty as a sign that I'm
about to really grow as a person, and, for lack
of a better word, I'm about to level up. Every
time I have ever felt scared, lost, uncertain it has
(25:15):
always been the beginning of something just over the horizon
that I haven't been able to see yet, Like it
always signals to me that something really big is about
to come that way. Now now that I know that's
its purpose, I actually almost get excited when I'm feeling
that way. I feel like I get kind of giddy.
I'm ready to be surprised, and I really feel like
(25:36):
I'm in preparation mode for whatever is about to happen next.
The reason this worked is because when we assign a
role to our uncertainty, this actually gives us a cognitive
framework through which we can accept it, through which we
can just let it exist and actually focus on what
we need to focus on. We give the annoying voice
(25:56):
a job. It's like when a toddler. I don't know
if you've been around kids a lot, but when like
a toddler or a child is being really annoying, so
you tell them they have to rearrange all the pens,
or they have to divide up all their dolls or
pick up something like rice, I don't know, you give
them a job so you can get to work. Like
you give the annoying voice somewhere, someone else to talk
(26:17):
to or something else to do. The second way to
really confront your uncertainty is also to look for stories
of people who didn't have it all figured out, or
who dealt with supreme uncertainty and came out the other side,
rather than just looking for people who seem like a
natural A to B success story. The natural success stories
(26:40):
are all we seem to see these days. So you
would think that most people who you admire have never
struggled the way that you do and that you have.
That's false. It's hugely it's a big myth. When you
start collecting these stories, you will find that almost every
single person who has made something of them else has
(27:00):
an uncertainty story DOCI for example. That's one I've recently
added to my list. The Woman of the Hour. She
posted a YouTube video back in twenty twenty, only like
five years ago, about how she got fired from her job,
and in it, she's like, tomorrow, I'm just gonna doorknock
at a bunch of studios and just see if they
will give me an internship. She just want a Grammy.
(27:24):
Five years ago. She was completely unsure of where she
was going to end up, and she ended up in
the right place because she leant into it. The founder
of Spanks, She's another one on my list. She used
to selline machines like door to Door. Now she runs
a billion dollar industry. Stephen King, he's another one. His
like draft for his book Carrie, which is now a
(27:47):
cult classic, a favorite of so many. He literally threw
that manuscript in the trash after it was rejected thirty times,
and that book is a cultural icon. I even think
of my mum. My mum is the one that often
comes to mind for me. You know, she was kicked
out of university because she got such poorly bad grades.
(28:07):
They basically expelled her. And then she took a year
after travel. She didn't really know what she wanted to do.
She came back, she did something different, and she graduated
with the top jop and now she's like this incredibly powerful,
successful girl boss. All these people and you have something
very important in common. In their journey to success and
(28:31):
to wherever they ended up. There were moments when they
had absolutely no idea what was next, and they just
had to bet on themselves, and they just had to
trust that they were capable. And once you start searching
for these stories, you will see them everywhere. You will
see them constantly, until one day you'll have your own
(28:52):
version of this story, your own version of how you
overcame uncertainty, how in hindsight the path was actually so
clear the entire time. Another small thing you can do,
and it's going to sound so minuscule and silly you
might be tempted to skip it. Please don't. I want
you to make a playlist that you feel represents yourself
(29:13):
and play it whenever you feel uncomfortable or confused as
a way to really just bring yourself back and center yourself.
Even if it doesn't necessarily help you feel less uncertain,
it can just help you with the general feelings of
discomfort and strangeness that you may be having. And just
as like a fun thing to do, a fun thing
(29:35):
to do to remind yourself of who you are, of
who you want to be, of what your core values are.
All through music. These songs reflect how you see yourself
back at you, and that is a very special, familiar,
beautiful feeling. There's actually this brilliant twenty fourteen paper from
a researcher in Texas that talks about how music contributes
(29:59):
to the formation of our identity and can help us
trust ourselves more because it acts as a touchstone when
we feel challenged. It represents all the times we have
previously overcome challenges, all the times we previously experienced joy,
and the music we choose really does reflect our values
and says something about how we see ourselves. And so
(30:20):
when you're kind of externally lost and don't really know
who you are and can't really find your way back,
music is just like beautiful anchor. You know. I have
a playlist like this. The playlist is called if Jemma
was a playlist, and I was listening to it literally
the other day, and it has songs from twenty sixteen
all the way up to last week. And it's really
(30:42):
a beautiful way to see how I've transformed, to be
able to categorically see different chapters in my life and
what was happening during them, like and the music brings
back all those memories and also just to see how
far I've come. And so it's something you can literally
take five minutes do for yourself right now. It's a
fun exercise. I promise you it will help you ground
yourself during this like crazy chaotic period. On a much
(31:05):
larger scale, the biggest antidote for uncertainty is really just this.
