Anxiety and Learning to Tolerate Uncertainty

Anxiety is often an attempt to control. It provides an illusion of control through things like perfectionism, excessive worry, scolding other people when they don’t do things the way we want, procrastination, difficulty with changes, difficulty delegating and writing lists constantly.

Some desire for certainty is normal. We want to know the restaurant we are going to serves some food we like, we want to know if we did well on that work project, we want to know our loves ones will be there for us.

However, the problem with not being okay with uncertainty, is that uncertainty is the only guarantee in life. Some people are more ‘allergic’ to uncertainty than others. If you have anxiety, that is likely the case for you.

Here a few ways of learning to tolerate uncertainty:

Practice tolerating uncertainty in small ways. E.g, don’t check the menu before you go to a restaurant or read a book without reading the reviews.

Delegate a task to someone else and sit with it not being done perfectly.

Reduce reassurance seeking from others.

If you do the above strategies and it doesn’t work out they way you wanted, think about how you still managed to cope. You often manage better than you think.

The secret to learning to tolerate uncertainty is to start acting as if you are comfortable with uncertainty. If you’d like help with your anxiety or perfectionism, please reach out today.

Photo by Robert Ruggiero on Unsplash