Why we fear uncertainty — and why we shouldn’t

One of the things that human beings seem to fear is uncertainty. Most of us like to know things, and when we don’t know things, we get uncomfortable. And when we’re forced to face the unknown, our response is often to retreat into old ideas and routines.

Why is that? What’s so unnerving about ambiguity?

Maggie Jackson is a journalist and the author of a delightful new book called Uncertain: The Wisdom and Wonder of Being Unsure. It makes a great case for uncertainty as a philosophical virtue, but it also uses the best research we have to explain why embracing uncertainty primes us for learning and can improve our overall mental health.

So I invited her onto The Gray Area recently to talk about what she’s learned and how to think about it in our practical lives. Below is an excerpt of our conversation, edited for length and clarity. As always, there’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to and follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you find podcasts. New episodes drop every Monday.

Sean Illing

How did you come to this topic?

Maggie Jackson

Reluctantly, to be honest.

This is my third book. I’ve been writing about topics that are right under our noses, that we don’t understand or that we deeply misunderstand. The first book was about the nature of home in the digital age. The second book was about distraction, but particularly attention, which very few people could define.

And then finally I started writing a book about thinking in the digital age and the first chapter was about uncertainty. And not only did I discover uncertainty hadn’t really been studied or acknowledged, but there’s now this new attention to it. Lots and lots of new research findings, even in psychology. But I was still reluctant. Like many people, I had this idea that it was just something to eradicate, that uncertainty is something to get beyond, and shut it down as fast as possible.

Sean Illing

So what’s beneath our near-universal fear of the unknown?

Maggie Jackson

As human beings, we dislike uncertainty for a real reason. We need and want answers. And this unsettling feeling we have is our innate way of signaling that we’re not in the routine anymore. And so it’s really important to understand, in some ways, how rare and wonderful uncertainty is.

At the same time, we also need routine and familiarity. Most of life is what scientists call predictive processing. That is, we’re constantly making assumptions and predicting. You just don’t think that your driveway is going to be in a different place when you get home tonight. You can expect that you know how to tie your shoelaces when you get up in the morning. We’re enmeshed in this incredible world of our assumptions. It’s so human, and so natural, to stick to routine and to have that comfort. If everything was always new, if we had to keep learning everything again, we’d be in real trouble.

But neuroscientists are beginning to unpack what happens in the brain when we deal with the stress of uncertainty. The uncertainty of the moment, the realization that you don’t know, that you’ve reached the limits of your knowledge, instigate a number of neural changes. Your focus broadens, and your brain becomes more receptive to new data, and your working memory is bolstered. Which is why facing uncertainty is a kind of wakefulness. In fact, Joseph Kable of the University of Pennsylvania said to me, “That’s the moment when your brain is telling itself there’s something to be learned here.”

Sean Illing

We can think of uncertainty as a precursor to good thinking, and I suppose it is. But that makes it sound a little too much like a passive state, as opposed to an active orientation to the world. Do you think of uncertainty as something closer to a disposition?

Maggie Jackson

Uncertainty is definitively a disposition. We each have our personal comfort zone when it come to uncertainty, and our impression is that uncertainty is static, that it’s synonymous with paralysis. But when you take up that opportunity to learn the good stress that uncertainty offers you, you actually slow down — there are less snap judgments, you’re not racing to an answer. Uncertainty, in other words, involves a process, and that’s really, really important.

The way we think of experts is a good example. We venerate the swaggering kind of expert who knows what to do, whose know-how was developed over the so-called 10,000 hours of experience. But that type of expertise needs updating. That type of expert’s knowledge tends to fall short when facing new, unpredictable, ambiguous problems — the kind of problems that involve or demand uncertainty.

So years of experience are actually only weakly correlated with skill and accuracy in medicine and finance. People who are typical routine experts fall into something called carryover mode, where they’re constantly applying their old knowledge, the old heuristic shortcut solutions, to new situations, and that’s when they fail. Adaptive experts actually explore a problem.

Sean Illing

The idea that not knowing can be a strength does intuitively seem like a contradiction.

Maggie Jackson

Knowledge is incredibly important. It’s the foundation and the groundwork.

