Practising uncertainty, and why getting comfortable with not knowing is a skill

Will the test results come back clear? Will the savings last? Will the kids settle overseas or come home?

Later life hands us plenty of questions that can’t be answered yet, and the news adds a few more every morning. Most of us respond by trying to find out. We check, we ask, we search, we read the reviews twice.

Psychologists who study anxiety think that habit can make not knowing harder to bear. Their research suggests the opposite habit, deliberately practising a little uncertainty, can make it easier.

What intolerance of uncertainty means

Canadian psychologist Michel Dugas, of the Université du Québec en Outaouais, has built much of his research around people who worry heavily. With Robert Ladouceur he developed a treatment for generalised anxiety disorder whose goal is to help people become more tolerant of uncertainty.

In an early test with four adults, published in 2000, three of the four no longer met the criteria for the disorder six months after treatment. How well people did was closely tied to how much their intolerance of uncertainty changed. It was a tiny study, but the idea stuck.

R. Nicholas Carleton, a psychologist at the University of Regina, goes further. In a 2016 review he made the case that fear of the unknown may be one of the fundamental fears underlying anxiety, possibly the most basic of all.

His team also pooled 52 North American studies and found self-reported intolerance of uncertainty rose between 1999 and 2014, in step with mobile phone and internet use. They suggested phones may cut down our everyday exposure to not knowing, because an answer or some reassurance is always a tap away. They also said experiments were needed to test whether one causes the other.

Age may be on our side

A 2008 Canadian study in the International Journal of Aging and Human Development compared older and younger adults. The older group worried less, reported less intolerance of uncertainty and put less faith in worrying as a useful thing to do. The authors suggested a greater ability to tolerate uncertainty may partly explain why worry seems to ease in later life.

That isn’t the whole picture. When Patrick Gosselin and colleagues at the Université de Sherbrooke surveyed 356 people aged 60 and over during the Covid-19 pandemic, anxiety levels were high and appeared to have risen since the pandemic began.

People less tolerant of uncertainty reported more anxiety, and part of that link ran through behaviours such as avoidance and procrastination. Putting things off feels like relief at the time. In this study those habits went with more anxiety, not less.

How to practise not knowing

Dugas’s newest treatment takes this head on. In a 2022 randomised trial, 60 adults with generalised anxiety disorder spent 12 weekly one-hour sessions learning to run behavioural experiments, small real-life tests of their catastrophic beliefs about uncertainty.

Compared with a wait-list group, they improved on worry, anxiety, depression and intolerance of uncertainty, and the gains held or grew over the following year. Participants were aged 19 to 67, with an average age of about 35, so it wasn’t a trial of older people.

You don’t need a diagnosis to borrow the idea. A self-help guide from Anxiety Canada suggests listing the things you do to feel certain, like seeking reassurance, double-checking or putting things off. Rate how anxious you’d feel skipping each one, from 0 to 10, start with the easiest and aim for at least three small experiments a week.

Its examples are pleasingly ordinary. Order a meal at a restaurant you’ve never tried, see a film without reading a review, do the grocery shop without a list, or let a friend make the plans. Afterwards, note what happened and how you coped if something didn’t go to plan.

For bigger unknowns, Dugas’s approach separates worries you can do something about from those you can’t. A worry about a power bill can become a phone call to the retailer. A worry about how a scan will turn out usually can’t, and that’s where the practice comes in.

Clinical psychologist Dougal Sutherland, chief executive of Umbrella Wellbeing, applies the same thinking to the state of the world. “One of the most useful approaches is to focus on what you can control,” he says. He suggests turning off notifications and checking the news less often, since most of us don’t need constant updates through the day.

He also warns against pulling away from people, which he calls one of the biggest mistakes under financial pressure. Sharing what you’re going through, he says, often shows that others feel the same way.

If worry is getting in the way of daily life, Just a Thought runs free online courses for New Zealanders, including one on generalised anxiety. You can also call or text 1737 any time to talk with a trained counsellor, free.

The test results, the savings and the kids’ plans will sort themselves out in their own time. The skill is having a good day while you wait.