How to Become Comfortable With Uncertainty

Have you ever been in a team meeting where someone has an idea they’re so wedded to that they can’t entertain other options? Some people in the group might agree, while others might disagree and suggest other solutions. Depending on the group dynamics, each person may become increasingly attached to their own position.

If you’re lucky, however, there’s another person in the group who avoids getting caught up in these strongly held opinions. This person can look at all the different ideas at once, perhaps seeing some that haven’t been suggested, and can move flexibly among them to weigh their pros and cons. They don’t get stuck in one worldview.

In my last essay, I introduced the idea of fixation in the context of behavior. What happens when we become so attached to our own thoughts, opinions, and beliefs that we’re no longer able to put them aside or have any others? How can we get out of this pattern?

Not knowing can be uncomfortable

Consider what it would be like to enter the world with no knowledge of what things are like. Everything would be new, vivid, and unfamiliar. You would lack a sense of which phenomena are likely to hurt you and which are safe. Over time, familiar patterns would emerge, and you’d learn which are safe and which are unsafe.

Of course, in this new world, you would still encounter unfamiliar things that, in the absence of other information, you would reasonably tag as unsafe until experience proved otherwise. This “not knowing” can feel uncomfortable or even unsafe in some situations. Is the strange sound in the night just the natural noise of an old building or something more sinister? The discomfort of not knowing motivates you to find out.

Experiencing the unfamiliar as uncomfortable is a reasonable habitual mechanism because it drives you to make the thing you’re experiencing familiar—to map whether it is safe or not, and make it part of your known inner landscape of how the world works. It also serves as an energy-saving device: if you can correlate something in the world to a familiar experience, you don’t need to go to the effort of figuring out whether it’s safe all over again.

But while this mechanism may be appropriate when exploring new physical territories, it can go astray in today’s world of ideas. When it comes to solving a problem in a team meeting, not knowing doesn’t necessarily imply danger, yet the urge to resolve the uncertainty one way or the other persists.

I myself experience a low-level anxiety or inner pressure to make the uncertainty go away by asserting that the world is one known way. But the world doesn’t work like that. It’s full of volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity—and pretending otherwise just obscures the reality. 

Find the treasure in the unfamiliar

I’ve written previously that you can only respond to what you notice. One effect of experiencing something as familiar is that it engenders a tunnel vision that closes off other possibilities. While tunnel vision can provide its own sense of comfort, being unable to notice new possibilities can cause you to miss opportunities, or encourage you to walk into dangerous situations while thinking they’re safe.

Let’s say you’re a hunter-gatherer in a previously undiscovered patch of land, and you encounter a hive of bees. If you decide that these are stinging bees that produce no honey, like the ones you have at home, you might ignore or avoid them. This might be a correct assessment, but it might not be, and you might miss the bounty of honey guarded by stingless bees.

It’s a simple example, but it’s applicable to many daily experiences. If you believe that the investment will be good, you might do less due diligence. If you know for sure that your colleague dislikes you, you might decline a genuine offer of help. And if you’re convinced that you know where you are, you might struggle to ask for directions.

The trick to being able to notice the treasure in the unfamiliar lies in noticing that it is unfamiliar in the first place, becoming comfortable in that experience, and interrupting the tendency to make it familiar by asserting that things are a certain way. As long as there is at least some felt sense of “I don’t know for sure,” you’ll be better able to notice valuable things in the world that don’t align with the expectations that derive from your certainty.

Become comfortable with uncertainty