TRAP #11 - FEAR OF THE UNKNOWN
Welcome to the Small Jar Podcast, where we moms of teens find the power to step off the emotional rollercoaster between motherhood and the empty nest. I'm your host, Jennifer Collins. Episode number 79.
Hello, my friends. I got some news the other day that could literally change the trajectory of my life. And so I thought today I would tackle the mindset trap of the fear of the unknown.
Now, it occurs to me that it might seem like an odd topic to be addressing at this time of year. If you're listening just as this episode comes out, it's December and we're in the midst of the holidays. But truly, I believe this trap can creep up on us any time of the year.
Maybe there's even a little bit of extra wistfulness and longing that creeps up on us at this time of year, because we want so much to cherish the happy moments while we have them. Also, at this time of year, if you have a child in the later years of high school, you're either waiting on college decisions or you're gearing up for the application process. It's such an uncertain time for our children and for us.
It's amazing how short the runway looks before our children take flight and leave home. You may already have a child or two at college. You know, I don't think anything prepared me for the lack of visibility I have into my son's life now that he's at school.
I feel lucky that he shares some things, but I really only know what he tells me. I have no idea what his daily life looks like. I haven't met nearly any of the people he talks about as his close friends.
I have zero idea about how he's doing in school, other than what he tells us. There is so much unknown. But what is certain is that our kids' lives are marching forward, and increasingly in a way that seems like they're marching away from us.
Our thoughts about all of this can create excitement for us, but also fear. Believe it or not, I've had a few clients recently tell me that their children have recently gotten engaged. They're so happy for their children, love their future children in law, and yet there's so much that's uncertain.
You know, one of the most universal comments I've heard from many of my clients, well, believe it or not, there are a few things, but one of them is that my clients will say, I don't know what my life's going to look like after my kids leave home, or because of this or that circumstance. Another related comment is that they'll say, I can't imagine anything being as fulfilling in my life as raising kids has been. Look, I get it.
Once you have kids, it becomes your whole world. Even if you have a job on top of raising a family. Nothing else is as important as raising our kids.
You can feel like the truth when approaching the transition to the empty nest that we're on the brink of letting go of something that has been precious to us. And then what? So here we are on the 11th mindset trap for us as moms of teens, as we approach the empty nest. It's worth remembering that all of us fall into these traps, not just as moms.
In fact, we can see any of these traps play out with our teens, our partners, our friends, our own parents and siblings. Mindset traps are a very human experience because of the way our brains are designed to keep us safe and comfortable. But because we as moms of teens are dealing with so many circumstances that are changing or out of our control, I've been exploring some of the ways these traps can make us even more anxious and uncomfortable.
If you're just tuning in, you can learn about these traps in any order. No worries if you're starting with this one. So far, we've covered the mindset traps of perfectionism, catastrophizing, all or nothing thinking, labeling, validation-seeking, and many more.
So this week, the fear of the unknown. It's pretty self-explanatory, actually, fear of the unknown. And its impact, as you can imagine and may have experienced, is excessive worry, anxiety, or feeling a sense of apprehension about future events or outcomes.
I think it's important to remind ourselves that we don't ever know what our life is going to look like. It's kind of crazy that we go about our daily lives and we have a plan generally about what we're going to tackle for the day or the week or the month. And so we go about our lives plugging along with an expectation about what that near future is going to look like.
When you really think about it, that expectation about what will happen later this afternoon or later this week, that expectation is only a guess. It's a fiction that our minds have created based on what we've planned or what the typical course of a week looks like. And think about the life that we've lived with our kids up to this point.
Since the moment our kids were born, they've been growing and changing. It's been a constant part of our experience, even though we might not have realized it because we've spent so much of our time with our kids, especially when they were little. I always used to joke that I would get used to a particular stage of my kids' development and that's about the time when they would change a little, so I had to learn how to embrace that next stage.
Although it hasn't always been easy, these changes have in many ways been predictable. It's not like we knew what to expect exactly. Someone commented on a recent one of my posts that people don't talk enough about kids' brain development.
For sure, this is a big aspect of the changes we've faced with our kids, particularly now that our kids are teens and often responding in emotional and erratic ways because they're being ruled by their subconscious amygdala rather than their prefrontal cortex. Yet, you still don't really know how that's going to play out with your own individual child. Some teens are impulsive or moody.
Others are pleasant and compliant, at least for now. We'd like to think that their behavior is predictable, but we could be wrong about all of it. I think that's helpful to remember, particularly when our kids are moody, sullen, and closed off.
