The best (and worst) ways to deal with uncertainty

Guest post by Dr. Erman Misirlisoy

Today, I’m delighted to feature a guest post. Erman Misirlisoy, who is a neuroscientist and the mind behind The Brainlift, a newsletter dedicated to research-backed insights for a happier and healthier life, dives into one of my favourite subjects: uncertainty.

Based on the latest research on this topic, he offers a range of strategies for managing uncertainty effectively and avoiding common pitfalls. I also share my own reflections on his insights at the end of the post.

Erman has a PhD in cognitive neuroscience from University College London, and his roles have included Chief Scientist at multiple tech startups and Research Manager at Instagram. His writing and research have been featured in worldwide media including NY Times, LA Times, and BBC News.

He has previously written on topics such as loneliness, creativity, and empathy, always bringing cutting-edge research directly to your inbox.

Please consider subscribing to Erman’s newsletter, The Brainlift: for people who want regular, science-backed tips to boost health, happiness, and creativity.

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It’s normal to worry about the future, especially when it’s not clear how that future will unfold. We might wonder what kind of career or family we’ll have in 10 years. We might question how comfortable next year’s travel adventure will be. We might feel concerned about the severity of a storm forecasted to hit our town in one hour. Despite the different timelines, all of these potential futures come with some degree of uncertainty.

Even when there’s a clearly defined event like an upcoming presentation at work, we can’t help but ask questions that introduce unnecessary uncertainties, “what if I forget what I’m supposed to say?”, “what if I do something embarrassing?”, “what if I slip on the way into the room and hit my head on the projector screen?”

Uncertainty frequently causes anxiety, since we’re unsure exactly when a challenge will surprise us or exactly what form that challenge will take. If we believe problems are incoming but feel unable to deal with them, we start to experience a lack of control over our lives. Without control, the world can seem quite scary.

Of course, we never have control over everything in our environment, and we can only deal with a problem when it actually appears. There’s little use in worrying about imaginary problems, since the most imaginative worriers could easily come up with thousands of stressful possibilities. This is where anxiety management strategies—and more specifically, uncertainty management strategies—are so helpful.

A recent scientific paper has shed some light on the most and least effective ways of dealing with the stress of uncertainty. I’ll highlight those learnings here, and I hope you’ll be able to apply them in your own life so that uncertainty occupies less of your mental energy.

How to boost your uncertainty tolerance

Some of us find it more difficult to deal with uncertainty than others do, and psychologists refer to this tendency as “intolerance of uncertainty”. People with a low tolerance struggle to manage the negative emotions that come with uncertainty while people with a high tolerance find it more manageable. A low uncertainty tolerance has been linked to multiple mood and anxiety disorders including generalized anxiety disorder and major depressive disorder.

For a long time, researchers have theorized about a possible link between a person’s emotional regulation strategies and their level of uncertainty tolerance. But until recently, nobody had systematically reviewed the large body of work testing this idea.

In 2023, researchers published a paper to answer this exact question with a meta-analysis. This is an analytical method that combines every available piece of scientific evidence on a specific research question, and then looks at what the overall results show. This approach is important because single studies can be cherry-picked to support practically any conclusion you want, since research is messy and individual results can be misleading. But when you build a meta-analytical picture of an entire research area, conclusions are much more reliable.

The researchers combed through scientific literature and extracted 91 studies that tested an association between emotion regulation strategies and uncertainty tolerance. In total, these studies contained over 30,000 participants.

Emotion regulation strategies were defined as either adaptive or maladaptive based on whether they’re effective for emotional health. The final list included 9 adaptive strategies (e.g. acceptance, reappraisal, mindfulness) and 13 maladaptive strategies (e.g. avoidance, suppression, rumination).

It might seem strange to define an emotional regulation strategy as maladaptive, but all of us have these kinds of approaches in our lives. For example, if you cope with health anxieties by avoiding the doctor so you don’t have to deal with worrying diagnoses, that is a maladaptive coping strategy for your overall health even if it temporarily alleviates your worry.

After analyzing all of their data, the researchers ranked the adaptive and maladaptive strategies according to how strongly they predicted uncertainty tolerance.

The adaptive strategy that was associated with the best uncertainty tolerance was mindfulness.

When you practice keeping your mind in the present moment, it’s less likely to drift toward uncertain futures that produce anxiety. If an uncertainty does come to mind, you are better able to keep it in perspective without your mind spiraling into infinite “what if” hypotheticals.

Cognitive reappraisal was also linked to better uncertainty tolerance, though not as strongly as mindfulness.

