Uncertainty is one of the few guarantees in life. So then why does not knowing still feel so uncomfortable and stressful? Episode 355 of Let’s Talk About Mental Health explores why uncertainty feels so difficult, and how to navigate life in spite of it. So, Let’s Talk About Mental Health!
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Episode Overview:
Navigating uncertainty can feel hard even when nothing is actually wrong, and the link between uncertainty and anxiety runs much deeper than most people realise.
Whether it’s a big life question or something as small as waiting on a reply, not knowing has a way of taking up far more space in your head than it logically should… and the harder you try to think your way out of it, the more stressful uncertainty seems to feel. The real reason for that is probably not what you’d expect… and once you see it, the fear of the unknown stops being so confusing and becomes something you can actually work with.
This week on the Let’s Talk About Mental Health podcast, I’m getting into what’s really going on when uncertainty gets under your skin, along with practical and realistic ways of living with uncertainty that don’t require you to have every answer first.
👉 Ready to discover how to navigate uncertainty, even when it feels impossible? Then let’s talk!
💡 TL;DR: Uncertainty isn’t hard because you’re bad at coping; it’s tough for a reason that’s far older than you’d think, and understanding it changes how you handle not knowing. 🙂
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Episode Transcript:
Why does navigating uncertainty feel so difficult?
Why does uncertainty feel so uncomfortable, and maybe even dangerous?
It doesn’t even really matter what the ‘unknown’ actually is, either; your mind and your body react to not knowing the same way that they’d react to something genuinely frightening.
Your brain treats not knowing as danger every time it shows up, and it’s been doing that for your whole life… maybe without you even realising it. But the fact is that not knowing something feels much worse than it actually is, and there are simple ways to navigate uncertainty so that you can protect your peace of mind… and that’s what this episode is all about.
So let’s talk about… navigating uncertainty.
Hello and welcome! I’m Jeremy Godwin and this is the Let’s Talk About Mental Health podcast, where every week I help you understand and improve your mental wellbeing.
This week is all about how incredibly uncomfortable uncertainty can make you feel… and that feeling doesn’t need a specific reason to appear; it shows up whenever something’s unresolved, no matter how big or small that might be, and it convinces you that the discomfort means something is actually wrong. S’o today we’re going to talk about why that state of not knowing and not having certainty affects you so much, as well as what your brain’s actually doing underneath it and then how to build real tolerance for the unknown rather than exhausting yourself trying to create certainty in a world full of uncertainty!
Because I may as well just say this upfront: the relief and certainty that you’re waiting for was never actually on the other side of knowing whatever you don’t know… because you can never and will never know everything. Don’t just take my word for it; you can test this on yourself: think of anything that used to feel unbearable to not know, and consider honestly whether or not finding out actually gave you the calm and peace of mind that you were hoping for… or if it just gave you a few days’ peace before the next unknown, uncertain thing turned up to take its place. Uncertainty is a fact of life.
It means that chasing certainty was never and will never actually be the way out of uncertainty.
Which then raises the obvious question: if knowing isn’t what settles you, then what does? And that’s exactly what we’re going to get into today. So let’s start doing that with some definitions, and let’s talk about…
What uncertainty feels like
Alright, so ‘uncertainty’ isn’t really about the unknown itself. It’s about what happens in you while it stays unknown. It’s the mental loop that won’t switch off, running the same handful of possibilities over and over; not because it’s actually helping you to get anywhere closer to an answer, but because stopping that process feels riskier than continuing to try to figure it out.
It’s the churning restlessness that shows up in your gut before your mind has even caught up with what it’s feeling restless about. It’s lying there at night tired enough to sleep, but definitely awake enough for your thoughts and your worries to keep circling around and around. None of that is really about the outcome. It’s about not having an outcome yet.
And it can be easy to misread as well. You know, you’ve probably told yourself at some point, as we all have, that the discomfort means you’re not handling uncertainty well; that if you were just stronger or calmer or you had your stuff more together, then maybe you’d be able to just let it go and get on with your day. And so, you double down. You think about it more, not less, convinced that somewhere in all of those circling thoughts is the one thought that will finally settle you.
And look, that’s not silliness. It’s not failure to cope. It’s just simply your mind doing exactly what an unsettled mind does when it believes that an answer is still findable, if only it works hard enough.
The effort here is not the problem. The problem is the belief that effort will get you to the promised land of certainty; you know that place: the place where the unicorn roam, and everything is perfect and beautiful. In other words, the imaginary place that would be wonderful to get to, sure, but it just isn’t realistic… because it doesn’t exist. Because the existence of uncertainty is probably one of the only certain things in life; that, and taxes… and reality television’s ability to churn out trash at a rate that can make your head spin!
