How to get (more) comfortable with uncertainty

As discussed in the previous post, getting more comfortable with uncertainty can be helpful in many ways. Practically, it can free up time and energy that you previously put towards safety behaviours, and it can result in new and exciting opportunities you might have missed out on due to procrastination and avoidance. Beyond the practical benefits, you can become more confident in your ability to cope with curveballs when they are thrown your way and therefore feel less threatened by uncertainty in the first place.

How do you go about this? By trying behavioural experiments, which can help you experience uncertainty in structured ways. Like any experiment, you would decide what you were going to test, come up with a hypothesis, conduct the experiment, and analyze the outcome. In the previous post, I wrote about driving somewhere new and trying to find parking. If you were doing this as a behavioural experiment, you might hypothesize that you won’t find a spot, other drivers will honk at you, and you will have a panic attack. You would then carry out your experiment and observe the actual outcome. Perhaps you find parking easily, perhaps you have a hard time and another driver has to wait for you but doesn’t honk, or perhaps another driver honks at you and you feel quite anxious but you end up finding a spot.

Any discrepancy between what you predicted would happen and what actually happened results in new learning. The greater the discrepancy (e.g., you thought it would go horribly and it actually went very well), the greater the learning. This is known as expectancy violation (Craske et al., 2014). We used to think that exposure (i.e., the formal, structured way of facing your fears you might do in therapy) works because it helps you get used to or “habituate” to the scary experience, but newer research on inhibitory learning suggests otherwise. It seems that although you may never get rid of the association between parking somewhere new and feeling fear, you can create a new, competing association between parking somewhere new and feeling safe and competent. The more experience you get with this second association, the more it can compete with the first.

Because there are many sources of uncertainty in our lives, there are also many opportunities to practice tolerating uncertainty. And there are even some, dare I say, fun ways to engage in behavioural experiments. Here are a few:

·      Watch a movie without seeing the trailer or reading a review first

·      Order a dish you’ve never tried from your favourite takeout place

·      Order a dish from a takeout place you’ve never tried

·      Buy a low-stakes item (e.g., pens, dish soap, socks) without first reading reviews

·      Go to a restaurant without looking at the menu beforehand

·      Listen to an album you haven’t heard before all the way through

·      Create a dice game in which each number represents a different enjoyable activity (e.g., reading, going for a walk, watching TV, playing with a pet)

I understand that even some of these milder forms of experiments can bring on a lot of discomfort! Remember though that having experiences like these can help prepare you for the bigger, higher-stakes uncertainties you will certainly face.

One more important thing to mention about uncertainty is that it can actually be an enjoyable, exciting experience! If you could somehow always protect yourself from uncertainty, you would miss out on some of the best of what life has to offer. There is no rule saying you need to enjoy surprise parties, but uncertainty is the ingredient that makes some experiences particularly enjoyable, such as receiving a gift, experiencing a plot twist in a book or movie, or travelling somewhere new. Noticing when uncertainty is enjoyable is another way to help you become less afraid of it as you practice tolerating its less enjoyable forms.