Of everything I measured for my MSc, the one that has been most useful to me since is intolerance of uncertainty. Partly because it explains so much, and partly because almost nobody I work with has ever heard the phrase, and yet every single one of them recognises it within about thirty seconds of my describing it.
The formal definition, from my thesis, is a cognitive, emotional and behavioural reaction to uncertainty which leads to faulty appraisals and poor coping. It comes about through biased information processing, where the individual believes there is something inherently threatening about uncertainty itself.
That is a mouthful. So here is the version I actually use.
Most people find not knowing mildly unpleasant. Some people find it unbearable. And crucially, the unbearable group are not reacting to bad news. They are reacting to the absence of news, and treating that absence as though it were bad news.
The gap gets filled
This is the mechanism, and once you see it you cannot unsee it.
Something happens that carries no information. Your boss says "have you got ten minutes later" and then goes into a meeting. A client is a bit shorter than usual on a call. An email you sent two days ago has not been answered. A recruiter looks at your LinkedIn profile.
There is nothing there. Genuinely nothing. Any of those things has fifteen explanations, and fourteen of them are boring.
But a person with high intolerance of uncertainty does not sit neutrally in a gap. The gap gets filled. And it never gets filled with "she is probably just busy."
What I found in my research was that this was strongly predicted by perfectionism, specifically self-oriented perfectionism and socially prescribed perfectionism, and that it then went on to predict psychological distress in its own right. It sits in the middle. It is one of the two things doing the actual work between having high standards and feeling terrible.
What it looks like from outside
The frustrating thing about intolerance of uncertainty is that all the behaviours it produces look, from the outside, like conscientiousness. Which is why it goes unnoticed for decades, often by the person themselves.
Checking. The sent folder. The tracking. The read receipts, God help us. You are not gathering information, because there is no new information in your own sent email. You are trying to resolve a feeling using the only object available.
Over-preparing. Preparing for a meeting is sensible. Preparing for the eleven ways the meeting might go, including the three that have never happened to anyone, is something else, and it eats an evening.
Seeking reassurance. And then needing it again a day later, which confuses everybody including you, because the reassurance was perfectly good and you believed it at the time.
Avoiding the ask. You do not chase the answer, because at least while you have not asked, the bad version has not been confirmed. This is the one that costs people money, incidentally. I have watched senior, competent people sit on an unasked question for six weeks.
Deciding too fast. This is the sneaky one. Some people cannot bear the open state at all, so they close it. They take the offer, accept the deal, make the call, not because it is the right call but because a decided bad thing is more comfortable than an undecided anything.
Why reassurance does not fix it
This is the part I most want people to understand, because it explains why everyone around you has been trying to help and it keeps not working.
Reassurance resolves the specific uncertainty. Somebody tells you the meeting was fine, and it was, and you feel better. That relief is real. It usually lasts a couple of hours.
But it has not touched the intolerance. The capacity to sit in a gap is exactly where it was. So the next gap opens, as gaps do, roughly hourly, and you are back at the beginning slightly more tired and slightly more embarrassed about needing to ask again.
Which is why the answer is not more reassurance, and it is definitely not better information. You cannot resolve your way out of this, because the supply of unresolved things is infinite. The only thing that actually changes it is getting better at the not knowing, which is a skill, and which is learned the miserable way, by practising.
What practising looks like
I am not going to dress this up. It looks like deliberately leaving something unresolved and letting it be uncomfortable.
Not checking. Not asking. Sending the email and closing the laptop. Letting the ambiguous comment stay ambiguous overnight. And then noticing, the next morning, that you survived it, and that the catastrophe your brain was so certain about did not arrive.
You do that enough times and the reaction genuinely fades. Not to zero. But to the level where uncertainty is unpleasant rather than intolerable, which is where most people live, and which is quite a nice place to be.
It is slow, and it feels ridiculous, and for the first few weeks it feels like you are being reckless rather than well. I would not pretend otherwise.
However. If you have spent twenty years resolving things faster and harder and it has not worked, that is reasonably strong evidence about which direction the answer is in.
So. What is the thing you are going to check in the next hour? And what would happen if you left it?
Until next time, Stacy