Worrying about a specific outcome at least gives your mind something to grab onto: a scenario, a fear, a shape of some sort. On its own, uncertainty doesn’t even offer you that. There’s no scenario for you to brace for; it’s just a blank space where an answer should be… and then a nervous system that treats a blank space as somewhere dangerous for you to stand. That’s the harder version for your mind to accept, because there’s nothing concrete to argue yourself out of; you can’t reason your way past a feeling that was never really about reasoning to begin with.
The feeling of uncertainty shows up in ordinary and almost forgettable ways, not just the big and obvious unknowns. It’s waiting on a reply from someone, waiting on results, waiting for a decision on something. Relatively small stuff, a lot of it… right? But, yet, your body responds like it’s not small at all.
Now, you might think logically that the size of the unknown would match the size of the reaction… but it doesn’t work like that. Because it was never really about the size of the uncertainty. It’s about the fact that something, anything, is unresolved… and for your brain, ‘unresolved’ reads as ‘unsafe’, and so it can invoke fear and a burning need for control and certainty.
What can make uncertainty genuinely disorienting is that the discomfort feels so personal, like it’s telling you something true about how well you’re coping or not coping, or how capable you are of handling whatever’s ahead. But it isn’t telling you that at all. It’s simply what happens when a mind that is wired to want resolution runs into a situation that, for now, refuses to give it any solutions. Which brings us to the actual question that’s worth asking yourself: it’s not “How do you think your way to an answer that isn’t there yet?”, but, “Why is your mind so convinced that it needs an answer before it’s allowed to settle?” Because that’s where this gets genuinely interesting… and it’s not the story that you’d expect.
So now let’s talk about…
Why your brain treats uncertainty as danger
So… here’s the part that actually explains everything I just talked about, with a dash of “Jeremy’s a bit of a nerd when it comes to how the brain works” thrown in; so… consider yourself warned! Your brain didn’t evolve to handle uncertainty the way that you experience it now. It evolved to handle a much older and much simpler version of not knowing: a rustle in the grass, a shape in the dark, a strange noise… like when you hear an animal in the middle of the night, and it makes your blood run cold.
It’s something that may or may not be a threat; and usually, that gets resolved in a matter of seconds… one way or the other. For our ancestors back then, ‘unknown’ and ‘dangerous’ were functionally the same thing… because the cost of assuming safety when there was actual danger was just far too high to risk, unless you particularly enjoy being eaten by lions and tigers and bears. So our brains built a simple rule, and kept it: when something is unresolved, treat it as a threat until proven otherwise.
That rule is fast, it’s blunt, and it’s built for survival… but not for accuracy. And all this time later, that rule has never been updated. It is still running, word for word, like some sort of phantom software from Windows 95… except now, it’s not being aimed at a shape in the dark. It’s aimed at some other kind of uncertainty, like a reply you haven’t received, a diagnosis you’re waiting on, a future you can’t quite see the shape of; in other words, long, abstract, drawn-out uncertainty… which is nothing like what your ancient alarm system was ever built to sensibly interpret.
And your brain cannot tell the difference. It just fires up and reacts the same way it always has… because as far as it’s concerned, ‘unresolved’ still means ‘unsafe’ regardless of whether there’s anything remotely dangerous actually happening. That’s why the discomfort feels disproportionate to what’s actually at stake. It’s not disproportionate to the danger. It’s exactly proportionate to how your brain reads the situation, which is a completely different thing.
Once you see that gap, between what’s actually threatening you and what your nervous system thinks is threatening you, the whole experience stops being so confusing. Because it’s not a sign that you can’t cope, or that you’re falling apart. It’s simply an old, well-meaning system doing its one job… but just focusing on the wrong target.
Now… if it’s just left unaddressed, then unfortunately it ends up becoming genuinely costly over time rather than just a bit uncomfortable. You end up spending real energy fighting something that isn’t designed to be argued with; you end up thinking harder, checking things again, running the same scenarios over and over… all in service of trying to use logic to switch off an alarm that does not respond to logic, because it is driven by fear and pure survival instinct. And that can end up with you in an exhausting cycle, in a way that quietly wears you down over time… because you’re not just dealing with whatever’s actually uncertain and unresolved, but you’re also then fighting your mind and your body’s reaction to it every single day it stays unresolved.
I’ve sat with this one myself many times, and I’ve seen it in others more times than I can count, and you can find yourself in a loop of waiting for something to resolve before you can find any peace; it’s like waiting to exhale. But the problem with holding your breath like that is that, eventually, you’re going to go blue and pass out. Over time, uncertainty can go from “I’ll be OK once I know,” to, “I’m not allowed to be OK until I know.” That’s the same trap as putting your peace of mind at the end of a queue that never finishes, like I talked about in last week’s episode; it’s just wearing a different outfit this time.
