This Is Exactly Why We Hate Living With Uncertainty
by Marissa Pomerance
When I initially pitched this article, I was “only” dealing with the uncertainty of a global pandemic and possibly working from home for eternity and wondering if I’ll ever get to hug my friends again.
But as I started writing this article, my mom got sick. She had a high fever. Chills. Nausea and vomiting. For about 4 days. I know that doesn’t sound like much, but remember— global pandemic. We were worried. She got tested for Covid, but we had to wait almost a week for the results.
All the while, I was trying to write about why uncertainty is so hard for people. The irony wasn’t lost on me. The only constant we can seem to count on these days IS uncertainty. But uncertainty feels truly hideous.
In fact, what I found is that humans would rather definitely get a painful electric shock than deal with the question of whether they may get an electric shock later.
Because sitting with uncertainty is sitting with an extreme psychological discomfort that humans are not equipped to deal with. And that discomfort causes us to go to extreme lengths to escape it in order to feel comfortable and in control again.
This Is Why We’re Terrified Of The Unknown
Think about how much easier it is to recall bad memories. People can vividly remember what they were doing on 9/11. Or when JFK was assassinated. It’s not just because these were huge, life-changing moments.
It’s because our brains encourage bad memories to linger.
Parts of our brain, like the amygdala, are hard-wired to seek out bad news. And once it comes across bad news, it quickly commits negative events and experiences to long-term memory.
It’s the job of the “survive brain” is to keep you safe. And our survive brains suffer from “negativity bias," meaning that evolution encouraged our brains to overestimate threats, because this helped ensure our safety. It was safer to assume that an ominous sound was a predator about to attack than just the wind, because on the off chance it was a predator, we’d be ready to fight back or run away.
Because of this negativity bias, uncertainty equals danger; when we don’t know what the future holds, our brains make up a bunch of exaggerated, scary stories to try to make sense of the world, so that it can create a plan to ensure our safety.
Which is why waiting for my mom’s test results was absolutely terrifying. Because instead of focusing on the plausible explanations, or even the statistics that show how most people survive Covid, my brain was hard-wired to focus on the stories of young, healthy people who’ve died (which, I know, is morbid and triggering and, honestly, hard to admit).
But these stories help fuel our uncertainty; they give our brains something negative to latch onto. A possible explanation. A worst-case scenario to prepare ourselves for— because if we’re prepared, we might feel like we have a better chance of survival.
Uncertainty Intolerance Is At The Core Of Anxiety
Anxiety and uncertainty are inextricably connected— uncertainty can often feel worse than receiving bad news itself, and the constant guessing game breeds anxiety and discomfort.
In fact, this consistent inability to deal with uncertainty is called “Uncertainty Intolerance,” and a higher Uncertainty Intolerance is linked to several anxiety disorders, eating disorders, and depression.
If we’re unsure why we’re feverish, we’ll worry about all potentially negative outcomes because we’re searching our brains for answers. And as we know, our negatively-biased brain will jump to the worst outcomes, leading us to catastrophize, causing us to feel anxious.
Uncertainty also fuels our anxiety by making us feel like we’ve lost all control. And we’ll go to extreme lengths to regain that sense of control.
When We’re Uncertain, We Reassurance-Seek
Uncertainty is like a game of hot potato—as soon as you get it, you want to get rid of it immediately.
And that need to pass the hot potato leads us to reassurance seek—meaning, we look for cues or comfort to quell our doubts or fears. Reassurance seeking is also about getting answers— it’s “an attempt to get rid of the distress by getting rid of the uncertainty that underlies it.” It’s essentially trying to solve your uncertainty so you no longer have to sit with the discomfort that it creates.
For hypochondriacs, reassurance seeking means googling symptoms, obsessively checking the body for signs of pain or illness, getting a bunch of blood tests, or calling doctors every time there’s a minor ache or pain. For people with a fear of flying, assurance-seeking might mean evaluating pilots in the cockpit, listening for sounds that the plane is running smoothly, and googling the safety record of the airplane, airline, and pilot. And for people with OCD, reassurance seeking manifests in compulsions to help them deal with intrusive thoughts.
