Question: Being uncertain without worrying?

I write until thoughts stop coming to mind. It often takes a few hours, but it is really therapeutic. I mind-dump everything that I think of, without editing or stopping. Usually, the topic ends up centering in on the place where I have the most amount of uncertainty. It often gets pretty meta, which actually does tend to be helpful.

I find that getting recurring thoughts on paper (into a text editor) can make them feel 'handled'. The mechanism for this is basically mysterious to me, but it came from GTD.

Another idea is to dedicate time in your day to worrying. Set aside 20 minutes to do nothing but worry. I haven't tried it, but I've heard good things.

One standard suggestion is to imagine the worst outcome possible and come to terms with it.

compulsion to worry correlates tightly with depressed mood

There are some very interesting notions about depression from an ev-psych perspective here, the gist of which being that depression is "effort to reconstruct models of the world so that future action can lead to payoffs, in part through stripping away previous valuations that led to unwelcome outcomes". As a result depression results in "suspension of behavioral activity accompanied by very intense cognitive activity".

In somewhat more detail,

Depression should be precipitated by (1) a heavy investment in a behavioral enterprise that was expected to lead to large payoffs that either failed to materialize or were not large enough to justify the investment; or (2) insufficient investment in maintaining a highly valued person or condition that was subsequently lost (possibly as a consequence); or (3) gradual recognition by situation-detectors that one's long-term pattern of effort and time expenditure has not led to a sufficient level of evolutionarily meaningful reward, when implicitly compared to alternative life paths (the condition of Dickens' Scrooge).

In other words, depression is the manifestation of the brain calling a "Halt, melt and catch fire" event.

What I've been wondering for some time now is whether the causation can go in reverse - i.e. whether intense thinking about your life's overall strategy can be recognized by your brain as "that mood" and actually trigger the emotional ensemble associated with depression.

I can't think of any sensible advice, though. What I tend to do about decisions (mostly minor) that are waiting on further information is to put them into my GTD system with an appropriate "decide by" date, and annotate them with information as it comes in. I find this a big help in offloading concerns from conscious thought. I have no idea how that system would cope with a life-changing decision.

Pretend you're looking back on your current situation from 40 years in future, where even the big outcome you're worrying about seems fairly trivial but you still wish you had used this time well? (Doesn't make much sense though does it...)

Meditate?

In your description I am missing a link between uncertaintly and worrying. In my model, uncertainty alone does not have to be unpleasant, for example if you don't care about the outcome, of if both outcomes would make you happy. But this one specific uncertainty makes you worry, so maybe that has a specific cause, and a specific solution. My guess: are you afraid that you will (have to) choose a path you don't like?

I find worrying excessively over plans is often a result of not trusting the future self. People try to plan for every contingency as if as soon as the plan is finalized they will robotically follow it without reassessment. Your future self will have more data, more resources, and will have had more time to analyze. Ve will be at least as competent as you are now and probably more so. Worries about being locked into some course of action are usually overblown, and indicate that you expect to fall victim to the sunk cost fallacy in advance.

ANGTFT: future you is awesome, present you can relax a little.

This actually helped me.

Have you decided how your actions will depend on the uncertain facts, so that once you learn what they are you will simply carry out your already determined plan for that case?

Maybe these comments are relevant. My advice is to jump headfirst into some other important task, but this advice isn't backed by any deep theories.

You sound like someone who could benefit from Stoic meditation. If you are interested, I could recommend some readings.

Create a space repetition card that says something like "uncertainty is fine" or "I want to be comfortable with uncertainty" with some of those words occluded?

Reflect on the fact that you don't have any control over the outcome?

You know the way people say "be in the moment" and all your worries will disappear?

That's utter insanity.

But.

There is a case to be made for thinking in the moment. Think about what you can do right now, to alleviate your worry. Putting some kind of Plan B in place maybe?

People seem to crave direction and purpose. If you can put in place a plan that you can begin working on right now that will lend some greater direction to your life regardless of this new change, you may alleviate the worry.