Tolerating Uncertainty
A friend texts you last minute that they are feeling sick and can no longer make it to dinner that night, so you unexpectedly have a free night to yourself. Your partner gets caught up at work and doesn’t text you to say what time they’ll be home from work like they normally do. Traffic is stalled out on the highway and you’re unsure when you will arrive at the airport. If those scenarios filled you with dread instead of a sense of mild stress or inconvenience, you may be someone who really struggles to tolerate uncertainty.
Few of us as humans enjoy uncertainty, but there are certainly some of us who struggle with it more than others.
Why Some of Us Struggle More
If you’re someone who grew up in a chaotic and unpredictable environment where you had to parent your parents, suffered from abuse or neglect in your childhood, or endured some kind of trauma as an adult, you may be particularly unable to tolerate uncertainty. Seeking predictability through control, certainty, and routine may have become your lifeline — your safety raft in a choppy sea that you have brought with you into the turbulent waters of adulthood.
Or maybe you’re a classic type-A overachiever who was taught from a young age that success, accomplishment, and “doing it right” is what gets you love and acceptance. Perfectionists and overachievers also struggle with uncertainty, because it feels like a threat to the ability to control outcomes and predict success.
So in both cases, uncertainty poses what feels like an actual threat to safety. No wonder you’re freaking out!
Meeting the Underlying Need
So if the unmet need is safety here, how can we meet that need? How could you develop a greater sense of internal safety that could help you to better tolerate uncertainty?
A great place to start is noticing the thoughts or narratives that come up around uncertainty. My guess is that some of those thoughts look like “I can’t handle changes in plans,” “I need to be in control,” “I need to be certain of outcomes.” Another narrative — whether conscious or unconscious — that usually comes hand in hand with these thoughts is: “I am unable to tolerate the distress or discomfort that comes up for me when I face uncertainty.”
But what if that weren’t the case? What if by attempting to eliminate all uncertainty in your life, you are actually robbing yourself of the opportunity to flex that muscle and prove to yourself that you can in fact tolerate that experience, even if it’s uncomfortable?
A Reframe: Curiosity Over Certainty
What would it look like for you to be curious about the outcome, instead of having certain expectations for how something will go, or needing something to go a certain way? When we constantly seek certainty in all of our experiences in life, we are less present with what’s actually there; instead of being curious and mindfully observing how something unfolds or feels to us, we are seeking to predict and control an experience and feeling no small amount of distress when this is not possible.
We are focused on what we expect to be there, or want to be there, not what’s actually there. In addition, the more we cling to utter certainty in all areas of life, the more we distance ourselves from our own intuition. If we decide we’re ordering the same dish we always get, before we’re even at the restaurant, we’re not giving ourselves the chance to see if we’re in the mood for something different this time. If we schedule every minute of our weekend so that we know exactly what we’re doing at any given moment, we’ve achieved certainty, but lost touch with our intuition that tells us what we’d like to do or truly need in any given moment.
An Experiment
So, are you willing to try an experiment? If you’d like to practice tolerating uncertainty, I invite you to build up that muscle of curiosity and flexibility by trying the following:
- Pick a movie you’ve never seen and watch it without reading the reviews.
- Walk into a restaurant you’ve never been to before without looking up the menu ahead of time.
- Get dressed for the day without looking up the weather forecast.
- Resist the urge to ask someone for their ETA.
- Go on a walk or jog and take a new route, leaving your fitness/step tracker behind.
- Choose a hobby to deeply engage in when you have a chunk of free time and don’t check your watch or phone at any point during the activity. See if you can lose track of time!
- Leave a weekend day totally unscheduled, with zero plans on the calendar. See how the day unfolds!