There’s a big part of us that doesn’t like chaos: we want order and simplicity and feeling like we’re on top of things and doing things the “right” way.
And so when things feel chaotic, we scramble for some kind of stability:
- When we feel overwhelmed and behwend, we might beat ourselves up and try to look for a system to get things under control.
- When someone is upset with us, we might not like the feeling of being judged and the uncertainty about how people see us, and so we might lash out at them or spin around a story for days about how terrible that person is.
- When plans don’t go how we hoped they would, we feel like we’re on unsteady ground, and we start criticizing ourselves or feeling like we’re doing things wrong and things are out of control, and it might bring a lot of stress in our lives.
- When we think about putting our work out there into the world (by writing a book or putting out an album, for example) … we worry about the shakiness of putting ourselves out to be judged, and might decide that we won’t be OK if that happens, because it just feels too scary, and so we put off putting my work out there, for years.
Do you relate to any of these examples? In fact, the uncertainty of our chaotic lives is perhaps the main cause of our anxiety, stress, frustration, self-doubt, fears, procrastination, distraction and more.
We know when we’re feeling this chaos when we’re reaching for a new tool, system, method, tactic, plan, expert, book on a topic … or our phones.