Just try something, try anything, Choose something that interests you
to get good at, and when that thing stops serving,
you choose something else. We have to let go of
(31:26):
this idea that every decision you make in life has
to naturally flow into the next and the next and
the next, and that you have to have some step
by step plan that you can follow for your life.
Your life is not a recipe. You're not making a cake,
you're not cooking soder like. It's a series of experiments
that take you to different places that you didn't even
(31:47):
know you were going to get to. And when you
give yourself permission to just try, you really break this
cycle of needing to know, You break this cycle of
needing to have all the answers, and you move as
well from that rumination spiral of am I doing the
right thing? Is this the best choice? To just knowing
that if you're taking action and if you're doing something,
(32:08):
you are making the right choice. Even in perfect action,
even the wrong choice is still a better choice than
not doing anything at all. And it also gives you data,
It gives you experience, it gives you stories a question
to really ask yourself as well. If you're kind of thinking, okay,
(32:29):
that's great, but which direction should I choose? Especially if
you're someone who has a lot of hobbies and interests
and passions and ambitions. The question to ask yourself is
just what would make me most disappointed if I didn't
do this? What would I be most regretful around not
doing in twenty years time. This mentally makes you kind
(32:52):
of compute how much you have to lose by not acting,
rather than getting you stuck in this spiral of how
much you have to lose by acting. It reminds me
of this quote you could take a million detours to
your destination and still get there faster than someone who
never got in the car. And that's the idea I
(33:12):
really want to leave you with today. Uncertainty in our
twenties is inevitable, but it's actually a really profound sign
that you're expanding and you are growing, and you're reaching
new spaces you haven't yet experienced. That's a good thing,
like congratulations. If you're feeling uncertain, that is such a
(33:32):
beautiful sign. And I wish I could give you all
the applause for just trying and pushing yourself into new
places and spaces. I know it feels uncomfortable, but I
promise you that this discomfort has a purpose that you
cannot yet see. Lean into it, assign it a purpose
while you're waiting, and just act. Do anything, even if
(33:55):
it's small things. I think that that's a great solution
avoiding a worse discomfort of looking back at your life
and realizing that you never did anything because you were
scared of the unknown, when the unknown is something that
we always have to exist side by side with and
the only way to escape the unknown is to create
a known, is to create a reality that you do
(34:17):
really enjoy and that works for you. And the other
way you can do that is through action. So that's
a rather simple message, but also deeply complex message if
you think about it. To end the episode with, I
just hope that it brings you a sense of comfort
that you're not the only one going through it, and
then I totally know it's going to work out for you.
It's totally going to work out for you. I know
(34:37):
that I can give you that promise right now. So
thank you so much for listening. If you have made
it this far, let's leave a little emoji in the
comments below that represents how you're feeling about your life,
how uncertainty feels in your body right now, Just so
I know. If you've made it this far, if you're
one of the loyal listeners, make sure that you are
following along or subscribed wherever you're listening on YouTube, on Spotify, Apple, whatever,
(35:03):
one and give us a five star review if you
feel cold to do so. It really does help the
show grow and reach new audiences a new, fantastic, wonderful
twenty somethings and older. Also make sure you're following us
on Instagram at that Psychology podcast if you want to
be part of future episodes, If you want to DM
me episode suggestions, if you have questions dilemmas, you may
(35:24):
even be able to be featured in an episode just
like this one. So follow me over there and until
next time, stay safe, be kind, be gentle to yourself,
especially in the face of uncertainty. You will talk very
very soon.
Hello everybody, I'm Jemma Spake and welcome back to the
Psychology of Your Twenties, the podcast where we talk through
the biggest changes, moments, and transitions of our twenties and
what they mean for our psychology. This episode is a rerun.
