Facing an unknown future is on all our minds. I’m reminded of the adage: “Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t.” Recently, awaiting medical results for someone I love, I was swamped by feelings of uncertainty and apprehension—the devil I didn’t know. Waiting and wondering felt more charged than learning the results, good or not so good. (Thank goodness the outcome was positive!) Once I had the facts, I trusted my warrior self would step forward and cope with whatever the future held. Perhaps this resonates with you? My experience inspired this blog to enlarge our understanding of uncertainty and offer some tools to ease distress.

Uncertainty. Why does this word make us shudder? One reason is that we are living in a time of accelerated and radical change. When our personal and communal lives feel at risk, when uncertainty is a frequent visitor, anxiety is likely to follow. As Dr. Mazen Kheirbek, an associate professor in UC San Francisco’s Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, tells us, “Uncertainty is not knowing what is going to happen.”[i] The combination of uncertainty and threat generates anxiety.

Evolution has wired us to adapt to uncertainty but what in our brains activates the sense of being uncertain? Researchers at the University of Cambridge in the UK have been investigating this in humans and developed tests that demonstrated that the neuromodulator noradrenaline is the key chemical that underpins behavioral and computational responses to uncertainty. Their research focused on a small area in the brain stem, the locus coeruleus, that regulates noradrenaline and enhances sensory learning.[ii]  Another set of researchers at University College London created human experiments that found two other neuromodulators, acetylcholine and dopamine, which affect uncertainty.[iii] Understanding of how these neurotransmitters work is evolving.

Our brains are agile and can sometimes assess an uncertain situation by remembering and comparing it to a past experience—Oh, when my partner goes quiet like this, I know they are about to explode; I’d better change the subject—but for other situations we can’t rely on past experience. They require quick thinking and a new approach to uncertainty. Understanding how our brains adapt to volatile and changing situations will be ever more important as food and water scarcity, climate disasters, wars, and migrating populations challenge us at an unprecedented pace.

When we feel uncertain, our brains are trying to figure out how to balance risk and loss. Our capacity to decide is hindered by doubt, anxiety, and avoidance of a perceived threat. Anyone who has waited for medical results for themselves or loved ones might feel, as I did, that when we know what we are facing, even when it’s difficult news, we can make a plan and take action. We are no longer holding our breath.

According to Dr. Aoiefe O’ Donovan, an associate professor of psychiatry at the UCSF Weill Institute for Neurosciences who studies the ways psychological stress can lead to mental disorders like post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD): “Uncertainty means ambiguity, which means that we have to expend effort in trying to predict what will happen in addition to preparing to deal with all of the different outcomes.”[iv] The stress of uncertainty, especially when prolonged, is among the most insidious stressors we experience as human beings, said O’Donovan. But, when faced with these feelings, it can help us to recognize that gnawing uncertainty is the amplification of a cognitive mechanism that’s essential to our survival.

At her Life Events Lab at the University of California, Riverside, Dr. Kate Sweeny focuses her research on “high stakes waiting.” “[Psychologists] don’t know that much about waiting and uncertainty,” according to Sweeny. In 2019, her lab looked into whether engaging in “flow,” a state of complete immersion in one activity, helped people during anxiety-provoking periods. They found that engaging in “flow” boosts a person’s sense of well-being and makes the waiting period easier.[v]

To answer questions about how we function, science researchers probe the structure and mechanisms of our brains. Spiritual traditions address the nature of being from a different perspective. Their inquiry is not centered on neuroscience or molecular biology but on how to live a full and joyous life that includes difficult or unpleasant experiences. These traditions help us recognize that uncertainty can have a positive side. Uncertainty can be an aid to curiosity, creativity, and inner peace. When we are overwhelmed with feelings of uncertainty and dread as we face an unpredictable future, we can expand our perspective and consider reframing our belief: what we habitually regard as a distressing state can be a benevolent friend.

In the Buddhist practices, uncertainty is a certainty and considered a wise teacher.[vi] The wisdom of uncertainty is that it teaches us that the nature of reality is impermanence; all things arise and disappear. All things are transient. Flux and change animate the universe and are not under our control. No matter how careful we are crossing a street, we cannot control the maniac driver who sweeps around the corner and hits us. No matter how much we exercise or eat broccoli, we cannot control the time or manner of our death. These are uncomfortable truths. Most of us have not been schooled in trusting the unknown and surrendering to life as it presents itself in the moment. This is the challenge of “calm abiding” as we meet uncertainty.

