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Writer's pictureGraham

Your Psychological Allergy to Uncertainty

Updated: Nov 21

Hope and dread are just two emotions you might experience when waiting for the outcome of a decision you've made. No matter you're playing roulette or switching jobs, amid the uncertainty you're likely to feel something.

Emotion reflects a deviation from your normal state, and the body needs to work to get it back in balance. And that's stressful.


Exactly how stressful was what researchers at University College London wanted to find out.


For their experiment, they hooked up participants to machines that could measure signs of stress, such as sweating and pupil dilation. They then introduced some uncertainty through a computer game that nevertheless had very real consequences for the participants: painful electric shocks.

Sometimes, participants knew they weren't going to get a shock, sometimes they were certain they would, and the rest of the time they didn't know.


Unsurprisingly, those who were confident they could avoid trouble were pretty chilled out. But the real finding from this experiment was that stress levels were higher for those who didn't know if they were going to get shocked than for those who knew the cattle prod was coming for them.

In other words, the certainty of getting a painful electric shock was more calming than the chance you might not.


Hope is more stressful than dread.


This reflects what I describe as our psychological allergy to uncertainty. It's instinctual, and for most of human history, it's kept us safe.


The modern world, however, requires us to make decisions with long-term implications, and the further out into the future we think, the more uncertainty there is.


The result?

  • "Busy" work

  • Procrastination

  • Fear of messing up

  • Second-guessing ourselves


These are the symptoms of the psychological allergy to uncertainty, an inflammation of the mind that drags us back into the noisy present and prevents us from making great decisions.


A futurist mindset, therefore, is one that can manage the uncertainties of the future to think more clearly about what might happen. The techniques we use are the antihistamines that give us confidence in our decisions despite not knowing exactly what the outcomes will be.


Uncertainty can be stressful, but it doesn't need to debilitate you. By leaning into the future, you'll find it's much easier to decide what you want from it.

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