(00:26):
Hello everybody, Welcome back to the show. Welcome back to
the podcast, new listeners, old listeners. Wherever you are in
the world, it is so great to have you here
back for another episode as we of course break down
the Psychology of Your Twenties today. To just jump straight
to the chase, we are talking about perhaps one of
(00:48):
the most defining parts of our twenties, the overwhelming uncertainty
of just being in this decade. If this decade had
one word to describe it, one theme to trump them all,
it would be uncertainty. We are lost in this very
weird haze of not really knowing who we are, not
(01:09):
really knowing what the future holds, what's going to happen
with our jobs, with our friends, with our finances, with
our love lives, And even once you think you have
some part of it figured out, another part of your
life suddenly crumbles and you're kind of just left feeling
as lost as you were before. So I got this
dam from a listener the other day that I wanted
(01:31):
to share, which really inspired me to talk about this
because going back through the archives, I realized we have
never sat down and done a full episode dedicated to
this feeling, despite it being I would say universal. This
is what her DM said, Hi, Gemma. I'm in my
twenties like I'm sure most of your listeners are, so
there must be others who relate to this feeling. My
(01:53):
dilemma is that everyone tells me to just try something
and that it doesn't matter what path I'm taking in
my twenties as long as I'm moving forward. What really
paralyzes me, though, is not knowing whether the path I
choose to take will make me happy or at least
happier than any other path. When I visualize my future,
it just feels like a big, ominous gray cloud, and
(02:15):
I can't help but feel like if I just knew
one part of the story, I could decide once and
for all what direction to take. How do I deal
with my fear of uncertainty? It's the biggest thing holding
me back. I just knew, like instantly upon reading this,
how many of us, and I can include myself in
this group, can relate to that feeling, the feeling that
our futures are not necessarily exciting but actually really scary
(02:40):
and really ominous, and a lot of that fear of
the unknown really fuels indecision, and it fuels not making
decisions that are important to make at this stage in
our life, which of course fuels later dissatisfaction. But I
think when you understand why we feel such uncertainty, to
begin with why it is human nature to turn away
(03:02):
from the unknown, but also how we can shift our
feelings about uncertainty so that it feels less scary. That is,
when this sensation has less control of you, you know
you're no longer fighting a losing battle against it. Uncertainty
can become perhaps your sign that you're going in the
right direction. It can be a sign of growth. It
(03:24):
can be a sign that you are trying new things
and you're expanding as a person. So you welcome it.
You welcome the sensation rather than running away from it.
If that sounds kind of implausible and out of reach,
let me explain how exactly we can get to that point.
If you want to get to that place, we're going
to have to make uncertainty feel like an asset, and
(03:47):
we need to have a better strategy for coping with
this feeling. And so that is exactly what we are
going to talk about today. How we can celebrate rather
than fear the unknown, How we can integrate this feeling
into our life plan, see it as a sign, but
also some of the origins of why we feel this way,
not just in our twenties, but as a species. All
(04:09):
of that and more and so much psychology, So stay
with us. My fear of uncertainty, I think definitely shifted
when I realized that uncertainty is the opposite of boredom
and predictability. If I knew exactly how my life was
going to turn out, if I knew what was around
(04:31):
every single corner, the name of every single friend, I
would meet, my entire resume until the time I retire, Yes,
I would feel less uncertain, But what would the point
of being alive even be? I think the newness of life,
the experiences, the surprises, they are really what makes this
whole thing worthwhile. In a sense, you can't have surprises,
(04:53):
you can't have unexpected joy, you can't learn, you can't
have excitement and anticipation with uncertainty. It is a core
ingredient in so many otherwise really amazing and pleasurable experiences.
And that's what I'm personally learning to appreciate and focus
on when I do have those very natural moments of
(05:14):
being paralyzed by all that I don't know yet. I'm
kind of jumping the gun here. Yes, uncertainty may have
its upsides, we definitely can think about it differently, But
why do we even experience it to begin with and
what makes it so freaking uncomfortable? That's really what we
have to nail down first. Like I said in the beginning,
(05:36):
uncertainty in our twenties are basically two peas in a
pod for a variety of reasons. Firstly, I want you
to give yourself some grace. You are doing everything for
the first time ever. Basically you are basically an adult
toddler or an adult child who yes, can read hopefully
and can write and is hopefully potty trained and all
(05:56):
those things. But you are now experiencing the next level
of situations, the next level of learning, experiences that are
emotionally complex and not straightforward. And as you're experiencing that
You also are without the same safety net that you
relied upon when you were younger, and you're without the
reassurance and the security of teachers and parents and a
(06:20):
school system and a societal system that hopefully isn't going
to let you fall through the cracks. You're on your own.
