Dealing with Uncertainty
As children, many of us were often afraid of the dark. We didn’t know what creepy things lurked in the dark corners of our bedrooms. Although as adults we tend to be more comfortable sleeping in a dark room at night without fear of monsters in the closet, we are still often afraid of the unknown.
Uncertainty can be scary. Uncertainty is often uncomfortable and really hard. As humans, we crave certainty. We want to know the answers and the outcomes, and we feel more empowered when we have a sense of control and closure.
Experiences of uncertainty create stress, activating our sympathetic nervous system, which causes a stress response in our body.
In 2016, University College London’s Neurology research department conducted an experiment in uncertainty. The experiment proved that high feelings of uncertainty created more stress than feelings of clarity about impending pain. The 45 participants in the experiment played a video game where they had to overturn rocks and guess if there was a snake under the rock. When they were wrong, they got a mild electric shock on their hand. At times throughout the game, it was predictable when they would get shocked, and then the game would fluctuate so that participants were increasingly uncertain of when they would be shocked. What they found was that when the chance of getting a shock was 50/50, people’s stress levels were at the highest. When their chance was 0%, or 100% they had the lowest stress response.
This research suggests that uncertainty creates more stress than physical pain itself!
At a biological level we really don’t like uncertainty. Uncertainty could potentially mean death, so we always look for certainty and answers. We do anything we can to bring an end to the unknown. Consider the uncertainty of COVID-19. This global pandemic created a much longer season of uncertainty than anyone ever expected. Western society values control, the rights of the individual, freedom, and certainty. COVID-19 challenged all of that! So much loss, and many, many months of living in the unknown. The uncertainty of COVID-19 has impacted many people’s well-being.
In the article Your Fear of Uncertainty Can Disempower You (2020) neuroscientist Beau Lotto says that people are more likely to feel disempowered when they are uncertain. He says that disempowerment also affects our perceptions. Ignorance, gullibility, delusion and even anger can ensue.”
When uncertain, we are more apt to perceive patterns that aren’t really there, and project meaning onto something or someone else. We perceive things to be bigger and scarier than when we don’t have a sense of control.
One thing we can be certain of in this life, is that we will have times of uncertainty. It is part of the human experience. Developing an understanding of what happens to us in uncertainty can help us handle it better.
As you move into peer support work, it’s important to remember that uncertainty will affect both you and the people y