But at the same time, we need to update our understanding of knowledge and understand that knowledge is mutable and dynamic. People who are intolerant of uncertainty think of knowledge as something like a rock that we are there to hold and defend, whereas people who are more tolerant of uncertainty are more likely to be curious, flexible thinkers. I like to say that they treat knowledge as a tapestry whose mutability is its very strength.

Sean Illing

I doubt anyone would argue that ignorance is a virtue, but openness to revising our beliefs is definitely a virtue, and that’s the distinction here.

Maggie Jackson

It’s really important to note that uncertainty is not ignorance. Ignorance is the blank slate.

In child development, there’s an expression called the zone of proximal development, which is usually used as a shorthand for scaffolding. That’s the place where a child is pushing beyond their usual knowledge, they’re trying something complex and new and the parent might scaffold a little bit and help only where necessary, but letting them do the work of expanding their limits.

But that’s something we do throughout our whole lives. That zone of proximal development, as one scientist told me, is the green bud on the tree. That’s where we want to be. That’s where we thrive as thinkers and as people.

Sean Illing

When does uncertainty become paralyzing?

Maggie Jackson

Forward motion involves choices. Uncertainty is never the end goal. It’s more like a vehicle and an approach to life. Most of the time it’s our fear of uncertainty that leads to paralysis. It’s not the uncertainty itself. If we approach uncertainty knowing it’s a space of possibilities, or as another psychologist told me, an opportunity for movement, then we can be present in the moment and start investigating and exploring.

But if we’re afraid of uncertainty, we’re more likely to treat it as a threat. And if we’re more tolerant of uncertainty, we treat it as a challenge.

Sean Illing

You cite some research about fear of the unknown as at least one of the root causes of things like anxiety and depression. It certainly makes intuitive sense, but what do we know about that relationship?

Maggie Jackson

This is a very new but rising theoretical understanding of mental challenges in the psychology world. More and more psychologists and clinicians are beginning to see fear of the unknown as the trans-diagnostic root, or at least a vulnerability factor, to conditions like PTSD and anxiety. But by narrowing down treatments to just helping people bolster their tolerance of uncertainty, they’re beginning to find that might be a really important way to shift intractable anxiety.

There’s one gold-standard peer-reviewed study by probably one of the world’s greatest experts on anxiety, Michel Dugas. He found that people who were taught simple strategies to try on uncertainty, their intractable anxiety went down. It also helped their depression. And then other studies with multiple different kinds of populations show that focused strategies about uncertainty boost self-reported resilience in patients with multiple sclerosis, who are dealing with a lot of medical uncertainty.

Sean Illing

It’s just a fact of life that things will change and the world won’t conform to our wishes, and so I feel like we end up going one of two ways: We either embrace the limits of our knowledge or we distort the world in order to make it align with our story of it, and I think bad things happen when we do the latter.

Maggie Jackson

That’s right. I think it’s also backbreaking work to continually retreat into our certainties and close our eyes to the mutability of the world.

I had a real epiphany when I was doing some writing about a Head Start program that teaches people from very challenged backgrounds, both parents and preschoolers, to pause and reflect throughout their very chaotic days. And it seems like something that doesn’t have much to do with uncertainty, but they were basically inhabiting the question even though it was a very difficult thing to snatch these moments of reflection within their lives.

In parallel to that, there’s a lot of new movement to understand the strengths of people who live in lower economic situations that are often chaotic. What was amazing to me is that I realized how much I grew up expecting that stability and predictability was just an entitlement. That this is the way we should live, that this is the skill set you need to adapt in order to thrive. Many of us have airbrushed out of our psyches the ability to live in precarious situations.

Sean Illing

So when someone is confronted with the feeling of fear that comes with not knowing, how should they sit with that? What’s your practical advice?

Maggie Jackson

Well, first, you can remind yourself that this is your body and brain’s way of signaling that there’s a moment when the status quo won’t do. That this might be uncomfortable, but it’s not a situation or a state of mind that prevents forward progress — it’s actually propelling you forward.

It’s truly changed my life writing this book, and it’s taken away a little bit of the fear that I might carry into new situations — from giving a speech to being in the presence of someone who’s very upset. I used to want to just offer a solution, and give that silver lining, and get that moment over with and get them on the road to happiness. And now I feel much more patient. And with that comes the ability to follow a path down an unexpected road, or even take a detour.

To hear the rest of the conversation, click here, and be sure to follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you listen to podcasts.