An uncertainty therefore feels a lot more alarming because you
feel like you're the one who is going to hold
the burden experience, the full burden of any poor decision
or any poor outcome you made. It's all on you
(06:44):
at this point. Another element of this is that because
you are an adult toddler, you haven't had enough life
experience yet to know that things will eventually work out
for you, even if they don't the first time, even
if they are not working out right now. People in
their forties and their fifties and later, they know that
the breakup isn't the end of the world because they've
(07:06):
experienced them and survived before. They know making a major
mistake or losing a friend or losing a job isn't
the end of the world because they have evidence from
previous life experience to tell them that. But you, you
don't have those same data points. You don't have that
same catalog of examples that tell you everything is going
(07:28):
to be okay. Uncertainty for you, and uncertainty for a
lot of us in our twenties doesn't have a conclusion
the way that it has for people who are older. Then,
of course, just to add even more fuel to the fire,
there's the fact that you're kind of living between milestones,
and this decade is definitely one of perpetual transition. You know,
(07:51):
you're no longer a teenager, but you know, you don't
really feel like an adult yet. You're not at that
financial level, you're not settled in a career, you're not
settled in a relatelationship the way that you expect adults
to be. What are you really It's what psychologists call
a liminal space, the in between and liminal emotional spaces
(08:11):
are by nature, by definition disorientating because they don't come
with a clear script, and of course there's no accurate way,
and there's no one who's going to be able to
tell you like, Okay, you're doing you're doing well, you're
doing fine, you are successful. Earlier in life, this is
(08:32):
something I talk to people about all the time. Earlier
in life, your entire days, weeks, months, are set up
in a structure that will tell you if you are
doing well. There are clear benchmarks for life performance, things
like grades, things like passing to the next year level,
(08:53):
things like a whole cohort of people in the same
situation at the same time and the same age as you,
with whom you can mark your progress against, and they're
probably all in the same environment like at school. You
don't have that anymore. You don't have that same framework
to look around and think, Okay, I'm doing okay or
(09:14):
I'm not doing okay, and these are the areas I
can improve on, these are the areas that I'm excelling.
You don't have that anymore. And it might seem really arbitrary,
but those social structures and those environmental structures and that
context actually provides a great deal of and a great
sense of calm and stability. So you have during this
decade almost suddenly lost a lot of what previously allowed
(09:38):
to just stay grounded, security, structure, direction, and of course, finally,
what may feel like a curse but certainly isn't, is
the fact that as a generation we have more choices
than ever we really do, and it's a beautiful thing,
and everyone tells us we're very privileged. We also know
that that creates a real paradox of choice that can
(10:00):
be quite stifling. You know, it is amazing that when
we're in our twenties, like eighty percent of the doors
are open to us. Definitely, there are some things that
we probably can't do anymore. You know. Unfortunately, you're probably
not going to become an Olympic gymnast if you haven't
been training since you were a trial. But in general,
you know, you're at the start line of pretty much
(10:21):
everything else. All the doors are open. Do you know
how utterly terrifying that actually is. We probably do it
because you're experiencing it, but it certainly does feel like
with each decision you make, the more doors you seem
to close, with no certainty around whether you might actually
want to go back through that door later, and no
certainty around what might happen next, closing those doors seems
(10:46):
a lot more scary than it does fulfilling, so you
do nothing. You're paralyzed by choice and the endless pro
cons list that we know as decision paralysis. That's really
the twenty something explanation for uncertainty. There's also a more
human explanation as to why uncertainty in any capacity, not
(11:08):
just when it comes to the big ticket items of
our twenties, is so uncomfortable for us as a species
to firstly, really state the obvious. Our brains they are
wired to seek out stability and clarity, because when something
is known and familiar, there are of course less opportunities
for danger and threats. Now, the part of our brain
(11:30):
that controls this primal urge, there's true specific regions. Actually,
it's the prefrontal cortex, so right up here at the front,
and the limbic system, which is really deep inside our brain.
It's part of what we call the old brain. A
series of studies done in the early two thousands basically
found that when we are exposed to ambiguous things like
(11:51):
an ambiguous image or ambiguous scenery, the limbic system, particularly
the amygdala, light up. Even when these participants were in
a laboratory setting where there is no immediate danger, your
brain is always going to respond over cautiously and over
zealously to something it doesn't understand, such as the unknowns
(12:14):
of the future. But that feeling is also something that
we can't suppress. It's automatic, and for good reason. You know,
we want that part of us that assesses danger to
not be reliant on our judgment and to be able
to act quick. And you know, the reason that we
have such an aversion to uncertainty is primarily rooted in
the fact that we needed to in order to survive.