Our brains want to tell us that their behavior will go on forever and that they'll never open up to us. But again, how are we to really know? Even when we have general expectations about the future, they don't necessarily play out the way we think they will. The accuracy of our expectations about the future can vary widely, depending on many factors.
For example, we're much more likely to predict the future accurately if the future we're envisioning is short-term rather than long-term. Makes sense, right? Another factor that controls how accurately our expectations about the future match reality is the extent to which the future is dependent on our actions and choices, or whether they're dependent on other people's actions and choices, or alternatively dependent on other circumstances entirely out of our control. And let's come back to this issue of control in a minute.
Other factors that influence how well we predict the future include the complexity of the situation in front of us. For example, if I have dinner plans next week, the variables might be straightforward, limited to time, location, and who can attend. But if we're talking about a wedding, for example, one being planned by my future daughter-in-law in a town I don't know anything about, it's going to be much more difficult to envision what that future looks like.
There are so many variables. You may have heard about the butterfly effect. I think there have been movies about it, but it basically suggests that small changes can lead to significant and unpredictable outcomes in the future.
I think about how I met my husband. I actually dated a guy in college whose best friend ended up living in New York City at the same time I did. For some totally unknown reason, he gave me a call one day and invited me to apply to the investment bank he was working at.
It was a better bank than where I was. I interviewed there and I got a job. In fact, my future husband was supposed to interview me that day, but he didn't.
The butterfly effect of that one random call changed my life, introduced me to my husband, created my two beautiful boys. It's crazy to think about how much of an impact one call can make. We've even joked that if my husband had interviewed me, he might not have hired me.
Although we can never really know what the impact of our day-to-day choices will be, we find comfort in having a general expectation about what our life will look like. But I think it's interesting to remind ourselves that when we say the words to ourselves, I don't know what my life is going to look like in the future. It's interesting to just consider the reality that you never really know.
And I don't say this to scare you. I offer this simply to point out that we lull ourselves into this sense of certainty about the future because our brains want to keep us safe. From an evolutionary standpoint, our brains have developed the sensitivity to potential threats as a survival strategy.
Uncertain or unknown situations pose risks. And so being cautious in the face of uncertainty actually has the effect of keeping us alive and healthy. Our brains assess risks and then seek solutions, seek safety.
Uncertainty can be uncomfortable because it introduces a degree of unpredictability to our lives. And this unpredictability is interpreted by our brain as a potential source of stress. Our brains want to avoid discomfort.
And so they prefer familiar situations where the level of perceived risk is lower. Our brains also want to be efficient, but uncertainty can require more mental effort. Think about it.
When the future is uncertain, our brains have to work to gather information and sort through predictions. They have to work much harder. In all these ways, the fear of the future is our brain's way of trying to keep us safe, comfortable, and to help our brains and our minds be more efficient.
It all makes perfect sense. But there's a downside. Although our brain's fear response has played a critical role in our long-term survival as a species, in today's modern society, not all uncertainties pose immediate threats.
Yet our brains and even our bodies act as if they're facing life or death situations when they're afraid. So the brain's fear response is a complex physiological and psychological reaction. And I think it's worth taking you through this to really understand what's happening.
Our subconscious mind is constantly scanning our environment, looking for danger. And when it perceives a risk, we experience this fear response so quickly we don't even realize that this is happening. But as soon as our brain decides there's a threat, it signals the body to prepare for fight or flight.
The part of our brains that's most reactive to potential dangers is the amygdala, which is the emotional processing center in the brain that plays a central role in the fear response. So once the amygdala senses danger, it signals to the hypothalamus to release adrenaline and cortisol. It's the release of the adrenaline that triggers that fight or flight response.
And when this is happening in your body, you'll likely experience an increase in your heart rate, an increase in your blood pressure, and your blood flow to your muscles. It's amazing to just appreciate for a moment how incredibly complex and adaptive our brains and bodies are when it comes to survival and adaptability. Not only does the fight or flight response in our body prepare us to literally either confront danger or escape, but our brain also heightens its awareness to focus on the threat.
It actually heightens the brain's ability to capture memories of the experience. And this is critical to our ability to learn from our experiences. Basically, our brain is teaching us to learn so that we can avoid similar threats in the future.
Although all of these complex changes are happening within our bodies when we experience the fear response, this collection of these physical and mental impacts is what we call the emotion of fear. We might label it as anxiety, dread, or panic, but in essence this is what's happening on a physical level. The emotion is literally a physical sensation of hormone changes and increased blood flow.