The benefits of yoga, breathing exercises, and meditation to settle a jittery nervous system are well known. From a place of stillness, we become aware of a larger presence within us that observes life as it ebbs and flows without constricting into fear. We simply observe and note this is the way life is—unpredictable.

A specific Buddhist practice that helps ground us during times of uncertainty is Metta. Considered a concentration meditation, it is also called a loving-kindness practice. When we focus on a repetition of phrases, or a mantra, or the sensations of breathing, the frontal part of our brain responsible for attention is activated and the areas responsible for excitatory emotional response stop overfiring. The body relaxes. The Greater Good Center, Science-based Practices for a Meaningful Life at the University of California, Berkeley has a seven-minute Loving-Kindness-Meditation that can get you started.

Can you think of a time when uncertainty sparked a sense of aliveness and adventure in you? Or perhaps an insight arose during a period of waiting and not knowing? Uncertainty begs for a playful attitude toward life, invites the inner child to step forward without fear of success or failure. Uncertainty calls on us to do something that may be difficult but rewarding: to embrace unpredictability as a constant companion

[i] Reynolds, Brandon R., “There’s a Lot of Uncertainty Right Now — This is What Science Says That Does to Our Minds, Bodies,” UCSF News, November 1, 2020.

[ii] Lawson, Rebecca P., et al., “The Computational, Pharmacological, and Physiological Determinants of Sensory Learning under Uncertainty,” Current Biology, January 11, 2021.

[iii] Marshall, Louise, et al., “Pharmacological Fingerprints of Contextual Uncertainty,” PLOS Biology, November 15, 2016.

[iv] Reynolds, Brandon R. Ibid.

[v] Rankin, K., Walsh, L., and Sweeny, K., “A Better Distraction: Exploring the Benefits of Flow During Uncertain Waiting Periods,” Emotion, Vol 19, No. 5, 2019.

[vi] Rinpoche, Anam Thubten, “The Wisdom of Uncertainty,” Buddhist Door, April 17, 2020.

This post appeared in a slightly different form on Dale’s blog on Psychology Today. You can find all of Dale’s blog posts for Psychology Today at “Transcending the Past.”

If you found this post interesting, you may also want to read “What Ancient Traditions Can Teach about Coping with Change,” “Can Mindfulness Bring About Real Change?” and “Waiting: a Source of Anxiety or Opportunity for Discovery?”

Keep up with everything Dale is doing by subscribing to her newsletter.

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Uncertainty is a word that pops up frequently in conversations. The pandemic, gun violence, international conflagrations, and the escalating number of climate disasters have increased our concerns about safety and heightened our awareness of our inability to prevent or control many current challenges. Global and societal changes that affect us personally are occurring at an accelerating pace, often without warning. No wonder we’re invaded by pervasive anxiety and feelings of vulnerability and isolation.

We know that stress reduction techniques like meditation, yoga, exercise, and walks in nature mediate the sympathetic nervous system’s stress response of fight, flight, or freeze. Another time-honored but much-overlooked modality that can restore a general sense of well-being is the reading and writing of poetry.

Poetry reconnects us with the beauty and goodness of the world, while also naming its difficulties. Rather than dismissing hardships, poetry calls them out and reminds us that others have also lost a loved one, experienced disappointments, endured sleeplessness, lived with depression—have suffered as we now suffer. Poetry allows us to identify our personal turbulences, breaks our feeling of isolation, and affirms our sense of belonging. Poetry steers us toward wisdom and acceptance.

Science agrees. The International Arts & Mind Lab at Johns Hopkins University offers convincing evidence from a number of studies that poetry is good for our health.[i] A 2021 study at a Rhode Island hospital found that hospitalized children who read or wrote poetry experienced decreased negative emotions such as fear, sadness, anger, worry, and fatigue.[ii] Another study from 2013 in the Philippines showed that guided poetry writing sessions significantly lessened depression in a group of traumatized and abused adolescents.[iii] Reading a poem that speaks to us, we realize we are not alone.