(12:38):
When you face an unknown you know, your brain will
immediately seek out as much information as it can, real
or imagined to fill the gaps. Our brain is wired
to do this. You might know this by another term,
which is catastrophizing. Your brain is trying to figure out
what's every possible thing that's going to happen here. It's
going to simulate outcomes, generate predictions. The problem is it
(13:03):
actually has no idea what's going to happen, So it
serves up all these situations, some of them completely impossible,
some of them may be more likely. We can't always
discern or tell the difference between what is more likely
and what is less likely. We are just receiving information
from this very old, ancient part of our brain, and
(13:24):
we're experiencing it as it comes. We're experiencing all the
fear as it comes without being able to interrupt that
and say, wait, how do I why do I think this?
How do I know this is going to happen? Oh? Wait,
I actually don't. So this brings me to a next point.
A lot of our anxiety and our fears don't actually
emerge from necessarily something having gone wrong in actuality, but
(13:48):
from the question of what if, what if this happens?
What if this even worse thing happens, What if the
worst thing happens. This is because our brain will stay
in this loop of providing us with potential outcomes until
it has some kind of resolution or closure. It doesn't
want to switch off the alarm system until the reason
(14:11):
for the alarm has been given meaning or it's identified
what the problem was. And like I said in the past,
that was useful. Now it's just plain annoying. It's annoying,
and your uncertainty is meant to feel that way. It's
meant to feel annoying and awful and frustrating, because again,
it wants to keep you alert. It wants to grab
your attention like a big shiny billboard or a big
(14:34):
red stop sign. It wants you to be looking straight
at it. It wants you to be directing. It's focused
onto the thing you don't understand and that you're unsure about,
so that you can provide it with a sense of closure.
The thing is, if you give your anxiety and your
fear of the unknown and answer, if you give yourself
(14:55):
a reason for the uncertainty, more specifically, you give it
a purpose, it will actually go away. We are going
to discuss that more in a second, which just bear
with me, but it's also important as well before we
move on, to understand that how you experience uncertainty in
your twenties is not the same as how everyone else
is going to experience this feeling. So you can't beat
(15:15):
yourself up if you feel like you are struggling with
it more than others. Psychologists in the early nineties they
identified what they called an intolerance for uncertainty spectrum. Basically,
they found that where you sit in terms of your
tolerance or intolerance for uncertainty will determine how much information
(15:36):
you think you need before you make a decision. They
discovered this spectrum almost by accident. They were actually trying
to determine what personality traits caused anxiety, and in that research,
what they kept realizing that was that a number of
their participants all reported this same experience, this sense that
(15:57):
they weren't necessarily scared about what was going to happen,
They just really wanted to know what was going to happen.
And these same people were the ones who would read
ahead in books even if they were excited by the plotline.
They would read spoilers in the papers of movies that
they were really eager to see, even though they knew
it was going to kind of ruin the enjoyment. They
would also at times make more impulsive decisions in their
(16:19):
relationships when they felt something was fading or feeling off,
not because they necessarily wanted the relationship to end, but
because to them and it's kept coming up over and
over again, a known bad outcome was better than an
unknown good outcome. These same individuals were also, surprise surprise,
(16:40):
more likely to have a diagnosis of generalized anxiety disorder.
Most people in society and in our world will score
in the middle of this spectrum for an intolerance for uncertainty,
but people who score higher, probably like you and I,
tend to spend a lot more time ruminating on the
(17:01):
future than being in the present moment. And they just
can't help it. Someone with a high intolerance for uncertainty,
they might make lists repeatedly, They plan out conversations in
their head. They look at food menus well before they're
going to a restaurant, just to make sure that they
know that there's something they're going to like and they
know what they're going to order. They triple check driving routes.
(17:22):
They do all these things basically to calm this sense
that if I don't know well, then something's going to
go wrong. This cloud ahead of me, it can only
be dangerous if this is you. Your twenties are naturally,
and I'm sorry to say it, they are going to
(17:42):
feel a lot more stressful and they're going to feel
harder than someone who can naturally go with the flow,
because you are constantly being bombarded with unknowns and it's
not you, it's this decade. I promise you. I'm going
to give you some good news and some solutions in
just a second. But I do want to talk about
what can happen if we let uncertainty force us into
(18:04):
a corner or force us into a place of an action.
