How to Deal with Uncertainty

As I write this, the world is still recovering from more than a year of COVID-19 related pandemic. There have been multiple lockdowns in several countries across the world and in US alone more than 500,000 people have died from COVID-19. This has enormous cascading effects on the economy. Hundreds of millions of people across the world have lost their jobs and are suffering from economic hardships. Businesses are facing an uncertain future. And individuals are no exception. Many of us have become uncertain about our future. Several of us are dealing with how to provide food for our families and how to get back into the workforce. While the future of the economy is still uncertain and out of our control, we can control how we react to it.

Most human beings are not wired to deal with uncertainty. In fact some of us want to avoid it to such an extent that we are ready to receive an electric shock rather than deal with the uncertainty of getting one. And this makes logical sense. If we know something bad is going to happen, we can prepare ourselves to deal with it. But if we don’t know then we put our mind in a kind of limbo, less prepared for either outcome. The COVID-19 pandemic or the economic downturn put many of us in such a state.

But the interesting part is that not everyone deals with uncertainty the same way. Scientists classify us as falling into two categories, low and high tolerance for uncertainty. Sometimes, a low tolerance for uncertainty is a good thing. You don’t want your heart surgeon to say, “Well I don’t know what’s going to happen but that’s ok”. When there is ambiguity, two persons can have the same exact information and react in completely different ways. Say your son hasn’t come back home yet. A person with low tolerance for uncertainty may assume that he has met with an accident. But someone with high tolerance for uncertainty may think it’s heavy traffic and not worry at all.

When someone is less tolerant of uncertainty, she engages in ‘safety behaviour’. These are strategies that prevent undesirable outcomes in the future. So the person above will probably try to call her son every few minutes to check if he is doing ok. And while safety behaviours are meant to reduce uncertainty, in most cases they make things worse. Too many safety behaviours mean that we can never learn that uncertainty isn’t always dangerous. If you never have to cope with negative outcomes, you will never realise how good you are at coping with them. And negative outcomes will definitely happen to you in today’s world, where most things are out of your control.

So how do you deal with uncertainty?

The good news is that our discomfort with uncertainty can be manipulated. Studies have shown that visualization of the negative outcome often helps with dealing with it. Another way to deal with it is to treat it as a phobia. So exposing yourself to uncertainty in small doses may be helpful. Our current lifestyle and technological advances are also to blame. Sudden rise of smartphones and ubiquitous internet access have increased safety behaviors amongst people with low tolerance for uncertainty. Another way to deal with it is to get occupied with an engrossing task that will keep the mind busy and the worry away. And finally it may be helpful to sit with uncertainty for a while rather than constantly worrying or preemptively solving for every eventuality. It requires a mindset switch but may be the best way in the long run. You will see that most of the time everything turns out to be ok. And even in very few instances when it didn’t turn out ok, there wasn’t anything you could do about it. So worrying would have been pointless in any case.

One good thing that may come out of the COVID-19 pandemic is the way it forced people to deal with uncertainty. It led most people to deal with more anxiety and made them more anxious. But they also saw that they can still go on with their lives, despite the uncertainty. And so it may make dealing with small things easier for them in the long run.