#22: Dealing with uncertainty
Do you struggle to cope with uncertainty - about the effects of the pandemic, about your career, about your income, your relationship, and God knows what else? The Academic Imperfectionist is here to break it all down for you. You're going to learn:
That it's completely normal to feel stressed and anxious in the face of uncertainty;
That the reason uncertainty is stressful is due not only to the possibility of some nasty outcome that you fear, but also to how anticipating it makes you feel;
That coping effectively with uncertainty requires two separate strategies: one to try to avert the nasty outcome that you fear, and another to address the stress that anticipating that outcome causes you;
How to start implementing both those strategies right now.
Here are the publications mentioned in the episode:
Anderson, E. C., Carleton, R. N., Diefenbach, M., and Han, P. K. J. 2019: ‘The relationship between uncertainty and affect’, Frontiers in Psychology 10.
Loewenstein, G. 1987: ‘Anticipation and the valuation of delayed consumption’, The Economic Journal 97/387: 666–84.
Lovallo, D. and Kahneman, D. 2000: ‘Living with uncertainty: attractiveness and resolution timing’, Journal of Behavioral Decision Making 13/2: 179–90.
And here's Harvard Law School's guide to BATNAs.
Episode transcript:
Is too much uncertainty taking a toll on your mental and physical health? Help is at hand.
You’re listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. I’m Dr Rebecca Roache. I’m a coach and a philosopher at the University of London, and week by week I’ll be drawing on philosophical analysis and coaching insights to help you dump perfectionism and flourish on your own terms.
I’d be willing to bet that you, dear listener, struggle with uncertainty. Not knowing what your future holds causes you anxiety, right? Yep, I thought so. It’s not that I’m particularly astute. It’s that everyone is struggling with uncertainty at the moment, even more than usual, thanks to the pandemic. The last 18 months have been especially rotten, and we all hope that we’ll emerge into the sunlight at some point - but will we? And what would that even look like? And what if we don’t - what would that look like, and how will we adapt? Will we adapt? And so on. If you’re an academic, or hoping to become one, you’ve bought into a career steeped in uncertainty. You’re constantly throwing your energy at projects that might come to nothing. If you’re a PhD student, then you’ve invested a great deal of time and money into your studies when you don’t know whether you’re going to finish on time, whether you’re going to pass, and if you do, whether you’re going to get an academic job. If you do get an academic job, then sadly it’s more than likely to be a temporary one, leaving you uncertain about whether you’ll be employed in a year’s time, and if so, whether you’ll be living where you currently live or whether you’ll need to move to a new city, country, or continent. If you’re not running the gauntlet of the job market, then it’s the competition for grants. And even if you’re lucky enough to have a permanent job, there’s the fact that academia is changing - and not for the better. Burnout, and other mental health crises, are rife. Overwork is standard. Often, those who don’t have to worry about job uncertainty find themselves worrying about health uncertainty: will their mental and physical health hold out if they continue along the path they’re going? Uncertainty sucks, right?
Well, actually, it’s not that simple. Uncertainty doesn’t always suck. Sometimes uncertainty is really valuable. We don’t like spoilers for movies and books and sports matches that we haven’t finished yet because uncertainty about how the story or match will end enhances our enjoyment of it. When we give someone a gift, we don’t use transparent wrapping paper, because we know they’ll enjoy it more if they can’t work out what the gift is until they unwrap it. Uncertainty is something we enjoy when we expect it to culminate in a good outcome, like a satisfying end to a story or a gift of something that we’ll enjoy. But we don’t enjoy uncertainty when we think it’s going to lead to something unpleasant, like unemployment or failure. It tends to happen, too, that uncertainty makes us anxious when we don’t know whether our uncertainty is more likely to resolve into a good or a bad outcome, and even when we think there’s a pretty small chance of a bad outcome - for example, you might take an exam and be reasonably confident that you’ve done ok, but still, you find yourself feeling anxious as you wait for the result. It looks like, unless the chance of a negative outcome isn’t on our radar at all, uncertainty is a state that we don’t enjoy. Given that uncertainty in various forms is something we have to endure, how can we best live with it?