Because uncertainty is so uncomfortable, it can be a very
powerful maladaptive motivator, i e. Something that motivates us to
do things that are actually against our interests, and it's
really important that we are aware of that so that
when we pause and are choosing whether to act whether
(18:26):
not to act, we can carefully examine whether this isn't
our best interest or just because we are scared of
an outcome that is no more or less likely than
any other outcome. The ways this shows up in our
twenties could be a very long list, but I'm going
to keep it brief, and I want to scare you.
I'm just going to touch on two of the big
consequences of letting this feeling rule your life. Firstly, you
(18:50):
accept what you don't deserve and also less than what
you're capable of and less than what you've actually worked for.
It's like what I said before, a no bad outcome
over an unknown good outcome is what you prefer. And
how that might look like is accepting the first grad
offer because you're scared of not getting another, even though
you don't really want the job. Accepting the first person
(19:14):
who I don't know starts talking to you on hinge
because you're scared that no one else will talk to
you when you're scared of what it will mean to
be single after a certain age. You choose the first
apartment you see, the first car you try out. You
go to the same places on the same trips over
and over again, because an uncertain outcome, even if there
(19:36):
is chance that it could be amazing, you don't want
to take that risk. Bear in mind, I have no
judgment on this. I have done this myself. All of
that is basically anecdotal. All that is basically my lived experience,
because I am someone who's this in the same boat
with you. The second consequence of a failure to embrace
uncertainty in our twenties is that we actually don't act
(19:59):
at all. We don't choose any job, we don't choose
any partner, because what if it's not the right one.
You know, in the first scenario, we chose the first thing,
and this scenario, we don't choose anything at all. It
probably won't surprise you that perfectionism and the fear of
uncertainty are actually, in fact sisters. Are They're incredibly aligned.
(20:24):
In fact, I personally think that perfectionism is basically just
the fear of uncertainty with a different name. It's like
a subgenre of the feeling. Perfectionism often disguises itself as
ambition or higher standards or great expectations for yourself, but underneath,
it's usually just fear. It's just a fear of the unknown,
(20:44):
the fear of what failure might bring, the fear of
making the wrong move. It is actually less about doing
things perfectly and more about trying to eliminate the possibility
of regret. That's what makes it a close relative of uncertainty.
They both come from a deep discomfort with not knowing
how things will turn out. Think if perfectionism in this
(21:05):
case as kind of like an emotional armor. If I
just plan enough, if I delayed the decision long enough,
if I do everything just right, then maybe maybe I
can avoid disappointment. But what you're really doing is just
trying to outrun uncertainty. A twenty twenty two study actually
looked at a group of students to determine whether perfectionism
(21:27):
meant people were less quick to act when it came
to making a decision. They asked these students to complete
a questionnaire which would essentially rank each student based on
perfectionist tendencies. So the most perfectionist down to the least perfectionists,
and then they asked those students to consider a bunch
of would you rather questions? So would you rather I
don't know this or that? Would you rather X or y?
(21:50):
There was about I think fifty of them fifty scenarios,
and they measured how long it took them to complete
these entire range of scenarios. The top twenty five five
percent of perfectionist took the same amount of time combined
to complete the exercise as the remaining seventy five percent
of students. They took so much longer because they were
(22:13):
sat there considering, wanting to make the perfect choice. The
thing is, opportunities don't always wait for us to make
up our minds. Big decisions aren't always going to let
you delay them. They will find the next person, or
they will disappear. A big part of our twenties is
(22:35):
being able to say yes to that thing that feels
really scary. Yes, I'm going to try. Yes, I don't
know what's going to happen, let me just do it anyways.
But when you are battling the fear of all fears,
the fear of the unknown, it's going to be a
lot harder for you. Finally, I'm here to give you
some good news. This is actually something you can change,
(22:59):
and it's something that any people have proven to themselves
that they are able to overcome. So I want to
explain exactly how you can do this, including something you
could literally do in the next five minutes if you
wanted to, that will allow you to better act on
your dreams, on the opportunities, on the desires of our twenties.
(23:19):
So we're going to talk about all of that and
so much more after this shortbreak. Okay, so we are
back talking about uncertainty in our twenties, and luckily for us,
we are actually not the first generation to feel this way,
nor will we be the last. And that's good news
(23:40):
because it means that there are a lot of people
who have come up with some really amazing approaches to
this feeling that helped get them through this period of
discomfort and which will hopefully help you as well. The
biggest thing we can do for our uncertainty in our twenties,
and I've been hinting at this for the entire episode,
is to basically assign it a purpose, because that satisfies
(24:05):
our deeper desire for a reason, a meaning, and kind
of just a sense of why, why is this happening?
