Navigating chaos: The science of uncertainty and how to build resilience in a constant state of flux
In one research study, participants were given a choice: Either they could pay $38 to guarantee they would get a $50 gift certificate, or they could pay $28 to enter a lottery for a chance to win either a $50 or $100 certificate. If given the choice, which would you choose?
Most participants in the study, published in 2006 in The Quarterly Journal of Economics, selected the former option, indicating something interesting about the nature of humans: Many of us seem to prefer to pursue a relatively negative outcome rather than risk an uncertain one. In other words, many would rather know their future — even if it sucks — than live with the fear that accompanies uncertainty.
This idea makes evolutionary sense. After all, our ancestors had to balance the need to search for food and mates with the risk of consuming a toxic plant or being attacked by a wild animal. Something risky inherently has a chance of harming us, and we value our safety and want to protect ourselves.
“As hominids leaving Africa and going through the mountains of Eurasia, these were very dangerous terrains, and if they didn't know what they were going to encounter, they could die,” said Dr. Michael Halassa, an associate professor of brain and cognitive sciences at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “It makes perfect sense to be averse to uncertainty.”
These days, the potential threats behind the uncertainty we live with are a little different in nature than those faced by our hominin ancestors. Today, humans are tasked with juggling the uncertainty of how long our overheating world will continue to be safe for us to survive, the looming threat of another pandemic occurring before recovering from COVID-19, and disruptive political changes like the chaos ensuing from the new Trump administration that upend life as we know it.
"It makes perfect sense to be averse to uncertainty."
These threats are real, and are already transforming the lives of millions of people who have lost a home in a wildfire, grieved a loved one in the pandemic, or lost their jobs in the new administration. Yet our perception of these threats produces the same biological response that arose in our ancestors if they came face to face with a threat like a wild animal.
As humans encounter a threat, the body produces the stress hormone cortisol and mounts an inflammatory response to deal with the risk of injury, said Dr. Aoife O’Donovan, who studies stress and health at the University of California San Francisco.
“One of the most exciting things about humans is that we can mount this response not only when we confront a real threat but when we anticipate a threat,” O’Donovan told Salon in a phone interview. “So when we have an uncertain time, like with a potential risk of wildfire, for example, or a major change in policy — if we perceive that as potentially threatening to us, we will mount a biological stress response.”
When these stress exposures are repeated or prolonged, they produce toxicity in the body’s cells and tissues, O’Donovan explained. Studies have shown that this prolonged stress response can lead to autoimmune conditions, cardiovascular disorders, and psychological disorders like depression and anxiety.
“When it comes to a threat in the environment, usually we mount this response, deal with the threat, the threat ends, and we go back to baseline,” O’Donovan said. “But when it comes to uncertain times, depending on your perception of the situation, you can be mounting this response for days, weeks or months — and that is when it becomes really harmful because the resolution doesn’t come.”
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Humans aren’t the only animals to view uncertainty this way and an aversion to uncertainty is a natural response. In the laboratory, mice tend to avoid open areas in their environments because that is where their situation becomes uncertain, said Dr. Mazen Kheirbek, a neuroscientist at the University of California San Francisco. However, eventually they will explore it if they value the cost of what they are searching for as worth the risk.
“If you excessively avoid things that are aversive, that comes at the cost of getting rewards, finding mates, getting food, and things like that,” Kheirbek told Salon in a phone interview. “Your brain is always trying to find this balance of what we in the lab call approach versus avoidance.”
An important piece in how these stressors affect our physical body seems to lie in how they are perceived. For example, in one 2012 study O’Donovan conducted involving new mothers who were chronically stressed, her team gave participants a stressful task like giving a speech in front of an audience and compared how stressful they perceived the task to be with the stress response that it produced, measured through telomeres, which are used to measure people’s biological age.
What they found was that women who perceived that the task would be more stressful had an older biological age than women who perceived that it would be less stressful. But the experience of the stressor itself was not associated with biological age, O’Donovan said.
"Increasing our tolerance for uncertainty is one way for people to experience less anxiety."