I should also add an entirely normal experience, one that our bodies are designed to handle. Now I mentioned the amygdala is part of the brain's automatic and rapid response to threats. We can't really control this part of our brain, which is another reason why the fear response is in many ways out of our control.
That said, our brain's prefrontal cortex has the ability to regulate the fear response by helping us assess the relevance of the perceived danger we're facing. Here's an example. If someone jumps out at you from behind a door, your brain or your amygdala will automatically initiate the fear response.
But as soon as you see that it's just your friend and there's no real danger, your prefrontal cortex gets involved to downregulate the fear response, basically telling your brain and body everything's fine. There's no life or death situation here. A few episodes I covered the mindset trap of emotional reasoning.
This is when we use our feelings as evidence that there's a problem. In other words, I feel something and therefore I think that must mean those feelings are based on some objective reality, something true out there in the world. So think about the implications of this when we feel fear.
Now remember, our fear response is an automatic reaction triggered by our amygdala's perception of a threat. This could be an actual danger, like running into a bear on a hiking trail. Or it could simply be a theoretical danger, like uncertainty, what might happen in the future.
Or it could even be a non-danger, like the jump scare or a roller coaster ride. The amygdala's response and then our adrenal and physical response to that perceived threat is the same, no matter whether the danger is real or pretend. So think about how much of a problem it can be when we use our fear or that sensation of fear in our body as evidence that there's a problem.
I'll admit it, I've done it. If you drop your child off at a party and you have that bad feeling, you text your child at college and they don't respond. You start to feel anxiety and wonder if there's a problem.
You find evidence that your child's been drinking or experimenting with drugs and now whenever they go out, you're on alert. You perceive danger. And look, it only takes a quick scroll through social media to validate all of your fears.
We're not making it up. There are risks out there in the world. And yet there's so much we don't know.
From what our kids are really doing when they're not with us to how they choose to handle themselves. What decisions they'll really make when it comes down to making hard choices. And this is just the fear of the unknown in our current daily lives.
What about when our kids go to college? Where will they end up? How will they handle rejection from their top choice college if that happens? How will they keep up with their work in college? Will they be far away? How often will they visit? Will they call? And then there's the fear of what happens to us. What does it look like to be a mom to a kid no longer living under your roof? Do I become irrelevant? Will I spend my days doing laundry? If I were to go out and get a job, would anyone take me seriously? Or maybe worse, they'll make me work 40 hours a week and I'm honestly too tired for that. But who will hire me part-time? Who will hire me anyway? So much is unknown.
And our brains can perceive all of it as a risk, as a threat. So what happens when our brains perceive a threat and then fall into the trap of the fear of the unknown? I would liken this to our prefrontal cortex basically validating our fear. As in, yes, there's a threat and there's something to worry about.
Now on the one hand, we can have this thought and it doesn't have to be a problem. But what can sometimes happen, and raise your hand if you've experienced this, don't worry, no one can see you, but we go down into a downward spiral of worry. We can engage in catastrophic thinking, another mindset trap, where we imagine the worst case scenario.
We might also overestimate the actual threat. For example, we could think about our teens smoking pot and then immediately have them in our minds trying other drugs or developing a drug addiction. Once we're caught in this downward spiral, it's almost self-reinforcing.
The more you panic, the more you panic. Believe me, I've been there. Time goes on and the problem only becomes bigger in our minds.
The anxiety becomes more pervasive. Now while our brains are trying to keep us safe by perceiving danger, we also don't want to feel anxiety and fear. So our natural response is to try to eliminate the threat.
And here's why the teen years are so fraught for us. Because when our kids were little, it was so much easier to eliminate the majority of the threats. We were all laughing over Thanksgiving that I still have children's locks on the liquor cabinets.
And when my boys were little, I got to know their friends and their mothers. I established boundaries around use of computers and screen time. I didn't give my boys any privacy in terms of what was in their backpacks or in their rooms.
What I had when they were little was control, or at least enough control where I was able to keep many of my catastrophic fears at bay because I could minimize risks. Now, I only know a small handful of my younger son's friends. I don't know any of my son's friends who are in college.
I don't know what they do when they're out with their friends other than what they tell me. I will still provide reminders about safety and smart choices, but at the end of the day, I no longer have control. I no longer have any way to mitigate many of the risks I regularly perceive my boys might be facing.
Realistically, we have no control over our kids anymore. And yet, in an attempt to alleviate our anxiety and fear, we can be prone to try to establish control. Now, let me preface all of this by saying it's not my job to tell you how to parent your teens.