The purpose you assigned to your uncertainty. It could be
that you see this as a learning opportunity. It could
be that you view uncertainty as a rite of passage.
It could be that uncertainty is a sign that you're
(24:26):
opening yourself up to new things which are scary. It
could be a call to surrender and just to accept
life as it is. It could be a real spiritual thing.
It could be that uncertainty just makes for a really
good story, and you value a good story and you
can't have one with that uncertainty. Whatever it is, whatever
makes uncertainty feel meaningful to you, hone in on that.
(24:52):
Anytime you feel overwhelmed by the feeling, remind yourself, okay,
but this has a purpose. This has a meaning for me.
I personally think of uncertainty as a sign that I'm
about to really grow as a person, and, for lack
of a better word, I'm about to level up. Every
time I have ever felt scared, lost, uncertain it has
(25:15):
always been the beginning of something just over the horizon
that I haven't been able to see yet, Like it
always signals to me that something really big is about
to come that way. Now now that I know that's
its purpose, I actually almost get excited when I'm feeling
that way. I feel like I get kind of giddy.
I'm ready to be surprised, and I really feel like
(25:36):
I'm in preparation mode for whatever is about to happen next.
The reason this worked is because when we assign a
role to our uncertainty, this actually gives us a cognitive
framework through which we can accept it, through which we
can just let it exist and actually focus on what
we need to focus on. We give the annoying voice
(25:56):
a job. It's like when a toddler. I don't know
if you've been around kids a lot, but when like
a toddler or a child is being really annoying, so
you tell them they have to rearrange all the pens,
or they have to divide up all their dolls or
pick up something like rice, I don't know, you give
them a job so you can get to work. Like
you give the annoying voice somewhere, someone else to talk
(26:17):
to or something else to do. The second way to
really confront your uncertainty is also to look for stories
of people who didn't have it all figured out, or
who dealt with supreme uncertainty and came out the other side,
rather than just looking for people who seem like a
natural A to B success story. The natural success stories
(26:40):
are all we seem to see these days. So you
would think that most people who you admire have never
struggled the way that you do and that you have.
That's false. It's hugely it's a big myth. When you
start collecting these stories, you will find that almost every
single person who has made something of them else has
(27:00):
an uncertainty story DOCI for example. That's one I've recently
added to my list. The Woman of the Hour. She
posted a YouTube video back in twenty twenty, only like
five years ago, about how she got fired from her job,
and in it, she's like, tomorrow, I'm just gonna doorknock
at a bunch of studios and just see if they
will give me an internship. She just want a Grammy.
(27:24):
Five years ago. She was completely unsure of where she
was going to end up, and she ended up in
the right place because she leant into it. The founder
of Spanks, She's another one on my list. She used
to selline machines like door to Door. Now she runs
a billion dollar industry. Stephen King, he's another one. His
like draft for his book Carrie, which is now a
(27:47):
cult classic, a favorite of so many. He literally threw
that manuscript in the trash after it was rejected thirty times,
and that book is a cultural icon. I even think
of my mum. My mum is the one that often
comes to mind for me. You know, she was kicked
out of university because she got such poorly bad grades.
(28:07):
They basically expelled her. And then she took a year
after travel. She didn't really know what she wanted to do.
She came back, she did something different, and she graduated
with the top jop and now she's like this incredibly powerful,
successful girl boss. All these people and you have something
very important in common. In their journey to success and
(28:31):
to wherever they ended up. There were moments when they
had absolutely no idea what was next, and they just
had to bet on themselves, and they just had to
trust that they were capable. And once you start searching
for these stories, you will see them everywhere. You will
see them constantly, until one day you'll have your own
(28:52):
version of this story, your own version of how you
overcame uncertainty, how in hindsight the path was actually so
clear the entire time. Another small thing you can do,
and it's going to sound so minuscule and silly you
might be tempted to skip it. Please don't. I want
you to make a playlist that you feel represents yourself
(29:13):
and play it whenever you feel uncomfortable or confused as
a way to really just bring yourself back and center yourself.
Even if it doesn't necessarily help you feel less uncertain,
it can just help you with the general feelings of
discomfort and strangeness that you may be having. And just
as like a fun thing to do, a fun thing
(29:35):
to do to remind yourself of who you are, of
who you want to be, of what your core values are.