This strategy refers to your ability to find positive interpretations in life’s challenges. For example, when you don’t land a job you wanted, you might feel disappointed at first, but a helpful reappraisal would be “it leaves me open to find a better opportunity”. Similarly, after a sad ending to a romantic relationship, you might think “I’m happy that ended when it did so I can find my forever partner sooner”.

The maladaptive strategy that was associated with the worst uncertainty tolerance was cognitive avoidance.

It’s natural to want to escape a problem by keeping it out of sight, out of mind. However, avoiding a problem means avoiding solutions to that problem, and many problems get worse with time. Returning to my previous example, trying to avoid health anxieties by ignoring symptoms and medical professionals is likely to make health problems worse. On top of that, you reinforce a tendency to be intolerant of uncertainty. Instead of practicing acceptance of uncertainty and tolerating the discomfort that comes with tackling it, you instead develop a weaker and less sustainable habit that relies on not thinking about it.

Sitting at the other extreme to avoidance, rumination was also associated with poor uncertainty tolerance.

It might sound contradictory to say that thinking about a problem too much via rumination and not thinking about a problem enough via avoidance are both bad. But life is a balancing act. If you repeatedly think about the same uncertainty and generate the same recurring negative feelings through the day, it can start to make you feel hopeless and reduce your tolerance.

The ideal balance is to accept uncertainty without letting it take over your mind and emotional health.

Uncertainty is uncomfortable and that’s fine. Thinking about uncertainty is also fine as long as it’s moving you in a productive problem-solving direction rather than becoming an obsessive habit with intensifying emotions.

Uncertainty can be challenging to deal with, but according to the available evidence, there are ways to both improve our tolerance and make our tolerance substantially worse. By employing more adaptive strategies in our daily lives and fewer maladaptive strategies, we can learn to stay on top of uncertainty rather than letting it climb on top of us.

Takeaway tips

1. Be mindful of uncertainty.

The most effective strategy linked to healthy uncertainty tolerance is mindfulness. When you’re in an uncertain environment or find your mind occupied by an uncertain future prospect, allow yourself to be present with how it feels in the moment instead of suppressing it or overthinking what it may or may not mean. Negative emotions are an important signal in the body, and it’s not helpful to ignore them or feel frustrated by them. Accept those feelings and understand them in their current context. Less fighting and more tolerance will give you a greater sense of control.

2. Seek the brightest possible side.

“Look on the bright side” is a cliche that can feel a little vacuous, but there’s an important kernel of truth hiding inside it. Practically all problematic scenarios and painful circumstances could be worse, and in many cases, the pain itself may also be more helpful than it first seems. Finding gratitude during life’s mishaps is one of the most powerful ways to take control of your circumstances and acknowledge that life is always uncertain.

3. Find the right cognitive balance.

A healthy tolerance for uncertainty doesn’t come from avoiding it, nor does it come from ongoing ruminations about it. The right balance is between those two extremes: a sense of acceptance for the cards you’ve been dealt and a practical approach to resolving uncertainties where possible. When you notice yourself moving toward an extreme, explore whether one of the two positive strategies listed above (mindfulness and positive reframing) could help you to recenter.

“If you can solve your problem, then what is the need of worrying? If you cannot solve it, then what is the use of worrying?”

~ Shantideva

A few words on uncertainty from me, Selda

Erman’s post hits home for me, both in my work as a therapist and coach, and in my personal life.

One of the biggest traps we fall into with discomfort is avoidance—dodging uncertainty or difficult emotions rather than facing them head-on. We either try to outrun it or get stuck overanalyzing. I see this play out a lot: clients either avoiding what’s hard or spiraling into endless rumination. Neither gets us anywhere.

I used to struggle with uncertainty too. Needing all the answers, craving certainty—it drained some of the spontaneity and joy from my life. But I’ve come to realise uncertainty isn’t something to “solve.” It’s just part of the deal, something we have to learn to live with.

Erman’s point about balance rings true, but it’s not the kind of balance where everything is neatly in place. It’s more about shifting your mindset—getting comfortable with the fact that some things will always be unsettled. This isn’t about endlessly picking apart those feelings or turning them into a problem to fix. It’s about finding a new way to coexist with them, exploring different angles, seeing what opens up when you stop running or overthinking.

Ultimately, we can’t rid ourselves of uncertainty, nor can we make everything certain. What we can do, as Erman so beautifully expressed, is “learn to stay on top of uncertainty rather than letting it climb on top of us.”

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