“When you say ‘fear of the unknown’, that is the definition of fear; fear is the unknown, fear is what you do not know, and it’s genetically within us so that we feel safe. We feel scared of the woods because we’re not familiar with it, and that keeps you safe.”
- M. Night Shyamalan
My brain is weird. Not that my brain is weirder than any other brain; brains are weird. Brains of people that tend to worry a lot are the worst. It is reassuring to know that my brain ain’t the worst, but it doesn’t make it any easier to deal with. It stresses if you don’t have a plan. It stresses if you do have a plan. Good news only appeases for a few minutes before the brain starts worrying about this good news. I mean seriously, can’t you just ride the good-news wave for more than 2 minutes brain??
I got some good news this week: I got a new job. It is wonderful news; it is exactly what I was looking for and it is super exciting. And yet my brain is still worried. Mind me, we did change the track: we went from “what if?” to “how on earth?”. The “what if” track was starting to drive me crazy, so I am glad we changed. I just wished we took a break between the 2. I did find a new job in another country requiring me to move in the middle of a pandemic, I’ll give that to my brain: it will be a bit of a puzzle. But maybe, just maybe, we did not have to start worrying about it straight away. It is all because of my need for cognitive closure.
The need for cognitive closure is you as a kid asking your parents if you’re almost there yet. It is your brain needing to limit the number of things it doesn’t know and have an idea of what’s coming next, so it doesn’t have to think about one thousand and one possible scenarios and one thousand and one more for good measure. The need for cognitive closure is your brain fighting its fear of the unknown. The extend of that need will vary between individual; some people do fine with a limited amount of information while others need to know every detail. I’d like to think I’m somewhere in the middle, slightly more on the need-to-know side maybe. The need for cognitive closure has been broken down into 5 domains: desire for predictability, preference for order and structure, discomfort with ambiguity, decisiveness, and close-mindedness. It was first defined in the 1990s and can help explain why some people are more susceptible than others to endorse some conspiracy theories: they provide answers. Answers that many will dispute or know to be wrong, but if the alternative is “we don’t know”, some people would rather believe bunk than not have an answer. If that can explain why some people believe the COVID-19 pandemic originates from a foreign laboratory, it has nothing to do with my current situation.
Not surprisingly for people that know me, I quite like order (especially in work-related situations). I do well with a clear schedule and defined tasks, but I can adapt and I am open-minded. I don’t faff around too much when I need to make a decision, but I like to have some form of data to base my decisions on. I think that can be summed up by saying that I have a scientific mind with a crafty twist to it. And in the current context, I don’t mind big changes and I am ready to move to a new country during a pandemic, I’d just like some reliable information to be able to organise everything. Needless to say, that it is like asking for the directions to Neverland at the moment, and I think my chances to get to Neverland are significantly higher than having visibility into the future.
The rational part of my brain knows we are in a wait-and-see kind of situation, but weirdly enough, the rational part of my brain is not the dominant voice in my head lately. I know I should focus on what I can control, i.e. sorting out through my stuff, and not on what I can’t, i.e. when the lockdown will be over. But knowing it and applying it are 2 very different things. So, I focus on something else entirely: reading, doing crochet and going for runs. I trick myself into doing a Spring cleaning that will conveniently help me prepare for the move without labelling it as “start packing”. I will probably have to come back to organise a proper leaving party (or multiple of them in order to limit the amount of people gathered at once?) but that’s really not a bad thing, is it?
My brain is weird. But my brain has learnt a lot about itself during the pandemic and I’m sure that all the voices in my head will eventually agree that it’s a great thing, it is scary-but-not-too-scary, it is a good-kind-of-unknow and that we will be fine. Eventually…
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References:
If you’re curious about the extent of your need for closure, I suggest taking the need for closure test: http://terpconnect.umd.edu/~hannahk/NFC_Scale.html
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