A shared universe › Blog › Not knowing what is going to happen · Español
If not knowing what will happen feels unbearable, there is nothing odd about you: psychology calls it intolerance of uncertainty, and what helps is not looking for more certainty but slowly learning to live with doubt in small steps. Some people would rather have certain bad news than a doubt. Not knowing what is going to happen can be harder to bear than whatever happens in the end.
The psychologist Michel Dugas and his team studied why some people worry much more than others. In a 1998 study they compared twenty-four people with generalised anxiety disorder, in which worry takes over everything, with twenty people without it. They looked at several things: what each person believed about worrying, how they approached problems and whether they avoided thinking about what troubled them.
What most set one group apart from the other was how they coped with doubt: feeling that not knowing is unbearable and needs to be resolved as soon as possible. They called it intolerance of uncertainty. It was a small, preliminary study, but the idea has been studied a great deal since.
The psychologist Nicholas Carleton, of the University of Regina in Canada, reviewed in 2016 the different models psychology has put forward about anxiety and found that they share the same core: how each person responds to what they don’t know. He suggests that fear of the unknown lies at the root of many anxiety problems, not just one.
Put simply: not knowing unsettles all of us to some degree. What changes from one person to another is how much of that unease they can bear and what they do with it. That is why it makes sense to put less effort into getting certainties, which often never come, and more into coping better with the wait in the meantime.
All of that soothes for a moment and, in the long run, makes doubt harder to bear. Each time the unease is calmed by finding a certainty, the mind learns that it cannot do without that certainty.
If doubt catches you mostly at night, in bed, you may find it useful to read about night-time worries and the habit of giving them a fixed time during the day.
Some uncertainties last for years, like not knowing what will happen with a job, and others have a date: the result of a test, a phone call, an answer. The second kind are more intense because everything is concentrated on one day. For that particular kind of wait, there are ideas of its own in how to cope with waiting for important news.
Worrying now and then is normal. But if worry takes up most of the day, if it stops you sleeping or concentrating, or if you notice your body tense nearly all the time for months, mention it to your GP or to a psychologist. You don’t have to wait until you feel overwhelmed to seek advice.
In A shared universe you can light a star with “What I hope for” while the doubt lasts. It doesn’t resolve what is going to happen, but it changes how you wait: with someone beside you.
Other people will keep it company with a touch or a few words of hope. If the news arrives in the end, you can come back and say how it went, with phrases like “It went well” or “I’m a little better today”.