The rapid pace of change under the current presidential administration has been amping up people’s feelings of uncertainty. That collective unease can take a toll on societal well-being, researchers say.
“Given that unfamiliarity permeates our current ether … uncertainty can be considered a widespread public health problem,” Emily Hauenstein argued earlier this year in the Archives of Pediatric Nursing.
A considerable body of research shows that uncertainty challenges people’s ability to think clearly, sift through information and make sound decisions. This can make people susceptible to cognitive traps. Faced with a volatile environment, some go down every rabbit hole in search of the perfect path forward, only to feel paralyzed by the glut of competing options. Others take the opposite tack, latching onto simplistic explanations for complex problems.
Imagine, for example, that someone is faced with the prospect of losing their job, says psychologist Nick Carleton of the University of Regina in Canada. Some people dislike uncertainty so much that they may rationalize a suboptimal decision such as “I’m going to quit my job because I’m going to lose my job,” he says.
Though less studied than the ills of uncertainty, a growing body of evidence hints at how people can avoid such pitfalls. The first step comes from accepting that some uncertainty in life is inevitable and even desirable, says social psychologist Jessica Alquist of Texas Tech University in Lubbock.
Though anxiety-inducing, uncertainty also imbues life with a sense of adventure, surprise and novelty. If the world were entirely predictable, how would people know when to pay attention or take action?
“There are positives to uncertainty,” Alquist says. “We view that feeling as just entirely negative without recognizing how useful it is.”
Contemporary uncertainty can jeopardize mental health
From an evolutionary standpoint, people’s attempts to predict what might happen next makes sense, says neuroscientist Anne-Laure Le Cunff of King’s College London. For our foraging ancestors, when faced with an approaching tribe or unusual weather patterns, worrying and reacting quickly was generally the safest bet.
Now, though, humans’ worries — such as climate change, a global health crisis or societal unrest — are often too unwieldy for any one person or community to tackle alone. The inability to comprehend what’s on the horizon can wreak havoc on mental health, particularly for individuals who score high on a standard measure of intolerance to uncertainty. Low tolerance scores have been linked to generalized anxiety disorder, social anxiety, panic disorder, symptoms of depression, eating disorders and suicidal thinking, Alquist and social psychologist Roy Baumeister noted in December in Current Directions in Psychological Science.
Problematically, people’s ability to handle uncertainty seems to be progressively worsening, Carleton and colleagues reported in 2019 in Cognitive Behaviour Therapy. His team attributes that rise to more widespread use of the Internet and mobile phones.
Not long ago, when people debated social issues, they couldn’t immediately investigate a given claim, Carleton says. Instead, they had to sit with the discomfort of not knowing. Today, people can look up information on the fly. “You can get … that sense of certainty right away,” he says.
This quick pivot to certainty, though, may come at the cost of accuracy, say Carleton and others. Le Cunff notes that an intense desire to resolve uncertainty can inhibit people’s urge to dig deeper. “As human beings … we naturally seek to restore order. That means usually we try to either predict what is going to happen or control things. That explains why you see people cling to routines, ideologies or even conspiracy theories.”
For instance, when people felt certain about the progression of the COVID-19 pandemic, they were more likely to ignore medical guidelines, researchers reported in 2022 in Personality and Individual Differences. This intellectual blindness held true for those who agreed with the statement “I know that everything is going to be fine soon” and others who agreed with “I know that nothing is going to get better soon.”
Uncertainty can also signal us to focus
Experiencing uncertainty is a bit like experiencing pain, Alquist says. The natural inclination is to treat the feeling as unequivocally bad. But pain serves as a signal to apply a bandage or rush to the hospital. Similarly, she says, uncertainty “is setting off that alarm … to pay attention.”
For instance, in one study reported in 2015, participants guaranteed a $2 reward did not work as hard as those who had a 50-50 chance at getting either $1 or $2. This suggests that uncertainty can fuel motivation.
In another experiment, researchers handed out one of two fliers illustrated with a rose to roughly 200 people walking down a busy street in Northern California. One flier read, “Life is unpredictable. Stop and smell the roses.” The other read, “Life is constant. Stop and smell the roses.” A short distance away, the team set up a table with a dozen roses and a blown-up version of the flier with just the statement “Stop and smell the roses.”
Over a quarter of walkers who received the “Life is unpredictable” flier stopped at the table compared to just 11 percent of those who received the other flier, the team reported in 2023 in Emotion. Uncertainty can enhance savoring, says psychologist Paul Piff of the University of California, Irvine. In other words, experiencing uncertainty might make people more inclined to appreciate the little things in life — or literally stop and smell the roses.
“One of the ways that [people] can cope with … uncertainty is by focusing on the more controllable, positive things in their life,” Piff says.
Research directly examining how to manage uncertainty, though, remains surprisingly limited, Le Cunff says. Instead, she and others point to related studies. For instance, small acts of kindness — such as providing a listening ear for a neighbor or volunteering in a neighborhood activity — can increase well-being and social connectedness while decreasing anxiety, uncertainty’s sibling, researchers reported last year in Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology.
This sort of research shows how people can take on small, manageable tasks to overcome paralysis during periods of uncertainty, Le Cunff says.
Piff concurs, pointing to a parable about two people walking along a beach where countless sea stars have washed ashore. One person keeps throwing the sea stars back into the water. The other, overwhelmed by the sheer number of beached sea stars, wonders why bother. To which, Piff says, the friend replies: “I’m going to have an effect on the starfish I’m throwing back.”