Well, let’s first take a look at what the research says. There are good evolutionary reasons why we dislike uncertainty. It’s bad for decision-making. If we don’t know what’s going to happen in the future, then it’s hard to decide how we should behave right now. Our attitudes to uncertainty have been studied by psychologists and other researchers. A study from 2000 by Dan Lovallo and Daniel Kahneman found that people will pay to reduce uncertainty, when that uncertainty relates to the possibility of an undesirable outcome. (When it comes to the possibility of desirable outcomes, we’re more willing to tolerate uncertainty.) What that reveals about our attitudes - that we dislike uncertainty about nasty outcomes more than we dislike uncertainty about nice outcomes - isn’t particularly surprising. But the research that inspired this study adds an interesting angle. Lovallo and Kahneman state right at the start of their 2000 article that their starting point was a 1987 study by Geoge Loewenstein. Loewenstein wasn’t concerned with uncertainty - he was looking at anticipation. He found that people were willing to pay twice as much to avoid a nasty outcome - an electric shock - that would happen in 10 years than they would pay to avoid it today. And conversely, experiencing a nice outcome - a kiss from their favourite movie star - was twice as valuable if it was due to happen in a few days compared to if it was due to happen today. This tells us that when we think about nice outcomes and nasty outcomes, what makes them nice or nasty is not merely the outcome itself. The way we feel when we anticipate the outcome is also important. A 2019 review article of the research on the relationship between uncertainty and emotion proposed that ‘mental simulation’ during the period of anticipation is what produces the emotions we feel when we think about the uncertain outcome: when we anticipate a nice outcome, we imaginatively construct the experience of that outcome, which makes us feel good. And when we anticipate a nasty outcome, we imagine experiencing that, and that makes us feel bad.
There’s a few things we can learn from all this about how to cope with uncertainty. The first is simply that, given how difficult (or even impossible) uncertainty is to avoid, and given that we are evolutionarily programmed to be bothered by it, we can expect to spend a fair amount of time feeling anxious about things like how the future might turn out, whether our romantic partner likes us as much as we hope they do, whether we made a fool of ourselves at that social event we attended last night, and so on. Just accept that. The fact that you’re fretting about these uncertainties doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with you, or with your life. It’s all just business-as-usual. Worrying is what you’re supposed to do in the face of stuff you don’t yet know. Having said that, some of us worry far more than others. And some of us face, and get worn down by, far more significant uncertainty than others. If your employment contract is due to end in a few weeks and you don’t know where you’re going to find next month’s rent, then hearing that uncertainty is just part of life is not going to be much comfort. Which brings me on to our second lesson about how to cope with uncertainty.
Remember: the stress you experience when you contemplate an uncertain, nasty outcome - such as the possibility of being unemployed a few months from now - is not wholly due to the possible outcome itself. It’s also due to how anticipating the outcome makes you feel. This means that coping effectively with uncertainty needs to involve two strategies. One strategy involves taking steps to avoid the nasty outcome. The other involves taking steps to reduce the stress caused by anticipating the nasty outcome. Let’s explore each of these in turn.
Taking steps to avoid the nasty outcome is what most of us actually do in the face of uncertainty - or, at least, it’s what we think we should be doing. If you’re worried that you might be unemployed a few months from now, then you apply for jobs, right? You do that in the hope that the nasty outcome that you fear - being unemployed - won’t materialise. It’s a sensible idea. However, you can make life easier for yourself if it’s not the only approach you take. We can draw an important insight from business here. In negotiation theory, the acronym BATNA stands for ‘best alternative to a negotiated agreement’. The idea is that, before you enter into a negotiation in which you hope to succeed in getting a particular outcome, you should have a clear idea of what the best outcome would be if you don’t get the one you want. That’s your BATNA. In the same way, if you’re worried that you’re on the verge of being unemployed, and you’re frantically applying for jobs in the hope of averting that outcome, then take a breath, take a step back, and identify your BATNA. If you don’t succeed in getting one of those jobs you’ve applied for, what’s the next best outcome? Perhaps you can look into learning a new skill or getting some other valuable experience that’s going to help you flourish. Perhaps you can have a frank talk with some family members to see if they might be able to support you financially for a while, if you end up needing that. Perhaps you can use the job application process, where you have to review and describe your skills and strengths, as an opportunity to think about what alternative paths might be open to you.
Now, in reality, we’re often reluctant to do this. If you’re worried about being unemployed and you’re applying for jobs, you might understandably feel that you simply don’t have the mental space to build yourself a safety net in addition to all the other things you’re having to do. You might also tell yourself that planning a BATNA is defeatist, and that you should have faith in yourself and not give up, instead of thinking about what you’ll do in the event of failure. Let’s take those points in reverse order. Planning a BATNA is not defeatist. People do this in business all the time. You can go to the website of Harvard Law School and download a guide to BATNAs, in order to become a better negotiator (I’ll put a link to that in the show notes, in case you’re interested). Viewing this as defeatist involves viewing your options in a binary, all-or-nothing way: you either get what you want, or you fail. I’ve warned you about this sort of thinking before. Life is more complicated. You’re not simply trying to succeed and not fail; you’re trying to secure the best possible outcome for yourself. And thinking through what might happen if you don’t get your first choice of outcome is part of that. It’s a way of looking after yourself; of giving yourself the best chance to flourish. Next - what about the point that someone fretting about how to avert an undesirable outcome might not have the mental bandwidth for thinking about what they’ll do if they don’t get what they want? Well, here’s where we come back to my claim that coping with uncertainty involves two strategies: trying to avoid the nasty outcome you fear, and dealing with the stress that the uncertainty causes. If you find yourself saying things like, ‘But I’m too busy trying to avoid the nasty outcome, I can’t deal with having to think about back-up options too!’, that’s because you’re neglecting the second strategy. Or rather, you’re focusing on the first strategy - avoiding the nasty outcome - and assuming that that will somehow take care of the stress you feel, indirectly. But the research suggests that that’s not going to work. If averting the nasty outcome was enough to take care of the stress we feel when we anticipate that outcome, then it wouldn’t have been the case that Loewenstein’s subjects were willing to pay twice as much to avert a nasty outcome ten years from now as they would pay to avert a nasty outcome today. Instead, you need to try to avert the nasty outcome and deal with the stress that anticipating that nasty outcome causes you. You need to do those things separately.
