Simone Stolzoff

What they found was the people who had a 50% chance felt far more stressed than people who had a 100% chance.

So we would somehow rather know a bad thing is going to happen to us than have to deal with the ambiguity of not knowing.

I think part of it is once we know, then we can begin to plan.

We can begin to think about how we might brace ourselves for the worst.

We might be able to respond.

Whereas the not knowing doesn't give us a toehold.

It doesn't give us anything to feel grounded in the moment.

There's another study that found that

Professional uncertainty, so not knowing whether or not you're going to lose your job, takes a similar toll on our health to actually losing our job.

And it comes back to that ambiguity aversion.

We don't like to not know what the future holds.

The problem is we often don't have a choice.

Yeah.

One thing it does is it keeps people from turning towards uncertain situations, even when those uncertain situations could be potentially beneficial.

So it keeps us from leaving a mediocre job to find a better job, a mediocre relationship to find a better relationship.

It keeps us from taking a big bet to, say, pursue a new business opportunity when we can just stay in our safe, secure place.

The problem is that the safe choice isn't always the optimal choice.

And because of our intolerance for uncertainty, we don't open our minds to other possibilities that could exist.

Part of it is just through exposure.

So similar, if you had a phobia of spiders, you might research some facts about spiders and then you might be in the same room with spiders, but 20 feet away.