All through music. These songs reflect how you see yourself
back at you, and that is a very special, familiar,
beautiful feeling. There's actually this brilliant twenty fourteen paper from
a researcher in Texas that talks about how music contributes
(29:59):
to the formation of our identity and can help us
trust ourselves more because it acts as a touchstone when
we feel challenged. It represents all the times we have
previously overcome challenges, all the times we previously experienced joy,
and the music we choose really does reflect our values
and says something about how we see ourselves. And so
(30:20):
when you're kind of externally lost and don't really know
who you are and can't really find your way back,
music is just like beautiful anchor. You know. I have
a playlist like this. The playlist is called if Jemma
was a playlist, and I was listening to it literally
the other day, and it has songs from twenty sixteen
all the way up to last week. And it's really
(30:42):
a beautiful way to see how I've transformed, to be
able to categorically see different chapters in my life and
what was happening during them, like and the music brings
back all those memories and also just to see how
far I've come. And so it's something you can literally
take five minutes do for yourself right now. It's a
fun exercise. I promise you it will help you ground
yourself during this like crazy chaotic period. On a much
(31:05):
larger scale, the biggest antidote for uncertainty is really just this.
Just try something, try anything, Choose something that interests you
to get good at, and when that thing stops serving,
you choose something else. We have to let go of
(31:26):
this idea that every decision you make in life has
to naturally flow into the next and the next and
the next, and that you have to have some step
by step plan that you can follow for your life.
Your life is not a recipe. You're not making a cake,
you're not cooking soder like. It's a series of experiments
that take you to different places that you didn't even
(31:47):
know you were going to get to. And when you
give yourself permission to just try, you really break this
cycle of needing to know, You break this cycle of
needing to have all the answers, and you move as
well from that rumination spiral of am I doing the
right thing? Is this the best choice? To just knowing
that if you're taking action and if you're doing something,
(32:08):
you are making the right choice. Even in perfect action,
even the wrong choice is still a better choice than
not doing anything at all. And it also gives you data,
It gives you experience, it gives you stories a question
to really ask yourself as well. If you're kind of thinking, okay,
(32:29):
that's great, but which direction should I choose? Especially if
you're someone who has a lot of hobbies and interests
and passions and ambitions. The question to ask yourself is
just what would make me most disappointed if I didn't
do this? What would I be most regretful around not
doing in twenty years time. This mentally makes you kind
(32:52):
of compute how much you have to lose by not acting,
rather than getting you stuck in this spiral of how
much you have to lose by acting. It reminds me
of this quote you could take a million detours to
your destination and still get there faster than someone who
never got in the car. And that's the idea I
(33:12):
really want to leave you with today. Uncertainty in our
twenties is inevitable, but it's actually a really profound sign
that you're expanding and you are growing, and you're reaching
new spaces you haven't yet experienced. That's a good thing,
like congratulations. If you're feeling uncertain, that is such a
(33:32):
beautiful sign. And I wish I could give you all
the applause for just trying and pushing yourself into new
places and spaces. I know it feels uncomfortable, but I
promise you that this discomfort has a purpose that you
cannot yet see. Lean into it, assign it a purpose
while you're waiting, and just act. Do anything, even if
(33:55):
it's small things. I think that that's a great solution
avoiding a worse discomfort of looking back at your life
and realizing that you never did anything because you were
scared of the unknown, when the unknown is something that
we always have to exist side by side with and
the only way to escape the unknown is to create
a known, is to create a reality that you do
(34:17):
really enjoy and that works for you. And the other
way you can do that is through action. So that's
a rather simple message, but also deeply complex message if
you think about it. To end the episode with, I
just hope that it brings you a sense of comfort
that you're not the only one going through it, and
then I totally know it's going to work out for you.
It's totally going to work out for you. I know
(34:37):
that I can give you that promise right now. So
thank you so much for listening. If you have made
it this far, let's leave a little emoji in the
comments below that represents how you're feeling about your life,
how uncertainty feels in your body right now, Just so
I know. If you've made it this far, if you're
one of the loyal listeners, make sure that you are
following along or subscribed wherever you're listening on YouTube, on Spotify, Apple, whatever,
(35:03):
one and give us a five star review if you
feel cold to do so. It really does help the
show grow and reach new audiences a new, fantastic, wonderful
twenty somethings and older. Also make sure you're following us
on Instagram at that Psychology podcast if you want to
be part of future episodes, If you want to DM
me episode suggestions, if you have questions dilemmas, you may
(35:24):
even be able to be featured in an episode just
like this one. So follow me over there and until
next time, stay safe, be kind, be gentle to yourself,
especially in the face of uncertainty. You will talk very
very soon.
Host
Jemma Sbeghen
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