Peace of mind isn’t something that gets handed to you… it’s something you create, and you do that by learning how to navigate uncertainty in a way that doesn’t demand you find certainty in order to keep going. Because you will never actually be able to predict what’s coming at any point, in any way, in any part of your life. That is not a special kind of unfairness that just happens to be landing on you at the moment. It’s just a fact of life. And it’s just what being alive has always involved and will always involve.
Nobody knows what tomorrow will bring, and no amount of stressing over it is ever going to change the outcome; life is lived here, in the present, like I just talked about in Episode 352, and so the challenge for each of us is to find ways to be present in spite of the uncertainty of life, in spite of what may or may not be around the corner. You don’t need to ignore tomorrow, or try to pretend it doesn’t exist; in fact, I very much agree with Fleetwood Mac, who wisely told us all: “Don’t stop thinking about tomorrow.” But there’s a difference between planning for the future versus letting your worries about the future rob you of today, since this is the only place that life actually exists. All you can control is what you do or don’t do here and now.
And look, I know this is probably not exactly the comforting bedtime story that you might have been hoping for. Nobody wants to hear, “You were never in control and never will be!” Nobody’s buying that on a motivational mug or a t-shirt! But bear with me… because strangely enough this is actually the good news, not the bad news!
Being honest with yourself about that, really sitting with it rather than fighting it, that’s the actual bridge into finding peace of mind… and it’s the step that we’re going to take into what we do next. Because none of what I’m about to share is about somehow making the unknown disappear. Instead, it’s about learning to stand inside the uncertainty without your entire system treating it like an emergency. And we’re going to talk about how to do that right after this quick break.
[AD BREAK]
And welcome back! So… now let’s get into the ‘how to’ part of this episode, and let’s talk about…
How to build your tolerance for uncertainty
And I’m using the word ‘tolerance’ quite deliberately here, because there’s a huge difference between ‘tolerating’ something versus ‘accepting’ it; you can allow things to be uncertain without having to like it or celebrate it… this is about recognising that some things in life can and should be resisted, things like discrimination and hatred and disrespect, but other things we just need to learn to live with and make our peace with, since no amount of resistance will change them anyway.
And uncertainty is, unfortunately, one of those things we often have very little power to change.
This is a good philosophy for life in general, actually: change what you can, influence what you cannot, and make your peace with the things that are out of your control… which is something I’ll be exploring further in next week’s episode. So with all of that in mind, now let’s get into these practical ways to tolerate uncertainty more. Starting with…
Understand that waiting isn’t wasted time.
And this takes us back to that question from earlier: if finding out was never actually what settles you, then what does? Well, here’s the answer: nothing about the unknown itself has to change for you to feel OK. What changes is your relationship with waiting. At the moment, waiting probably feels like a frustrating waste of time, a holding pattern before real life resumes.
So try coming at it differently, and think of it like this instead: waiting is where you actually live most of the time, with most things. Almost nothing in your life has ever been fully certain. And so the good news is that you have survived every single stretch of waiting that came before this one. And so, you’ll survive this uncertainty as well. Now to be clear, that’s not an ‘Instagram’ bit of reassurance. It’s not just a glossy little thing. It is the truth… and it’s worth reminding yourself of regularly. Next…
Ask yourself if there’s anything to actually do.
When the uncertainty alarm fires off in your mind, and it will, ask yourself one straightforward question to sort it with: is there something I can actually do right now, or is this just the discomfort of not knowing yet? Most of the time it’s the second one: there’s no action available, no lever to pull, nothing productive waiting on the other side of just one more lap of thinking, or overthinking. Naming that fact out loud, even just to yourself, does something real: it doesn’t make the discomfort somehow vanish, but it stops you from mistaking the discomfort for a task that you haven’t finished yet. Next…
Practice small doses of not knowing.
Back when I worked in the corporate sector, one of my bosses had a really frustrating habit of telling me in passing on a regular basis that there was something he needed to talk to me about later as he was rushing from one thing to the next. And there would be days when I was struggling with my anxiety that I would sit there and either stew over what it could possibly be or, if I was really struggling, I’d have a minor meltdown in my mind while I went through every possible scenario. And of course, 99.9% of the time it was something trivial like a scheduling question or a minor change he needed me to be aware of. But for a long time, my brain just could not cope with the uncertainty. And to be fair, I was struggling with severe undiagnosed anxiety at the time… so that certainly didn’t help. But I managed to get through it by practicing sitting with small, low-stakes uncertainty on purpose: for example, leaving an email unanswered a little longer than usual, sitting with a minor decision instead of just jumping to resolve it the moment it appeared, taking my time to think about how I was going to tackle an issue rather than just jumping in head-first.