My role as a life coach is to help you see your mind so that you can really assess how you want to show up for your teen and in your life. Because the way we think and perceive the circumstances of our lives creates our feelings, and our feelings govern how we act, when we're trying to mitigate risk by gaining control from the emotion of fear. What happens? Again, no judgment, but what do we do? We might monitor our teens.
Today, there are so many ways to do this. Life360, find my friends, put a tracker on cars, security cameras in the house. We could search our kids' rooms.
Look, when our kids were little, we of course would know where they were at all times. We knew every inch of their bedrooms because we were the ones keeping it organized. The question is, at what age do we stop? I don't think there's one right answer.
It depends on you and your teen. But at some point, it becomes a question of privacy. For sure, our kids are going to be ready for it before we are.
But in my experience with this, I wonder how useful this additional information really is to us. Do I really need to know where my son in college is sleeping, or how fast he's driving? Does that information put me at ease or add fuel to the downward spiral of my worry? How else do we try to reduce our anxiety by establishing control over risks with our teens? We can micromanage their decisions. We can set up strict rules.
We can remind them over and over and over and over again. I remember a particularly trying time with one of my sons, and I would literally wake up in the middle of the night thinking of a different strategy to try to convince him to change his behavior. It was almost like I thought if I could just approach him in the right way, he'd say, oh, you're right, mom.
I'll totally do what you want me to do. That conversation never happened. Now, I've been talking about ways we try to reduce the fear of the unknown with our teens by asserting control.
But how do we do this with our uncertainty over the future and our lives as we approach the empty nest? One of the biggest ways I've seen women do this is that they want to find new purpose. It's so common that we look ahead and we see a void. Our lives have been dedicated to our children, and once they leave, what comes next becomes a big source of fear and uncertainty.
So it stands to reason that the way to mitigate that fear is to fill the void, right? Again, it's like creating control. If I just have new purpose, then I'll feel better. And certainly, once we've decided on a new path and we're all in, we can create a new sense of well-being because we're thinking, this is what I want to be doing.
But what I've found is that you actually have to manage and work through your fear of the unknown before finding that new thing. Think about it. You fear the future.
So how will you know what the next right thing is? When you're thinking about your present reality with your kids as the gold standard and the future as this bleak, uncertain blob, you're not likely to jump in with two feet. In fact, fear of the unknown can also impact decision-making and keep you even more stuck and unable to move forward. So although our fear response is a normal, helpful, and critically important aspect of our human experience and survival, it also can leave us feeling terrible.
The critical question with this mindset trap is how do you engage your prefrontal cortex, your conscious mind, in the regulation of your fear response so that you decide on purpose how you want to respond to the unknown. This is the key to getting out of this mindset trap. If someone jumps out in front of you to scare you as a joke, your unconscious mind immediately recognizes that there is no real threat and then actually initiates a parasympathetic response in your body to relax.
This counteracts the spike in cortisol and adrenaline triggered by your fear response. This is your body working perfectly. So why then do we make it mean something is really wrong when our body exhibits a fear response as we contemplate the unknown? Or maybe more interestingly, why do we sometimes perceive the unknown as a big threat and then the rest of our lives and the rest of our future that is also unknown, we don't? Remember, everything is uncertain.
The future, even tomorrow, is literally unknown. But we're not running around catastrophizing about tomorrow just because it's a new day, right? And look, I get it. Life with teens and this big transition we're facing, it's a lot.
Our brains see many risks. There is so much more that feels unknown. There's so many more variables.
The situations are so much more complex. And it may be that there are things that we need to do to mitigate some of the risks we see. There may be a need to step into our kids' lives.
You may want to look for new purpose. Remember, acceptance does not mean passivity. Just because we acknowledge that our lives are uncertain doesn't mean that we need to sit back, do nothing, and be passive.
But at the same time, are you taking action from an unsupervised fear of uncertainty or from a conscious decision? The difference is everything. It impacts the quality of the relationship we have with our teens. It impacts the quality of the relationship we have with ourselves.
And when it comes down to it, this is the work of my coaching program, Mom 2.0. How are you going to decide to face the unknown? I started this episode telling you that I got some news that could change the trajectory of my life. There is so much about it that's uncertain and unknown. So much over which I have zero control.
But I have the ability to decide how I want to show up in that life, come what may.
Until next time, friends.
If you enjoyed this podcast, please leave a review and check out our coaching program, Mom 2.0, at www.thesmalljar.com. You have more power than you think, my friend.
