You Don't Have To Solve The Unknown

(soft music) Headspace Studio. Hi, it's Dora, and welcome to Radio Headspace. I'm so glad you're here. Have you ever noticed that when you're stressed, when something is unresolved or uncertain, you go into this mode of trying to find the answers? You start asking people, researching, scrolling, seeking, and somehow at the end of all of that, you feel more wound up than when you started. I've been sitting with that a lot lately. I've been contemplating going back to school, looking at new certifications and new trainings, and what I've noticed is that when I'm in the middle of that uncertainty, the not knowing what to do, the mind just goes. It hunts, it searches, and the more it searches, the more dysregulated I feel. And yet, somehow I can't stop. Ironically enough, I was in a somatic training recently, when the teacher shared something so profound. She said that our greatest strengths when we are dysregulated become our greatest weaknesses. And for me, one of my greatest strengths is curiosity, the desire to learn, to seek, and to explore. But when I am dysregulated, that curiosity goes into hyperdrive. It becomes this insatiable hunger that feels productive, but often isn't. And what I've come to understand is that the seeking itself isn't the problem. It's the state that we're in when we seek. The opportunity and invitation is to regulate first and then seek. So there I am, laptop open, 15 tabs, an astrology reading in one window and a Reddit thread about grad school in another. And at some point, somewhere around tab 12, I looked up from the screen and realized I had no idea how long I had been sitting there. My shoulders were up around my ears, my jaw was clenched. I was exhausted and simultaneously more agitated than when I started. I had been searching for an answer, and instead I found 300 more questions, and that's when it clicked. I wasn't researching, I was hunting. And my nervous system didn't know the difference between that and actual survival. This is what researchers call our seeking system, one of the oldest circuits in the brain driven by dopamine, responsible for curiosity, motivation, and the desire to explore the unknown. And the thing about dopamine that I find so interesting, it isn't only the chemical of reward, it's the chemical of anticipation. It fires before we find the answer in the act of looking for it. So the searching itself feels good, even when it makes everything feel worse. The brain is essentially rewarding us for staying on the hunt, whether or not the hunt is actually helping. And this goes way back. Our ancestors needed this system to survive, to hunt, to gather, to scan the environment for threats and resources. In a healthy regulated nervous system, seeking begins with something simple, looking around, orienting, the eyes moving, the head turning, the body checking in with its surroundings and finding, yes, I...