Consider “The Guest House” by Jalal al-Din Rumi, a thirteenth-century Sufi mystic and one of the most cherished poets today. Written over eight hundred years ago, the poem invites us to view all of life’s experiences and the feelings that arise from them as temporary visitors in the “guest house” of self. With patience and compassion, Rumi counsels us to recognize that even negative moods are precious teachers for our growth.

In The Body Keeps the Score, Bessel van der Kolk describes the effects of traumatic stress on mind and body. I suggest that the body keeps the score on pleasure, too. One of our earliest and most fundamental pleasures as humans is the sensory delight of language. The lullabies, rhymes, and nightly prayers of our youth linger in the recesses of our brains. Some of us wished upon stars. Wish I may, wish I might, make this wish come true tonight. Some of us played clapping games. Miss Mary Mack, Mack, Mack/all dressed in black, black, black. Some of us made up silly limericks. A flea and a fly in a flue/Were imprisoned so what could they do/Said the flea, let us fly/Said the fly, let us flee/So they flew through a flaw in the flue.

A 2019 study in Finland measured the surface brain activity of 21 newborn babies listening to regular speech, music, and nursery rhymes. Only the nursery rhymes produced a significant brain response when the rhymes were altered, suggesting that the infants’ brains were trying to predict what rhyme should have occurred.[iv]

Our innocent delight at nonsensical rhymes and metrical rhythms brings a smirk now, but as children those sounds provided sensorial pleasure to our tongues, lips, and ears. In a 1978 essay called “Goatfoot, Milktongue, Twinbird: Infantile Origins of Poetic Form,” the poet Donald Hall identified the origins of poetic form in the preverbal babbling of infants, in the mouth-pleasure of sounds and sucking, and muscle-pleasure of clapping, tapping, repetition.[v] (When faced with a cranky baby, try a round of peek-a-boo, repeating the word itself, or cradling the baby while swaying and singing a rhythmic tune.)

We have forgotten how intimately we are connected to poetic meter. Iambic pentameter, the ta-DUM ta-DUM ta-DUM of one unstressed and one stressed syllable in a five-beat line, mimics the percussive beat of our hearts. In his ground-breaking book, The Master and his Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, Iain McGilchrist cites numerous instances of how across cultures people display a general appreciation for art, including poetry, which suggests that the brain has a non-socially constructed intuitive capacity to apprehend “beauty and the understanding of its expression through art.”[vi]

Are we somehow aware that there is something beyond its grasp? The great Swiss depth psychologist Carl Jung believed we have an inherent desire to connect with the deeper mysteries of existence, what he called “the religious attitude,” that creates a bridge between our inner world and the vast boundless outer one.

Especially during times of need, poetry acts as a bridge and invites us to participate in a greater understanding of our travails, and awakens our perceptions to beauty and joy, right here, right now. In “The Summer Day,” Mary Oliver calls out praise for the natural world and urges us to find our place in the natural order. Like Rumi, she asks the reader to recognize life’s preciousness and encourages us to consider how we might make the most of that precious gift. Mary Oliver once said, “I got saved by the beauty of the world.” This is the advice her poems offer us, to approach all experiences with gratitude and wonder.

Think of poetry as a portal to a timeless place where we find solace, companionship, enlightenment, enchantment, mystery, connection, wisdom, humor, healing. Poetry, especially contemporary poetry, names the disconnects as well, where we have gone blind to existential threats and personal sorrows that threaten to overwhelm us. With its adherence to precision of language, its concision of thought and meaning, its naming and interrogation of experience, poetry, in a small space, usually one page, packs a wallop.

To enter a poem is to escape the clamor of the ordinary world. Poems can be reminders of things we know but have forgotten. Painful experiences are reframed and given a new understanding by a poem. That’s because poetry reflects a rich brew of the sweetness and bitterness that is life. It refreshes our temporal minds and offers invented landscapes of imagery.

Rumi and Mary Oliver lived centuries apart and yet they speak to each over, and to us, across time. It’s a long way from Hickory Dickory Dock to T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland, but a direct line exists between the formal poem and our wiring for pleasure in pattern, rhythm, and form. Poetry is not an escape from but an escape to: a place to land, a refuge.

For your own health and peace of mind, I encourage you to take up a friendship with poetry.

