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Today Feels Impossible. Here’s How Science Suggests We Cope.
Uncertainty can hijack our planning machinery and weaponize it against us
Election Day 2020 is here, finally. And now, after all the waiting, it’s time to wait some more. Who will win? What will that win look like? When will we know for sure? Hard to say. Throw in all the open questions about the coronavirus, and the current moment’s level of unpredictability feels off the charts.
For many, all this uncertainty is likely to be distressing — if not downright destabilizing.
“Some people have the ability to sit with uncertainty and to let go of it — to not fret about it,” says Michelle Newman, PhD, director of the Laboratory for Anxiety and Depression Research at the Pennsylvania State University. “But others respond to uncertainty with worrying. And if the thing you’re worried about is out of your control, then the worrying doesn’t help anything. It just makes you miserable.”
Human beings are inveterate planners. The brain’s capacity to construct hypotheticals — to imagine future scenarios and adjust behavior accordingly — is one of the defining traits of our species. But while our ability to anticipate and plan can be an asset, it can also act like a bug in our programming. Uncertainty — either a little or a lot, depending on the person — can hijack our planning machinery and weaponize it against us. For some, uncertainty is the lifeblood of anxiety, paranoia, and psychological dysfunction.
How uncertainty agitates and unsettles
For a 2011 study published in the journal Behavior Therapy, people placed bets in a variety of gambling scenarios. In one of those scenarios, people could opt for either poor odds and a low payout, or improved odds and a higher payout. The catch: If they chose the crummy bet, they would learn its outcome immediately; if they wanted the better odds and payout, they would have to wait for an uncertain period of time before learning if they’d won.
Not everyone took the favorable odds and higher payout. For some, removing the element of waiting and uncertainty made the bad bet appealing. “Higher levels of intolerance of uncertainty were associated with a tendency to select the…
