Your Brain During Uncertainty

Your Brain During Uncertainty

Here’s why your brain finds “not knowing” more stressful than bad news.
By Matt Hughes, Founder of Ripen, Resilience & Leadership Speaker

You have probably noticed there is a certain kind of background noise in our brains during uncertain times. A low-grade noise that makes it hard to concentrate, to sleep properly, or to feel settled. You know something is unresolved, but you can’t act on it yet. Instead, you are just waiting, and the waiting is its own kind of exhausting.

This is not a character flaw; it is a neurological response, and understanding it helps you manage it.

The most consistently reported drivers of poor mental health at work are workload, change, and uncertainty about the future¹. If any of that sounds familiar right now, this edition is for you.

One Myth, One Truth

Myth: Resilient people are comfortable with uncertainty. If change and ambiguity bother you, then you’re not coping well.

Truth: The human brain is wired to treat ambiguity as a threat. Low tolerance for uncertainty is not a personality weakness; it is something we all experience on some level and is one of the most common and studied drivers of anxiety.

A study at University College London found that people were more stressed when there was a 50% chance of receiving a small electric shock than when they knew a shock was definitely coming. Not knowing was harder than bad news. Related research by Naomi Eisenberger at UCLA showed that social rejection activates some of the same brain regions as physical pain. We are not being dramatic when we say that uncertainty hurts. The brain’s threat detection system does not distinguish cleanly between “a predator might be in the bushes” and “I don’t know if my job is safe.” Both trigger the same alarm response.

Arie Kruglanski’s research on “need for cognitive closure” adds another layer. Some people have a stronger drive to resolve ambiguity quickly, to reach a conclusion and move on. Under sustained uncertainty, people with high need for closure often make premature decisions to escape the discomfort of not knowing. Meaning they might grab the first available answer rather than the right one.

This is also what Nassim Nicholas Taleb calls the narrative fallacy: our compulsion to construct meaning and story from events, even when the pattern isn’t there yet. We fill uncertain situations with stories, and usually worst-case ones, because a bad story feels more manageable than no story at all. Meaning we trade accuracy for the illusion of control.

The research-supported path through uncertainty is not to eliminate it (because often you can’t), or to pretend it doesn’t affect you (because most likely it does). Instead, you need to distinguish between what you know and what you’re filling in with fear, and practise tolerating the gap.

One Tool: The Reality Check

When you catch yourself spiralling about an uncertain situation, take two minutes and write two columns.

Column 1: What do I actually know? List all the things you can verify about the situation, including things that have been directly communicated to you by trusted sources. Stick to facts.

Column 2: What am I filling in? List all the things your brain has generated to close the gap between what you know and what you don’t. The stories, the worst cases, the assumptions.

Most people find that column 1 is much shorter than column 2. Somewhere in between what you know and what you fear is where anxiety lives. Naming it doesn’t eliminate the uncertainty, or the anxiety, but it interrupts the automatic filling-in process and gives you something more concrete to work with.

A question to ask after you’ve filled both columns: “Based on what I actually know, what is the one most useful thing I can do right now?” Often the answer is nothing yet, and that can be its own kind of useful information. Alternatively, seeking out the facts and information needed to fill Column 1 from trusted sources can help remove what you are filling in for yourself or from untrusted sources.

One Thing Worth Watching

Daniel Levitin, a neuroscientist and cognitive psychologist, explains the concept of “prospective hindsight”, which involves thinking through a future stressful situation in advance, rather than being caught in it unprepared. He calls it a “pre-mortem” (a technique developed by psychologist Gary Klein), and it is one of the most practical tools in the research for managing the anxiety of anticipation. Twelve minutes and really useful for anyone facing uncertainty.

Watch the TED Talk

One Question

For one uncertainty you are currently experiencing, how much of the uncertainty and unknowns are you filling with fear rather than fact?

Uncertainty is not a problem to be solved; instead, try seeing it as a situation to be navigated.

The people who do that well are not the ones who know more than you do. They’re the ones who have practised the art of acting clearly from incomplete information.

To bring this conversation to your team or event, contact ICMI Speakers & Entertainers.

Matt

About Matt Hughes

Matt Hughes is a resilience and leadership speaker and the founder of Ripen. Since 2016, he has delivered more than 2,500 talks across 30+ countries, combining science, real-world experience and humour to make resilience and wellbeing practical and relevant. Matt is trained in psychology, with executive studies in lifestyle medicine and coaching through Harvard Medical School. As a Graduate of the Australian Institute of Company Directors (GAICD), he helps leaders and directors understand and meet their psychosocial safety obligations.

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