[i] Sima, Richard, “More Than Words: Why Poetry is Good for Our Health,” International Arts + Mind Lab (IAM Lab), Johns Hopkins Medicine, March 11, 2021

[ii] Chung, Erica et al., “Effects of a Poetry Intervention on Emotional Wellbeing in Hospitalized Pediatric Patients,” Hospital Pediatrics, American Academy of Pediatrics, March 1, 2021

[iii] Brillantes-Evangelista, Grace, “An evaluation of visual arts and poetry as therapeutic interventions with abused adolescents,” The Arts in Psychotherapy, February, 2013.

[iv] Suppanen, Emma, et al., “Rhythmic structure facilitates learning from auditory input in newborn infants,” Infant Behavior and Development, November, 2019.

[v] Hall, Donald, “Goatfoot, Milktongue, Twinbird: Infantile Origins of Poetic Form,” in Goatfoot Milktongue Twinbird: Interviews, Essays, and Notes on Poetry, 1970-76 (Poets On Poetry), University of Michigan Press, 1978.

[vi] McGilchrist, Iain, The Master and his Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, Yale University Press, 2019.

Poetry resources: Poetry Foundation  Academy of American Poets   International Poetry

This post appeared in a slightly different form on Dale’s blog on Psychology Today. You can find all of Dale’s blog posts for Psychology Today at “Transcending the Past.”

If you enjoyed this post, you may also enjoy Dale’s recently published collection of poems, M, or these other blog posts about poetry: “Daughters Discovering Mothers: the Yearning for Identity,” “How I write; love and forgiveness,“ and “Recovering from Trauma: Finding the Words that Heal.”

Keep up with everything Dale is doing by subscribing to her newsletter.

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Imagine a black sack thrown over your head. Imagine your arms and legs bound, your body injected with a drug that wipes out thoughts, flattens feelings, and numbs senses. This is depression.

Depression is called the dark night of the soul for good reason. Depression leads us into the night world, a world of shadows, emptiness, and blurry vision. You feel lost, lonely and alone, mired in the quicksand of sadness, vulnerable to thoughts of failure and unworthiness. “We do not see things as they are, we see them as we are,” says a Talmudic expression. Through the lens of depression, the world is saturated with gloom.

One way to understand the lived experience of depression is to see it acted out symbolically in story form. Myths and fairytales show us the collective (and archetypal) universal patterns of the human psyche. I may have “my depression” and you, “yours,” but throughout the ages, worldwide, depression has plagued the human race.

One of the Greek Homeric hymns, the “Hymn to Demeter,” gives an early and vivid picture of depression. It tells the story of Persephone, Demeter and Zeus’s daughter, whom Hades, god of the underworld and brother of Zeus, falls in love with. When Hades asks Zeus’ leave to marry her, Zeus knows Demeter would never agree and says he would neither give nor withhold his consent. So, one day, while Persephone is gathering flowers in a meadow, the ground splits open and Hades springs forth and abducts her, dragging her down into his kingdom against her will. The unwilling bride screams to Zeus, her father, to save her, but he ignores her pleas. Demeter, a goddess herself, hears her daughter’s cries and also begs Zeus for aid, but he refuses to intervene.

Separated from her daughter, Demeter rages at the gods for allowing Persephone’s capture and rape. Her grief is “terrible and savage.” Disguised as an old woman, she roams the earth, neither eating, drinking, nor bathing while she searches for her child. During her time of mourning, the earth lies fallow.

“Then she caused a most dreadful and cruel year for mankind over the all-nourishing earth: the ground would not make the seed sprout, for rich-crowned Demeter kept it hid. In the fields the oxen drew many a curved plough in vain, and much white barley was cast upon the land without avail. So she would have destroyed the whole race of man with cruel famine.” “Hymn to Demeter,” translated from Greek by Hugh G. Evelyn-White.

As Demeter pines for her daughter, so too, during depression, do we yearn for a lost part of ourselves, for it seems that our spirited aliveness has deserted us, our appetite for living kidnapped and dragged down into the house of death. With our instincts blunted, we sink into darkness, and experience the desolation of barren landscape. Like the grieving Demeter, our enthusiasm lost, our life-giving energy depleted, we fall into despair. This feeling of isolation is a signature of depression and runs deep in those who try to articulate their condition and reach out for help.

