Intolerance of Uncertainty
Uncertainty was the enemy most of my life.
I grew up sheltered from it. Without practice dealing with it. Given a formula.
Study hard + swim fast + look good = top college + best sorority + (mrs) degree = husband + house + children = happiness.
I lived by the formula. It managed unpredictability – or promised to. It provided comfort, security, and certainty.
I got the grades, did the sports, and attempted to look good. I got into the college, matched to the sorority, and moved toward the marital degree.
My attempts to look good were my first deviation (ironically). College took a few extra years thanks to a few rounds of eating disorder treatment.
I eventually got the bachelor’s degree, but not the marital one. I went to graduate school expecting to find it.
And I did. I was on track – preparing to settle down, buy the house, start the family. Indonesia was supposed to be the “last hurrah.”
It became a real rupture.
We were on a scuba boat when he ended it. No buildup I could track. No warning I could make sense of in time.
One moment, I was inside the life the formula was building. The next, I wasn’t.
The relationship. The house. The family. Gone all at once. There was nothing to fix. No way to reapply the formula fast enough to feel stable.
Immediate, total, unavoidable uncertainty – the part the formula doesn’t prepare you for.
Intolerance of uncertainty doesn’t feel like intolerance of uncertainty.
It feels like discipline. Like ambition. Like a formula.
Until something doesn’t fit. And you realize how much it’s been holding you in place.
Formulas are sophisticated uncertainty management. They operate below awareness. They promise a predictable future – if we follow the rules.
That's a regulatory strategy. It works. Then it calcifies.
Adam Grant argues that we are neurobiologically hardwired for the level of uncertainty we’re currently experiencing. I agree – and I think there’s more.
We’re built to experience uncertainty as threat and ambiguity as danger. That fear motivates avoidance. And avoidance is adaptive – when the threat is static.
Dynamic threat is different. It requires adaptation. Evolutionarily, those who survive are the most flexible.
Brené Brown wonders if we struggle with uncertainty because certainty is positioned as an acquirable privilege.
Now working in eating disorders, I see this constantly. These disorders are empirically known to struggle with uncertainty – with control.
When uncertainty rises, the demand for certainty accelerates. Regulatory capacity gets taxed. Protection patterns emerge. We cling to what previously created stability.
Uncertainty isn’t the problem. Insufficient regulatory capacity is.
Grant names the need to accept that the world is complex, messy, and increasingly uncertain. He asks how we keep that from becoming overwhelming. Brown points to critical thinking, intellectual humility, and connection. I agree.
What’s missing is what Grant already implied: acceptance.
One of DBT’s core modules is distress tolerance – the ability to sit with uncertainty without collapsing into it or forcing it into something more comfortable. Radically tolerating uncertainty.
Acceptance that uncertainty is the only certainty. Change is the only constant. Unpredictability is the only plan.
We can build – as humans, as leaders – the capacity to regulate uncertainty. And when we do, uncertainty stops being something we need to eliminate.