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September 16 - October 5, 2025
We all come into the world with a “package” of character traits, and we grow up in an (increasingly) imperfect world. At the risk of sounding repetitive, connecting with people means that we’re living not only with our own package but also with theirs. If you want to have only one person’s package to deal with, you’re going to be lonely. If you want companionship, you’re going to have to deal with two people’s imperfections, and it’s going to be messy at times.
They loved each other, but the contrast of their natures and temperaments created major issues for their social life and sex life. Marta wanted to stay home and was reserved in the bedroom. Jon liked to party with his friends, most of whom were artists or musicians, and Marta didn’t feel comfortable in those situations.
something amazing happened during our sessions. Through discussing their differences, Jon recognized that Marta was primarily afraid—not inherently reserved. As such, he would simply have to help her come out of her shell. Jon needed to go more slowly in the bedroom, emphasize his feelings of tenderness, and warm Marta up until she reached his level of excitement, which took her longer. Marta recognized that Jon wasn’t a dangerous guy, just a tad wild, and that his love for her was genuine. As she wrestled with a sense of shame at some of his hijinks, she admitted that they also turned her on.
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As with the anxiety spiral, triggers are nothing to be concerned about. They happen because life is messy and people are not perfect. However, triggers only initially set off the spiral—it’s the following steps that play a much more formative role.
We may interpret what someone says as having global instead of just local consequences. We project that the person will always act that way and question the viability of the relationship altogether.
We forget that the other person has his or her own history, and that imperfection is part of being a human. Most of all, we forget to acknowledge that all people—including ourselves!—are imperfect, and we lose patience for the other as a whole.
“Shame on me!” Why are they treating me badly? Does it mean I’m not important? Does it mean they don’t respect me? Is it because I’m unlovable?
What will happen when we have a bigger place and want to have people over? What will happen when we have kids? Where is our relationship going? Don’t I matter to him?
But what tipped Ginger over the edge was her judgment of Carlos for being a slob. She failed to recognize that his lack of tidiness was mostly an artifact of growing up in a home that was disorganized—it wasn’t personal in any way.
A surge of anxiety is nothing to catastrophize about—it simply means you are human. Furthermore, when anxiety strikes, your body is asking for more acceptance and compassion. If you provide those—even if you don’t think you deserve them—you can turn the initial trigger of anxiety into an opportunity for self-love.
Whether you’re in a romantic relationship, maintaining a friendship, interacting with work colleagues, or even have a teacher-student bond, it’s only a matter of time until one party will disappoint or rub the other party the wrong way. If you spend any length of time with others, at some point an issue will come up that you disagree about. Even the simplest of relationships is prone to disappointment.
Note that compassion is not about being kind when people deserve it—that’s called reward, or even fairness. Compassion is about dropping warranted judgments and blame, by practicing kindness specifically when others are legitimately in the wrong.
Trigger. The trigger here is the same as in the disconnection spiral, since people are imperfect and even the best relationships will experience miscommunications or discord from time to time. Accept the imperfection. Instead of catastrophizing, recognize that all humans are imperfect. Why would you expect any relationship to be perfect, when you consider that interpersonal connections involve two people’s idiosyncrasies?
Recognize that it’s simply not true that relationships should be perfect. Remember that differences are often a great catalyst to connection and inner growth. Life is messy! So it is impossible to have rich relationships with others unless we learn to accept their idiosyncrasies with love and patience.
Catch yourself catastrophizing before things escalate. Recognize and accept local issues without going global. Miscommunications and errors happen all the time, especially when two people are close with each other. Interpreting people’s actions as nefarious (when they may not be) makes it impossible to respond with equanimity. When issues arise, take a breather and remain in the present.
While both anger and avoidance are typically used to gain or maintain control over interpersonal relationships, they usually create more emotional distance and make it harder to correct dynamics.
When someone causes us irritation or distress, we tend to respond with anger (fight) or avoidance (flight). The other party, in turn, also chooses anger (fight) or avoidance (flight). The resulting dynamics tend to repeat in a cyclical pattern, creating more interpersonal distance and suffering along the way.
The crux of addressing interpersonal dynamics involves converting anxiety to love.
So we must start out by identifying: What are we truly concerned might happen if someone doesn’t do what we want and expect? This is generally uncomfortable to even think about, since it necessitates acknowledging that we are vulnerable and reliant on other people.
To that end, the first step in relying on others is recognizing what about that makes us anxious.
unless we are aware of our anxiety as it relates to relying on others, we are sitting ducks for anger and avoidance.
Once we’re aware of our true concerns (for example, Will they come through for me? Can I rely on them? What if they keep doing that thing that’s driving me crazy?), we can start to manage our fight-or-flight responses.
However, the good thing about anger is that it subsides over time; many proverbial hotheads who quickly get angry settle down just as fast. The age-old advice to “count to ten” when you feel angry is actually sage counsel.
And finally, having realized what we are anxious about and having guarded against disconnection, we need to dig deep and express what we need from others.
The goal is to communicate how we feel so the other person can recognize our needs and how the decisions they make may affect our well-being.