Running to the doctor to get a Covid test. Googling the survival rates. Constantly checking symptoms, and comparing these to the official list of Covid symptoms. Those are all forms of reassurance seeking. Seeking out answers, even if those answers aren’t themselves comforting, helps us feel like we’re in control. It helps us feel certain. It helps us get rid of that hot potato of confusion, and give us something concrete to latch onto, instead of allowing our survive brains to run amok.
Reassurance seeking can actually begin to take over our lives.
It can be difficult to resist, time-consuming, and can interfere with our relationships. Hypochondriacs might spend hours googling their symptoms, or hundreds of dollars on expensive, unnecessary blood tests.
Reassurance seeking allows us to believe that we can’t trust our own judgement, or that we can only trust our own judgement. Because when our brains have told us, “this plane is definitely not safe” every time we’ve flown, and then we’ve landed safely every time we’ve flown, we need to seek out external sources of hard truth because we can’t trust ourselves to know, definitively, that we’ll be ok.
We might come to depend on these reassurances to just get through the day. And over time, we can actually build up a tolerance to these assurances, in which we need more and more to feel better. So maybe, the word of one doctor is no longer reassuring, and we always need to get a second opinion. Or checking to make sure we turned off the stove once before we leave doesn’t assure us anymore—so we better check it twice.
And this need for reassurance can frustrate our loved ones, who we might constantly rely on to make us feel better.
But the biggest problem with reassurance seeking is that doesn’t actually help us escape our uncertainty or emerge from these spirals of anxiety. It just worsens and perpetuates them; when we seek out assurances, we are not suppressing our anxious thoughts. We are indulging them. We are saying, “well what if my fever IS Covid-19? And how can I be sure it isn’t?” And then getting caught up in that loop of thinking.
By seeking assurances, we are not putting the anxious questions aside—we are actively engaging with these thoughts, chasing them to their catastrophized conclusions, and then hoping these reassurances will disprove our worst-case scenarios. We google our symptoms because we’re looking for someone (preferably, a doctor) to definitively say, “your fever is 100% not Covid-19,” even if we know that’s not realistic.
And by chasing reassurances to soothe our anxieties, we never learn to address this fundamental, underlying problem: that we cannot sit with our uncertainty because it is too uncomfortable.
Living With Uncertainty Means Sitting With Discomfort
We’re hardwired to hate uncertainty. To think it means danger. So it makes us anxious. Which makes us engage in behaviors to reduce our anxiety and discomfort.
But those behaviors just make everything worse.
So how do we deal with uncertainty? How can we learn to live with it?
Of course, anxiety management strategies help. Therapy—like exposure and response therapy, cognitive behavioral therapy—also helps. There are methods and specialized practitioners that can help us learn to sit with discomfort. And if you have zero idea how to find a therapist, you can start here.
But one emerging idea for shifting away from reassurance seeking is to, instead, focus on support seeking.
Instead of seeking out doctors or friends or family to get answers and reassurance, support seeking “is an attempt to have someone encourage you while you deal with the distress caused by your uncertainty. It means allowing the uncertainty and distress to exist while also acknowledging that it’s easier to succeed with the support of others.” It’s about receiving support, encouragement, and confidence to deal with feelings of distress, not trying to answer the questions created by our distress.
Support seeking is about getting emotional support from loved ones, who acknowledge your distress and provide comfort, without providing reassurance. So, instead of asking your partner “will our plane land safely?” or “do I have coronavirus?” support seeking means telling them, “I feel uncertain and anxious,” and discussing those feelings. You are not asking them to validate or dispel your fears—you are getting emotional support for the feelings beneath those fears.
And while support seeking, as a strategy for dealing with uncertainty, is still a relatively new idea, some researchers believe that certain modalities of therapy, like CBT, “should aim to shift the individual from reassurance seeking behavior to support seeking behavior,” as some studies have demonstrated that it can be more helpful to seek support than seek assurances.
While this idea of support seeking is emerging, it comes down to this: trying to resist the urge to gain certainty.
Because learning to live with uncertainty means learning to try to sit with discomfort. To try to just allow it to exist. To try not to pass the hot potato. To try to recognize that uncertainty is an unavoidable part of life.
By the way, my mom is fine.
Marissa Pomerance is the Managing Editor of The Candidly. She’s a Los Angeles native and lover of all things food, style, beauty, and wellness. You can find more of her articles here.