So, do the same sort of thing. It might feel silly, but it’s not; you’re giving your nervous system small and safe moments of ‘not knowing’ that don’t end in disaster… and, over time, that’s exactly what teaches your mind the rule that it’s been missing, which is that ‘unresolved’ doesn’t automatically mean ‘unsafe’. Because you can’t argue your alarm system out of its wiring… you can only show it repeatedly that it is wrong about this particular threat. OK, next…
Know the difference between ‘worry’ and ‘uncertainty’.
And by that I mean to be really clear and specific about ‘worry’ versus ‘uncertainty’, because you’re going to treat them very differently once you can tell them apart. Worry has a shape, a scenario, a fear that you can actually name and examine and question. Uncertainty does not. So when you notice that you’re spiralling, ask which one you’re actually in.
If it’s worry, then that’s a different conversation; I covered worry back in Episode 95, And also in Episode 339 I talked about how to deal with your worries when they’re spiralling. So I’ll leave them linked in the description, or you can just head over to ltamh.com/episodes where all of my past episodes are listed and linked. But if it is genuinely just that you don’t know something, and that it’s uncertainty with nothing concrete for you to picture, then no amount of worry-filled problem solving is going to do anything to change that… because there’s nothing there to solve yet. Next…
Protect your peace while you wait.
And I mean for you to do that deliberately, rather than treating ‘peace of mind’ as something that you’re only allowed to have once all of this stuff resolves. That might mean having a short window each day where you consciously set the unresolved thing down; not because you’ve stopped caring about it, but because you know that you are allowed to exist outside of it, even if it’s just for 20 minutes. Now… if that idea feels completely foreign to you right now, given the state of the world and the amount of chaos going on everywhere, it’s understandable… it is definitely worth checking out Episode 315 on protecting your peace in chaotic times… because this is the exact same skillset, just aimed at a different source of chaos; admittedly, that’s a much bigger and louder one that seems to have more plot twists than a telenovela! Next…
Notice the cost.
And this one is less about a single specific action and more of a genuine constructive challenge for you: just notice how much of your mental and emotional energy goes towards trying to ‘think’ your way to certainty, and be honest with yourself about the cost of that; not in a self-critical way, just in a self-aware and honest kind of way. What would you actually get back if you stopped trying to solve something that was never solvable through thinking alone? What would you get back in terms of your energy, your sleep, presence, your peace of mind? Next…
Accept that you were never in control, and that’s OK.
And now I’m coming back to the whole ‘tolerance versus acceptance’ thing, and I’m going to challenge you to accept a bigger and more fundamental truth of life: all you have direct control over is yourself, and what you choose to do or not do. You will never be able to predict what is coming, and you never have been able to at any point ever. That is not new information about your life; that’s just the reality of life for all of us.
Nobody can predict the future, and so the challenge for each of us is to learn to find our own moments of certainty in a world full of uncertainty. Once you actually accept that, dealing with specific uncertainties will start being just one more thing that happens; one more part of the lifelong process of learning that your life is made up of.
Conclusion
So here’s what I want you to take away from this episode. Uncertainty is stressful and exhausting, but recognising that what you’re feeling is a natural reaction to not knowing and not being in control helps you to navigate uncertainty and protect your peace… and it’s what helps you embrace the fact that uncertainty is an unavoidable reality of life.
So, how can you deal with uncertainty in a way that protects your peace?
Because when you boil it all down, you don’t need to know everything to be OK… and you’ll handle whatever comes your way, the same as you always have.
Each week I like to finish up by sharing a quote about the topic, and I encourage you to take a few moments to really reflect on it and consider what it means to you. This week’s quote is by an unknown author, and it is:
When nothing is certain, everything is possible.
Unknown
Let me repeat that.
When nothing is certain, everything is possible.
Alright, that’s nearly it for this week! If you’d like to work through how to protect your peace in your own life with support from me, instead of trying to do it on your own, then you might be interested in my upcoming Protecting Your Peace On Purpose program. It’s a small group program that runs for 12 weeks where you spend time live with me every week, starting in late January 2027. Doors open at the end of October 2026… but if you’d like first access and the best price when they do you can register your interest now. The link is in the description, or head to: ltamh.com/programs.
My Patreon supporters get a discount on the program as well as weekly early access to my podcast, so consider becoming a supporter. You can also check out my book Life Advice That Doesn’t Suck for more practical advice for better mental health. They’re both linked in the description.
Thank you very much for joining me today. Look after yourself and make a conscious effort to share positivity and kindness out into the world… because you get back what you put out. Take care and talk to you next time!
Join me next week to talk about why letting go of control is so hard. And check out my episode on why your stress never switches off next; it’s linked in the description. I release new content every Sunday, so follow or subscribe to never miss an episode.
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