The world will keep changing. Uncertainty isn't going away. But the way you meet it can evolve. From rigidity to resilience. From exhaustion to agency. From white-knuckling control to trusting that you can navigate what comes, one breath at a time.
You wake at 3 a.m. with your mind already three steps into tomorrow’s schedule. Your chest feels tight. You’ve cycled through possible outcomes, contingencies, but more critically everything that can go wrong. By morning, you’re wired and exhausted before the day begins. Sound familiar?
What if this relentless vigilance isn’t a personal failing or a sign you’re not cut out for high-stakes work, but your nervous system doing exactly what it was designed to do when the world feels too unpredictable to navigate safely?
We’re living through a period of compounding uncertainty. AI is reshaping job functions faster than organizations can adapt. Policy shifts ripple through industries overnight. Economic volatility makes long-term planning feel like guesswork. For many professionals, the baseline hum of unpredictability has never been higher.
Your nervous system registers this as a threat, not because you’re fragile, but because prediction is how your brain keeps you safe. When the future becomes opaque, your internal alarm system stays online. And in a culture that rewards responsiveness, foresight, and proactive problem-solving, control becomes the go-to strategy. You plan harder. You anticipate more. You try to manage every variable.
It works until it doesn’t anymore. The bill comes due in the form of exhaustion, chronic anxiety, and a creeping sense that no amount of preparation ever feels like enough.
Your brain is a prediction machine. It constantly generates models of what’s coming next: who will respond to your email, how your manager will react, whether the market will hold. If you will be fired tomorrow. These predictions help you move through the world efficiently and safely.
But when uncertainty rises, prediction errors spike. Your amygdala (the brain’s threat-detection hub) flags the mismatch. Your insula (which tracks internal body states) sends signals of unease. Your hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis releases cortisol to mobilize resources. This is adaptive in the short term: you become more vigilant, more alert, more ready to respond.
The problem is chronic activation. When you can’t resolve the uncertainty because the variables are genuinely outside your control, your nervous system never gets the all clear signal. Cortisol stays elevated. Your interoceptive awareness narrows, focusing only on threat cues. You lose access to nuance, flexibility, and the capacity to rest.
Workplace example: Your company announces a restructuring/ Re-org with no timeline. For weeks, you scan every email for clues, rehearse explanations for why your role is essential, and work late to appear indispensable. Your body reads this as ongoing danger. Sleep fragments. Digestion slows. You’re running a threat-response protocol 24/7, even though there’s no immediate predator to escape.
Here’s where Internal Family Systems (IFS) offers a reframe that changes everything: the part of you driving this hypervigilance isn’t a flaw. It’s a protector.
In IFS language, you have an internal Controller part, a manager whose job it is to keep you safe by anticipating and mitigating risk. This part learned early that competence, preparedness, and having answers keeps you from criticism, failure, or rejection. It’s not trying to exhaust you. It’s trying to protect you from the pain or shame of being caught off guard.
The Controller believes that if it can just plan enough, control enough variables, and stay ahead of every possible outcome, you’ll finally be safe. Its protective intent is genuine. But its strategy (total control) is unsustainable in a world where uncertainty is the baseline, not the exception.
Relationship example: You’re planning a difficult conversation with your partner. Your Controller part drafts the script, anticipates their responses, prepares counterarguments, and rehearses tone variations. By the time you sit down together, you’re so tightly wound that you can’t actually listen because your internal manager is too busy managing. The conversation feels stilted. Connection is sacrificed for control. And afterward, your body is flooded with the same cortisol signature as if you’d been in real conflict.
The Controller isn’t your identity. It’s a strategy. And like any strategy, it can be appreciated for its intent while also being renegotiated when it’s causing more harm than help.
How do you know when your protective Controller part has moved from helpful to harmful? Here are five indicators:
Body-based example: You notice that no matter how early you go to bed, you wake unrefreshed. Your jaw aches. Your stomach is tight before meetings. These aren’t random symptoms, they’re your body’s way of signalling that your threat-response system hasn’t had a break.
You don’t need to dismantle your Controller part. You need to help it and your nervous system, learn that safety can exist even in uncertainty. Here are three micro-practices to start building that capacity.
What it is: A body-based check-in that shifts attention from external threat-scanning to internal sensation.
How to do it:
Why it works: Interoception—your brain’s map of internal body states—narrows under chronic stress. This practice gently widens your sensory bandwidth and signals to your nervous system that it’s safe to notice more than just threat cues.
Reflection question: What does safe enough feel like in my body right now?
What it is: A brief internal dialogue with your Controller part, grounded in IFS principles.
How to do it:
Why it works: When you acknowledge the Controller’s protective intent, it often softens. You’re not fighting it, you’re collaborating with it.
Reflection question: What would it be like to trust that I can handle uncertainty without needing to control every variable?
What it is: A deliberate practice in tolerating incomplete preparation.
How to do it:
Why it works: Your brain learns through experience. Each time you tolerate good enough and survive (or even thrive) you build evidence that control isn’t the only path to safety.
Reflection question: What becomes possible when I don’t have to be perfectly prepared?
Control isn’t the enemy. It’s a strategy born from care, a part of you that has worked hard to keep you safe, competent, and valued. But chronic over-control drains your body, narrows your world, and paradoxically leaves you feeling more vulnerable.
The alternative isn’t passivity or recklessness. It’s coordination: learning to work with your nervous system’s need for safety while expanding your tolerance for uncertainty. It’s recognizing that your Controller part is doing its best with the tools it has and gently offering it new ones.
You don’t have to do this alone. Somatic therapy, IFS work, and trauma-informed support can help you build this capacity in a relational, embodied way. But even small experiments like pausing to feel your breath, thanking your protective parts, choosing good enough over perfect begin to shift the pattern.
The world will keep changing. Uncertainty isn’t going away. But the way you meet it can evolve. From rigidity to resilience. From exhaustion to agency. From white-knuckling control to trusting that you can navigate what comes, one breath at a time.
John Cummins is an accredited transformational coach (International Coach Federation), a certified communication psychology coach, with a Masters in Business Psychology and experienced in coaching CEOs, small-business owners and founders, corporate executives and senior managers.
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Transformational Coach | CEO of a regulated business | Business Psychology trained