“In other words, the actual stressor was not associated with their biological age, but their anticipation of how threatening it might be was,” O’Donovan said. “This is relevant to the whole uncertainty piece because it suggests that under uncertainty, people who anticipate more threats, perhaps have cumulative effects over time that are harmful to their biological systems.”
Many factors can influence whether a person sees uncertainty with a negative connotation. Prior traumatic experiences or people who have already experienced many adverse experiences might be more likely to, understandably, assume that there is a threat in an uncertain situation. How you perceive these threats can also be influenced by your mood at the time, Kheirbek said.
“You may be more likely to generalize across the sensory features in your environment if you are anxious for example, or you are stressed," Kheirbek said. “Our internal state — as in our anxiety levels or how stressed we are or how depressed we are — influences how we incorporate information in our world.”
Cognitively, some people also have a reasoning style that more quickly jumps to conclusions, Halassa said. People who are more tolerant of uncertainty have been shown in research to take more risks and decide more often to trust in others. The reverse also holds true, Halassa said.
“One of the things I feel is important to influence mental health positively is for people to try to stay away from forming very strong conclusions about the world and to try and get the opposite experience of what they are used to,” Halassa said. “Increasing our tolerance for uncertainty is one way for people to experience less anxiety.”
Kheirbek’s lab has conducted experiments in rodents that identified the part of the brain that is activated when animals enter fearful and uncertain environments. It is called the ventral hippocampus, which is responsible for learning, emotions, fear and memory. As such, this part of the brain could be working in these moments to learn about an experience while also incorporating how the body and mind feel when doing so, Kheirbek said.
“Whenever the animal entered into these kinds of fearful and uncertain environments, these cells in this area of the brain would fire,” Kheirbek said. “So we thought maybe these cells are actually encoding this experience of the apprehension and fear of these uncertain environments.”
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In another experiment, Kheirbek used neurostimulation techniques to turn down these cells in rodents and found that the mice were less anxious and more willing to explore these uncertain environments afterward.
“Perhaps these cells in this part of the brain may be important for this kind of decision-making process of: Do I approach or do I avoid?” Kheirbek said. “Excessive activity in those cells may actually make animals extra avoidant, and if you turn down that activity, they may actually explore more.”
Whether this region of the brain can be manipulated — and we can reduce our own fear of uncertainty — is still an unanswered question. Kheirbek’s lab is working on early experiments to test whether changing certain physiological measures, like breathing rate, could influence the activity in this brain region.
However, a few things have been shown to increase this resilience. It has been shown, for example, that exercise can change the hippocampus through a process called neurogenesis, where animals actually grow more neurons. Meditation and mindfulness can also help reduce our stress response and have been associated with a greater tolerance for uncertainty.
The idea through practices like mindfulness and meditation is that building some space in the mind can help reduce the judgements we make about uncertain environments. In that space, something that was seen as a potential threat can transform into a sense of possibility.
Donnovan Somera Yisrael, a senior health educator and well being coach at Stanford Vaden Health Services, emphasized the importance of cultivating this hope — especially in uncertain times.
“I think a lot of people in an uncertain world will go toward despair,” Yisrael told Salon in a video call. “We have to practice filling our bucket of hope because if it gets too low we are going to head toward despair, and despair is when all of the bad things happen.”
Our bodies are wired to protect ourselves against threats, and that response to uncertainty and risk is necessary for survival. Yet too many or prolonged exposures to this uncertainty can have toxic effects in the body. With these uncertainties seemingly increasing in number and intensity, it’s important to regulate our response to them the best we can.
Ultimately, we are tasked with the same dilemma our ancestors were, balancing the satisfaction of our needs with the risks that come along with the process of meeting them. While it’s important to stay alert to the real threats present to keep ourselves safe, perhaps it would also do us good to practice getting more comfortable with this uncertainty.
“Stressors are ubiquitous in our lives, and building our resilience to stressors is always going to be advantageous," O’Donovan said. "Getting through uncertain times could leave us stronger."
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