Coping with Uncertainty
In 2016, a group of researchers explored how people react to being told they will either “definitely” or “probably” receive a painful electric shock.
What they discovered was an interesting paradox. The volunteers who knew they would definitely receive a painful electric shock felt calmer and were measurably less agitated than those who were told they only had a 50% chance of getting an electric shock.
So essentially, people would rather have definite pain than face the uncertainty of it – regardless of whether there’s only a 50% chance of feeling that pain!
Emetophobes, in particular, find it very difficult to tolerate uncertainty. They tend to dislike surprises, make to-do lists, plan thoroughly, want to know all the details of a situation (why did he break up with me? Why did they vomit? How long did you cook this for? Why haven’t they replied? Why did they die?) and have ‘safety-seeking’ behaviours, all to alleviate the feeling of uncertainty and being out of control.
Paradoxically, as with pain in the experiment, it seems better to generate a huge amount of (fairly tiring!) anxiety for the sake of feeling in control, than to tolerate uncertainty (when it is actually MUCH easier and less time consuming to simply learn to tolerate uncertainty!)
This means you will likely be in high alert a lot of the time, with emotions and anxiety levels fluctuating based on external ‘threats’ and uncertainties you believe you can’t tolerate. It’s probably so normal to you you don’t even notice it!
This might be the case right now with an ‘uncertainty’ hanging over the world. If you’re feeling out of control about this situation, have poor coping skills and dislike the feeling of being out of control, you might be ‘coping’ by acting out ‘safety-seeking’ behaviours to give yourself a temporary sense of being in control, e.g. washing your hands more, restricting eating, monitoring your body, trying to control people’s behaviours around you.
The only way out of this cycle is to build strong coping skills and learn to tolerate uncertainty. Right now, this might be a frightening and farfetched idea. However, when you know you can calmly cope with life, regardless of whether you’re in control or not, uncertainty isn’t so bad…in fact you actually end up not even noticing it because you’re not generating fear in response to it.
For example, someone with, say, a fear of the cracks in pavements will notice and jump over every crack, generating a huge amount of fear and anxiety in response to this, vividly imagining a monster jumping out at them if they accidentally step on a crack. They may even completely avoid walking on pavements. For the rest of us, we’ve been walking on pavements all day every day throughout our lives, we’ve never even paid any attention to the cracks…
It would be interesting to put thriving people through the study – no doubt they’d much rather be in the uncertainty group and only have a 50% chance of getting an electric shock!!
To build your coping skills and learn to tolerate uncertainty you need to start challenging yourself slowly every day, in all areas of your life.
➡️Here’s an example. You’re in the middle of a work break, your phone rings and it’s your friend calling you.
Your initial thought is ‘I don’t want to pick up, I’m in the middle of a working day, I don’t know how long the call will go on for (UNCERTAINTY). I’ll just text her to find out why she’s calling (DESIRE FOR CONTROL), and tell her I’ll call her back when I’m free’ (DESIRE FOR CONTROL – it has to be on YOUR terms)
But, you’re free now – there’s nothing urgent you have to do that can’t wait half an hour.
You recognise this is just your desire for control so you answer and end up having a nice catch up with your friend!
By doing this you have challenged your desire for control and tolerated uncertainty. It might seem minor and irrelevant, but anything and everything you do like this will directly feed into building your coping skills and reducing your phobia and anxiety. The more you challenge uncertainty around small things, the more you’ll learn to challenge it around bigger, ’scarier’ things.
This recent #thrivingathome post discussed writing down positives. This is something you’d put on that list, here are some other examples:
- I challenged my desire for control and answered the phone
- I allowed my husband to make me a cup of tea
- My family were going for a walk, but I hadn’t factored it into my day plan. I stopped what I was doing and joined them, actively relaxing on the walk and stopping myself worrying about the things I had to do at home.
Don’t forget to process it all – what does this show you about you? It shows you that you CAN tolerate uncertainty.
Get going!!
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