Now is the time to free our minds, and watch the world follow.

July 15, 4:00 PMRelationship ExaminerBilly Thieme

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All of the uncertainty is killing us. It's time to choose to clear it up.

      There’s no doubt that we’re all in uncertain times. In fact, times continue to maintain, ironically, a pretty consistent uncertainty during this recession, at least that’s what many of us believed as the recession continued its stranglehold as this year began. During the first quarter of 2009, the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index showed that our collective well-being in the U.S. declined somewhere in the range of 3%, in the midst of a trend that showed that struggling was then “ . . . only on the uptrend.”

   That's bad news, for all of us. And, as we all know, bad news tends to beget more bad news, as our cloudy (or worse) perception of things influences our interpretations of our lives, on a daily basis. What has come of this long, seemingly endless decline of well-being seems to be a feeling of general malaise across the country. Everywhere we turn, we’re faced with proof of struggle, hard times and above all, uncertainty. It sometimes seems that we’re all swamped in an inescapable feeling of dread, as we wait to see which shoe will drop next.

     In an interesting column recently, author Daniel Gilbert pointed out that this overall feeling of doom is more than likely a result of the uncertainty we face, rather than actual hardships. After all, Gilbert says, “ . . . most of us still have more inflation-adjusted dollars than our grandparents had, and they didn’t live in an unremitting funk. Middle-class Americans still enjoy more luxury than upper-class Americans enjoyed a century earlier . . .” and we’re still mired in an itchy nervousness.

    It turns out that the nervousness itself may be the culprit, as a recent experiment performed at Maastricht University in the Netherlands suggests. The experiment involved groups subjects receiving electrical shocks of varying voltages, some low, some extreme. Some subjects were told they would receive intense shocks every time, while others were told they would receive mild shocks some of the time, but they were when the less intense shocks would come. The results showed that those who were left wondering experienced a much higher and more constant stress level than those who were told all shocks would be intense. The implication is, as Gilbert points out, “ . . . people feel worse when something bad might occur than when something bad will occur. Most of us aren’t losing sleep and sucking down Marlboros because the Dow is going to fall another thousand points, but because we don’t know whether it will fall or not — and human beings find uncertainty more painful than the things they’re uncertain about.

    This tendency to wallow in uncertainty seems to have inspired a (hopefully) mini-age of dread, because, as a group, we aren’t given the ability to process a likely outcome to our current situation, assimilate it, and move on. In short, we’re deprived of the ability to think positively, when we continually focus on potential negative outcomes or surprises (“shocks”).

    For this reason, it has become more vital than ever that we all begin to consciously switch our focus from the negative, to the positive. It’s time we all grab hold of our own cerebral cortex, and give it a good shake to mix-up all the old habitual negative neural pathways that we’ve become only too comfortable pacing again and again. Make a conscious choice to see things in a positive light, and soon your consciousness will follow suit. Sounds eerily similar to the title of a Funkadelic album, right? The fact that it does only proves that this is not a new idea (the record in question is over 30 years old).

    But the idea’s validity not only remains valid, it’s more vitally important now than ever. In order to pull our collective consciousness out of the mire, it is becoming more and more important to “think positively.”

    And what better place to begin rebuilding a positive outlook, than within ourselves, and in our relationships? After all, the only relationship one can truly control is that which he has with himself. If we’ve learned anything from the budding discipline of quantum psychology (look here, too), it’s that ultimately, we control our own universe. Ultimately, we can decide to perceive our world in a myriad of different lights, a few of which happen to be positive, growth-oriented and fulfilled.

    If there’s a key to getting ourselves out of the doom and gloom, surely this is it.

     For my part, I plan to use this platform to post positive, rather than negative, observations, links, pathways and discussions, with the hope that a little nudging can go a long, long way. To start, here’s a thought to ruminate upon: In the light of our abilities to change the nature of our world through the way that we think about our surroundings, it seems that we’re damned lucky to have been blessed with this recession, and this overwhelming feeling of doom. After all, how can one learn to climb out of a hole that he doesn’t even know he’s in?