Hate Surprises? How to Deal with Life’s Uncertainties
It’s supposed to be a wonderful gift: that moment when you open the door on your birthday and everybody shouts: ‘Surprise!’
But, apart from the fact that it involves quite a bit of deception and often seems to prioritize the way others want to celebrate your birthday over your own preferences, many people don’t like surprises in the first place.
Many of us like, or perhaps even need, the reassurance of a predictable routine. We appreciate the feeling that we have the power to shape at least some of our experiences.
Surprises, good or bad, disrupt that reliable routine.
So, while you may be able to explain to your friends and relatives that the best gift they can give you is a reliable schedule of festive events that includes your personal schedule, life can still throw all sorts of surprises at you. Out of nowhere. Without warning.
And those surprises are sometimes very upsetting.
So, what do you do if you hate surprises? How do you deal with life’s uncertainties?
Here are a few suggestions:
1. Don’t get too attached to specific outcomes
One of the major sources of your anxiety around surprises is too much attachment to specific outcomes.
If you are rigid in your expectations, you will very likely be disappointed. Then your fear of disappointment will make you afraid of future outcomes.
Take a moment to reflect. Can you open up the range of your expectations? How far can you go?
2. Explore the game of options
If you find it hard to accept uncertainty, it may be helpful to adopt a more playful attitude.
What if you were to see life as less a narrow path that you can veer off at any time, and more as a game? A game of options.
Economists, computer scientists, and biologists use ‘game theory’ to understand complex systems – your personal life is more complex than all of them.
3. Face your fear of failure
Sometimes, people don’t like surprises because they fear failure. If things don’t go exactly ‘right’, then you fail. You may think badly of yourself. You can spiral down through low self-esteem into depression.
No wonder you are afraid!
However, what you are really doing is to shape your life according to negative judgments. Judgments you may have heard from others but are now firmly ensconced in your own mind.
Maybe it is time to investigate those judgmental ideas. Decide if they are still useful to you right now.
4. Find someone to talk to
Talking about it can help to put it all into perspective.
A professional counselor will listen without prejudice and help you find new ways of accepting and adjusting to life’s uncertainties.
5. Distinguish between what you can and cannot control
That’s the serenity prayer.
And your life will become a lot more serene if you only worry about those things you have a chance of controlling. You’ll have more peace if you accept the ones you cannot control. It’s also called being realistic.
6. Prioritize your anxieties
If you can’t get rid of your anxieties around the future (aka negative surprises), maybe you could just make a list of them, in order of importance and threat to your inner peace.
Why not prioritize your fears into the top three, and loosen up on the rest.
Try it! You will be surprised how effective it is.
7. Befriend the chaos
The world around you constantly brings surprises. But it is not specifically hostile towards you.
What if you could find a way to make the ‘chaos’ you worry about into a friend? Uncertainty is also an opportunity. It’s the potential that you can grow from.
8. Find your ‘home’ inside yourself
Your fear of surprises may be due, in part, to a tendency to look for reassurance outside of yourself too often. Do you expecting the world around you to be a parental home, with you as the protected child?
Once you are an adult, that idea no longer holds. The outside world is shaped by all the many other people who are following their own agendas and responding to their own fears too.
The only way you can find ongoing peace of mind is to create a ‘home’ inside yourself.
Counseling can give you excellent tools to cope with your ‘hatred’ of surprises. From its origins in psychoanalysis, tolerating uncertainty has always been one of the goals of therapy. Consider these tips and maybe, one day, you will wake up and actually decide to invite uncertainty into your life!
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