Calm Worries by Reducing Intolerance of Uncertainty

Do you ever get anxious not knowing what the future holds, worrying about all the what-ifs? Well, what if the key to reducing your worry and anxiety isn’t trying to plan for all possibilities or control what happens in the future, but learning to live with and accept uncertainty? Uncertainty is an unavoidable part of life, from everyday decisions to major events, whether it’s waiting for medical tests, facing career challenges, dating and relationships, dealing with unpredictable situations, and so on. Uncertainty influences many aspects of our lives, but a lot of people have difficulty tolerating uncertainty and the unknown and find it incredibly stressful and uncomfortable and can go to great lengths to avoid uncertainty even if it means sacrificing opportunities or happiness.

Intolerance of uncertainty, or fear or dread of the unknown, can be like a magnifying glass focused on negative possibilities, magnifying even minor uncertainties and making them feel overwhelming. Intolerance of uncertainty can lead to things like health anxiety, chronic stress, general anxiety disorder, and OCD. Learning to tolerate anxiety involves accepting the inherent unpredictability of life and developing strategies to live with the discomfort it can bring. This doesn’t mean we ignore risks or stop planning for the future, but that we learn to handle the unknowns in a healthier, more balanced way.

So how do we do this? First, we can challenge our beliefs regarding our need to avoid uncertainty by asking: what are the benefits of striving for certainty in life, and what are the costs? Well, there are often some short-term benefits. We may get some temporary relief from anxiety and discomfort and feel more in control, but in the long term, not learning to tolerate uncertainty leads to increased anxiety and stress.

Efforts to eliminate uncertainty and gain control over the unknown are very time-consuming. Constant reassurance seeking can put a strain on relationships, limits adaptability and openness to new experiences and opportunities, and makes it harder to cope with unexpected changes and challenges. Since we can never get rid of all uncertainty, ultimately, our attempts to do so are futile.

Common behaviors related to intolerance of uncertainty include seeking excessive reassurance from others, like repeatedly asking friends or family for advice or comfort whenever we start to feel anxious, or consulting a doctor or the internet every time we notice a possible health symptom, excessive list-making and planning, writing out scripts for phone calls or conversations, triple and quadruple checking for mistakes or to make sure that loved ones are okay.

These behaviors can be helpful or even important in moderation, but when they become excessive, not only can they consume us, they make us less equipped to cope with uncertainty since we never give ourselves a chance to learn to manage it better and more prone to anxiety in the future.

So we want to stop engaging in these types of behaviors, but the goal isn’t to just tolerate our anxiety over uncertainty through force of will. Willpower alone isn’t effective because eventually, we’ll usually give in and resort back to our old behaviors to try to get some relief. Instead, we want to approach things from a mindset that anxiety is a natural human emotion. It can feel really unpleasant or even distressing, but it’s tolerable, as is the discomfort that arises from uncertainty. We want to give ourselves the opportunity to learn that we don’t need to rely on these behaviors in order to tolerate anxiety and discomfort and that we’re able to function in our daily lives despite feeling anxious.

When our anxiety starts to rise, instead of trying to fight it off by resorting to our habitual behaviors, we respond to it mindfully. We start by acknowledging and accepting that we’re feeling anxious in this moment: I’m feeling anxious right now and that’s okay. It’s uncomfortable, but it’s not dangerous. It can’t hurt me, and I’m willing to experience it now in order to learn to manage anxiety better and improve my quality of life. Fighting it doesn’t even help; it can make my anxiety even stronger.

Responding to anxiety in this way often calms our anxiety at least a little. If we’re feeling really anxious or starting to panic, we can calm our anxiety with our breath, slowing down our breathing by breathing in through our nostrils for a count of two, pausing, and then breathing out through pursed or puckered lips for a count of four, and just continuing with this until we start to feel better. Allowing ourselves to experience uncertainty can be challenging, and learning emotion regulation and distress tolerance skills can help.

Now let’s look at our thoughts. If we have difficulty tolerating uncertainty when faced with the unknown, we often imagine and expect worst-case scenarios, the outcomes we fear the most, which increases anxiety and makes us worry even more.

To reassure ourselves, we can ask: Am I worrying about the worst possible outcome, and then, how likely is that to happen? Not very. What are some other possible scenarios, outcomes, or ways things might turn out? I’m pretty nervous and I make a few mistakes, but it’s good enough. Everything goes fine and I worried over nothing. What’s the most likely thing to happen? I do get pretty nervous and make a few mistakes, but everything’s fine. If that were to happen, how could I cope? It’s not a big deal. I’m my own harshest critic and others won’t even notice some of my mistakes. I definitely won’t lose my job.

Sometimes analyzing our anxious thoughts like this just feeds into our worrying and can make us even more anxious. Instead, we can try just letting go of our worries, which can be difficult to do on its own. So we can start by labeling our anxious thoughts as worrying, catastrophizing, worst-case scenario, which helps us focus on the nature of these thoughts rather than their content. This gives us some perspective, which makes the thoughts easier to let go. We can add the qualifier “just”: I’m just worrying. I’m just imagining worst-case scenarios, which creates some distance between ourselves and our worries and makes them easier to let go.

We can also use a technique called postponing worry, where we just write down our worries and then set them aside for now and postpone thinking about them until a scheduled worry period later in the day, by which point often our worries don’t seem that important anymore, and so we don’t need to worry about them. If they are important, we can deal with them now on our own terms and not just because a worry popped into our heads because we were feeling anxious. I have videos that go into these techniques in more detail.

Learning to tolerate uncertainty not only reduces anxiety, it also boosts our resilience and allows us to adapt more effectively to unpredictable situations, which helps us become more confident and flexible in the face of change. As a result, we’re willing to take more calculated risks and become more open to new opportunities and experiences.