As the story continues, Zeus’s mounting fear that if he does not reunite mother and daughter nothing will ever grow again on the land finally propels his intervention. He orders Hermes, messenger of the gods, into the underworld to bring Persephone back. Hades is surprisingly gracious in agreeing to her return. Inconsolable during her stay in the underworld, Persephone has yet to eat anything. Before she leaves, Hades urges her to eat at least three pomegranate seeds. Distracted by her joy at leaving, Persephone does so – and thereby consigns herself to return to Hades for three months every year. Had she not eaten the fruit of the underworld, she would have been able to stay with her mother forever.

When we enter the space of depression, it seems we will never “get out,” but as the myth reveals, nature is cyclic. The myth of Demeter and Persephone originates in ancient fertility cults and women’s mysteries, and is associated with harvest and the annual vegetation cycles. Symbolically, for a quarter of the year, while Persephone is in the underworld, lifeless winter prevails. When she returns to earth, spring advances, a time of rebirth. But depressive cycles are not nearly as predictable as the seasons, and yet we might consider our time in the underworld as periods of incubation. While winter’s colorless landscape may suggest death, beneath the ground roots, seeds, and bulbs are dormant, not dead. They are busy with the business of storing nutrients for the coming season.

For plants, winter’s stillness is necessary before spring’s renewal. Depression, too, can be viewed as a time of going inward and down into the depths, and can be a generative and creative interlude during which the psyche renews itself in the slower rhythms of dark days. Many artists attest to depressive episodes that prefigure a creative breakthrough. An astonishing number of famous artists, writers, and statesmen as diverse as Charles Darwin, Friedrich Nietzsche, Winston Churchill, Hans Christian Andersen, Abraham Lincoln, and Georgia O’Keefe have described experiencing depression.

Little is written about Persephone’s life in the underworld, but one thing is clear, she does not die. Quite the opposite. She is given the honorific title Queen of the Underworld. This suggests her movement “to below” is one of transformation and the acquisition of special gifts and powers. Depression may feel as if parts of us have died, and yet is it possible depression opens us to another level of deep experience, one that matures us and brings new wisdom?

When depression drags us away from the lively day world, we might remember Persephone. The darkness of the underworld may provide a special quality of illumination not possible in the glaring, horn-honking, digitally-frenzied daylight. To consider depression as an expression of loss, grief, mourning, and inevitability of mortality is to bring it into the realm of the human heart. We are more than our genetic predisposition and our biochemistry; we are conscious creatures capable of discovering light in the darkness.

If myths allow us to look into “the heart of the matter,” then neuroscience allows us to peer into the actual matter of our brains. Dr. Richard J. Davidson, founder of the Center for Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, has made it his life’s work to investigate brain (neuro) plasticity, and how we can improve our wellbeing through the development of certain skills, including meditation.

In his groundbreaking book, The Emotional Life of Your Brain: How Its Unique Patterns Affect the Way You Think, Feel, and Live—and How You Can Change Them, Dr. Davidson and his co-author Sharon Begley offer an in-depth view of how our brains respond to different emotions and provide strategies to help balance or strengthen specific areas of brain circuitry.

The experience of depression differs from person to person. With the aid of fMRI imaging, Dr. Davidson has been able to pinpoint dysfunctional areas of the brain and correlate them with patient’s symptoms. Under the subheading “A Brain Taxonomy of Depression,” Dr. Davidson identifies three subcategories of depression. One group of depressed patients had difficulty recovering from adversity while another group had difficulty regulating their emotions in a context-appropriate way. The third group was unable to sustain positive emotions. Different patterns of brain activity were noted for each group.

Dr. Davidson is optimistic. His book offers a questionnaire to help readers figure out their emotional “style” and gives exercises that build skills to improve brain functioning. Sufferers of depression need hope. Dr. Davidson’s excitement about what he is learning in the laboratory is palpable and his hope contagious.

Archetypal myths and brain science may seem disconnected, but each presents its own form of wisdom, one through images and story, the other through investigatory science. Demeter’s suffering, the barren land, Persephone’s descent into darkness lodge in our imagination and dreams and recommend that we look into our own lives to discover the source of our grief. Neuroscience advances our knowledge of brain anatomy and its relationship to our feelings and emotions. Each perspective provides a potentially valuable way to examine and understand our experience of depression.

This post appeared in a slightly different form on Dale’s blog on Psychology Today. You can find all of Dale’s blog posts for Psychology Today at “Transcending the Past.”

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