Chapter 23: Making Peace with Uncertainty
Hiroshi had not had a restful vacation in nine years. He loved to travel, in principle. In practice, a trip was an extended exercise in managing risk. He checked the stove three times before leaving the house, and then o
Hiroshi had not had a restful vacation in nine years.
He loved to travel, in principle. In practice, a trip was an extended exercise in managing risk. He checked the stove three times before leaving the house, and then once more by video call to his neighbor. He checked his passport four times in the taxi, and again at the airport. He read two hundred reviews of the hotel, and then the reviews of the hotel across the street, in case it was better. He had a spreadsheet of contingency plans for missed flights, lost luggage, and unexpected closures. By the time he arrived, he was frazzled, and spent much of the trip scanning for the next thing that could go wrong.
His wife, Keiko, had a gentle way of describing it. “You take the trip in your head first,” she said, “and then we take it again in real life, and you’re already tired.”
What troubled Hiroshi was not any particular danger. It was that he could not rest until he knew that everything was in order, and that, in the nature of the world, was never completely true. He had a sense that if he could only eliminate the last few uncertainties, he would finally be able to relax. He had been feeling that way for nine years.
The promise that cannot be kept
In Chapter 5 we saw that the demand for certainty cannot be met, and in Chapter 10 we saw how checking and reassurance feed it. Now we come to the practice: learning to live alongside uncertainty rather than trying to abolish it.
The reasoning is straightforward, though not easy to accept. A meaningful life cannot be built on the promise that nothing painful will ever happen. We love people who can be lost. We take jobs that can end. We make plans that can fail. If peace requires certainty, peace is not available. If it can coexist with uncertainty, it is available now.
How tolerance of uncertainty grows
The most effective way to become more comfortable with uncertainty is to practice it, gradually, in small doses. This follows the same logic as the best-supported treatments for anxiety: exposure. You approach, in manageable steps, the situations you have been avoiding, and you learn, through experience, that you can cope.
The psychologist Michelle Craske and her colleagues have refined the understanding of how this works. Their inhibitory learning approach suggests that exposure does not simply erase fear. Instead, it creates new learning that competes with the old: I thought this would be unbearable, and it wasn’t. The key ingredient, they argue, is expectancy violation, a gap between what you predicted and what actually happened. The bigger the gap, the more powerful the learning.
This is why a prediction log can be so useful. Before you try something, write down what you expect: If I leave the house after checking the stove once, I will spend the whole day sick with worry and something will probably burn down. Afterward, record what happened: I felt uncomfortable for about twenty minutes, then it faded. The house was fine. The comparison between the prediction and the result is the lesson.
There is a second and subtler lesson in this: that the point is not only that the feared thing doesn’t happen. It is that you can tolerate the not knowing. Even on days when something goes wrong, you learn that you can deal with it. This is the true foundation of confidence: not the ability to predict outcomes, but the ability to handle them.
Acceptance is not recklessness
A natural worry is that learning to tolerate uncertainty means becoming careless. It does not. There is a large difference between sensible precaution and compulsive reassurance. Locking the door once is sensible. Locking it five times and checking it by phone is not. Buying travel insurance is sensible. Rereading two hundred hotel reviews is not.
A useful test is to ask: Is this action proportionate to the actual risk, and does it end? Sensible precautions are proportionate and finite. They are done once, and then you move on. Compulsive checks are open-ended. Each one seems to demand another. The aim is to keep the first and drop the second.
When we accept uncertainty, we do not abandon judgment. We exercise it more freely, because we are no longer trying to protect ourselves against every imaginable event.
Building a ladder
If you are going to practice, it helps to be systematic, and to begin where the stakes are low. Imagine a ladder with ten rungs, from the mildest uncertainty you could practice, to the most challenging. You start at the bottom and move up as each rung becomes manageable.
Hiroshi’s ladder looked like this:
- Check the stove once, not three times, before leaving the house.
- Order at a restaurant without reading its reviews.
- Leave a work email unanswered until the next morning.
- Book a hotel after reading no more than ten reviews.
- Pack for a weekend without a written checklist.
- Check the passport once.
- Take a day trip with no itinerary.
- Not look at the weather forecast for a week.
- Take a weekend trip with no backup plan for the flight.
- Take a longer holiday, with the stove checked once.
Each rung is slightly uncomfortable, and none is dangerous. The goal is not to feel no distress. It is to do the thing with the distress and see what happens.
Try this: One uncertainty, one habit
You do not need a ten-rung ladder to begin. Choose one manageable uncertainty and one checking or reassurance habit to resist.
- Pick the uncertainty. Something real but modest, like not knowing how a conversation will go, or how long a reply will take.
- Name the habit you will resist. Rechecking the door. Asking Keiko if she’s sure. Refreshing the tracking page.
- Write a prediction. What do you expect will happen if you resist? How bad? How long will the discomfort last?
- Do it, and ride out the discomfort. Use the techniques of earlier chapters: I’m noticing the thought that… and the urge-surfing of Chapter 10.
- Record the result. What actually happened? How did it compare with your prediction?
- Repeat, and step up. When a rung is easy, move to the next.
Hiroshi began with the stove. The first week, he stood in the hallway with his hand on the door, feeling the familiar pull, and said to himself: The urge to check. It will pass. It did, in about ten minutes. By the third week, he had moved to the restaurant. By the second month, he had booked a trip to the coast with minimal reading. He wrote in his log, in his careful handwriting, Prediction: I will worry the whole weekend. Result: I worried for an hour on Friday. We ate fish. It was lovely.
Keiko noticed before he did. “You’re different on the train,” she said. “You’re looking out of the window.”
Honest expectations. Distress often rises before it falls, and on some days it will not fall much. That is not failure; what you learn is that you stayed. Expect plateaus and uneven progress. Do not use this on situations that carry real danger. If checking or rituals take up substantial time, a therapist who uses exposure-based methods can guide the work. Keep these experiments within ordinary, sensible safety precautions, and do not design your own high-intensity exposure plan if your symptoms are severe; that is work to do with a clinician.
A THOUGHT TO CARRY
Confidence is not knowing what will happen. It is knowing that you will be able to meet it.