So, how do you deal with that stress? One possible way is suggested by the 2019 article I mentioned earlier - which brings me on to the third lesson that research on uncertainty and emotion can help us deal with uncertainty. That 2019 article, by Eric C. Anderson and colleagues, suggested that uncertainty linked to a possible nasty outcome makes us feel stressed because, while we’re waiting, we mentally simulate the nasty outcome in question. If you’re worried about the possibility of being unemployed, that might involve imagining in detail the sense of panic you’ll feel when your current job ends, the helplessness you’ll feel when your rent day arrives and you’re unable to pay it, the shame you’ll feel when friends and family ask you how your career is going and you have to tell them what a big fat failure you are. We mentally torture ourselves, in other words. It’s reminiscent of the Buddhist story of the ‘second arrow’. The story goes like this: the Buddha asked a student, ‘If you’re struck by an arrow, does it hurt?’ and of course the student answers that yes, it does hurt. The Buddha then asks, ‘If you’re struck by a second arrow, does it hurt even more?’ and again the student answers, yes. The Buddha then explains that we can’t always control whether or not we’re hit by the first arrow. But the second arrow is our reaction to being hit by the first arrow - and we do have some control over that, although developing and exercising that control can take a bit of practice.
Faced with uncertainty, the outcome we fear is the comparable to the first arrow. We don’t know yet whether or not it will strike us - that’s what uncertainty is. But the way we often torture ourselves by mentally simulating the worst-case outcome is the second arrow. And if we let our minds run free, that second arrow can be a certainty even if the first isn’t. It really doesn’t need to be that way. We can soften the blow for ourselves. One thing you can do is make time to mentally simulate the best-case outcome. When you find yourself dwelling on the worst that might happen, recognise what you’re doing, and switch instead to thinking about how great things might turn out instead. That takes practice, and it doesn’t come easily - as I said, evolution has programmed us to worry when we’re faced with uncertainty. But you can do it. You can also choose something affirming to think when you find yourself dwelling on the outcome you fear. Instead of thinking things like, ‘I’m screwed if X happens’, find a positive alternative. My favourite, which I got from the American author and speaker Mel Robbins, is: ‘What if it all works out?’
Aside from that, the stress you feel when you’re worried is real. It doesn’t matter whether the outcome you fear will or won’t materialise. That you feel anxious about it right now is significant. You need rest and care. You need fresh air, sleep, and exercise. All the boring, important things. Stress can be exhausting. Sure, you can be doing practical things to avert the outcome you fear - but that’s part of strategy 1, and we’re talking here about strategy 2. They’re separate, and you need both. And here’s some good news: by taking strategy 2 seriously and looking after yourself, you will have more energy for strategy 1. You’ll be less likely to say things like, ‘But I’m so stressed about finding a job that I don’t have the energy for working out what needs to happen if I don’t!’ When you recognise strategy 1 and strategy 2 as separate, and take them both seriously, each is more effective. Keep the emotion out of the practical planning and decision-making you need for strategy 1; and keep the practical concerns out of the self-care and restoration required for strategy 2. You got this, imperfectionists.
I’m Dr Rebecca Roache, and you’ve been listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. If you enjoyed the episode, please subscribe on whatever podcast app you like to use. I want to help as many people as I can with these episodes, and I’d really appreciate it if you’d share the podcast with any friends who you think might find it useful, and if you’d consider leaving a review on your podcast app. If you’d like to support the podcast financially, you can do that at patreon.com/academicimperfectionist. For more information about me, the podcast, and my coaching, please visit the website - academicimperfectionist.com. You’ll find links there to The Academic Imperfectionist on Twitter and Facebook too. If you have an idea or a request for a future episode of The Academic Imperfectionist, please drop me a line, either via my website or by tweeting your idea with the hashtag #AcademicImperfectionist. Thank you for listening, and see you next time!
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