“the search for the sacred,”
In this chapter, I will show you how the intrinsic relationships between anxiety, uncertainty, and uncontrollability can be a catalyst for thriving. We can learn to view our anxiety as an indicator that we are bumping against the limits of our knowledge and control in the world, and that there is no reason to judge ourselves when things go wrong—sometimes life just gets complicated and challenging.
At an even more basic level, scientific knowledge today remains incredibly limited. To take just a few examples, scientists do not know why we cry, why we laugh, why we fall asleep, or even how general anesthesia works.2
Likewise, many of us have an allergy to uncertainty. Among a certain subset of the population, this may become greatly exacerbated over time, taking the form of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), as we shall explore in this chapter.
The curious thing is that if you are among the unfortunate few who have an allergy to pollen, you can simply avoid exposure to it or take antihistamines. In the case of alcohol, you can eschew it entirely. However, uncertainty is omnipresent and cannot be avoided, so being allergic to uncertainty is much more complicated.
One common coping mechanism to deal with uncertainty is worry. As we discussed in chapter 3, worrywarts avoid having a truly overpowering and uncomfortable emotional response—they keep their minds busy thinking superficially about the future so they don’t...
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if she had reason to worry about an issue that had never crossed her mind, there could be any number of threats and concerns lurking in the shadows. She became increasingly apprehensive and concerned about uncertainty in general,
I went through the data with him, showing that there are traces of urine and fecal matter almost everywhere. This initially made Jerry much more anxious and uncomfortable, since he was trying to live with perfect certainty that he would not get sick.
psychological science has revealed that it is extremely common for people to have occasional violent or sexual thoughts pop up in their minds.7 Most of us briefly recognize these and immediately let them go, not giving them much thought
And the more one performs compulsions over time, the worse their obsessions and anxiety get. This is because compulsions make it impossible for people with OCD to do the one thing that could help them: recognize and tolerate the fact that certain things in life are uncertain, and there is nothing human beings can do to change that fact.
Furthermore, excessive corrective action in the context of uncertainty never helps. On the contrary, it’s just a pathway to being more intolerant of uncertainty, more worried, more anxious, and ever more obsessive over time.
to accept that as a human being, we can never fully know a large degree of information for sure, so he needed to be humble and recognize the limits of human knowledge.
paucity
Pema Chödrön has written insightfully about the inability to control things in our lives. She has brilliantly suggested that, when we recognize our inherent lack of control, we become spiritual warriors—“Not warriors who kill and harm, but warriors of nonaggression” who are emotionally and spiritually resilient to manage the vicissitudes of life.
A warrior accepts that we can never know what will happen to us next. We can try to control the uncontrollable by looking for security and predictability, always hoping to be comfortable and safe. But the truth is that we can never avoid [being out of control]. This . . . is part of the adventure. It’s also what makes us afraid.
On the one hand, recognizing our lack of control is a surefire way to feel afraid. On the other, when we embrace that safety, security, and predictability are a facade—when we voluntarily relinquish the illusion before life penetrates through it—we emerge infinitely stronger as human beings.
“It’s true that you do have some degree of agency in the world, and you can affect certain opportunities that come your way in life. But let’s be intellectually honest and acknowledge that almost all the most important factors that shape your experience and your capacity to make a difference in this world are not in your control: time, geolocation, culture, family, friends, intellectual capacity, socioeconomic status, personal health.
All of these factors are outside the scope of human choice, and any one of them indelibly shapes virtually the entirety of your life experiences.”
My concern was that they would blame themselves for not being stronger, better prepared, or for failing, even though they might have done everything they could along the way.
There is another concern with attributing success and failure to our hard work alone. As we will discuss in chapter 9, living a balanced and emotionally healthy life necessitates ensuring that we are grounded in our relationships with ourselves and with others, in addition to professional and other
the primary purpose of worry is to avoid thinking about the fact that, ultimately, life is unpredictable and uncontrollable. Worry gives us a false sense of control. This leaves us vulnerable to self-criticism in the wake of life stressors
Along these lines, consider that, while human efforts are important (as we will discuss in chapter 9), they are ultimately insufficient to control the outcomes of life. This is because of the following fact: in every situation, any number of events could occur that would interrupt the usual sequence of an outcome following from our intentions and actions. Our tool, therefore, is to decouple human efforts and outcomes by recognizing that what we do in day-to-day life may or may not lead to the result that we are striving for.
Similarly, the act of standing up from a chair could be interrupted by factors beyond our knowledge or control. The chair may spontaneously collapse, or our muscles and ligaments may not work as we expect them to, or there may be a sudden change in atmospheric pressure or gravity that makes it impossible to stand up. Granted, some of these situations are more far-fetched than others, but none of them is out of the realm of possibility, and all are beyond the scope of human control.
As the great Hindu holy book The Bhagavad Gita says, we should focus not on the results of our actions but on the actions themselves.
Most of all, recognize that whether or not things go our way, it has a lot less to do with our efforts than we tend to think. When we take this approach, we can thrive with anxiety by embracing our humble human position and by recognizing that our knowledge and strength are inherently limited.
