Simone Stolzoff

And I'd say that in general, it's not too different from other phobias.

So I talked to a lot of different psychologists for the book.

And one of them is this guy named Michel Dugas.

And he was the first one to link uncertainty intolerance to a lot of the anxiety and mental health problems that his patients feel and that many of us feel.

And he equated uncertainty tolerance to something like exposure therapy, if you were scared of spiders, for example.

You might not go toward reaching for a spider right away, but maybe you'd start by researching some fun facts about spiders.

And then maybe you'd get comfortable enough to sort of be in the same room as a spider.

I think the same can be true with uncertainty.

We can build our uncertainty tolerance by sort of micro-dosing uncertain moments.

By consciously putting yourself in uncertain situations and safer, controlled environments, you are training your brain to be more comfortable with uncertainty.

when you are, say, facing that job uncertainty or that medical diagnosis.

And so we can learn to build more uncertainty tolerance through exposure.

The problem is modern life makes it very easy for us to stay in our comfort zones, whether it's our climate-controlled rooms that we're in or our filter bubbles that we consume online or even just like our neighborhood in our cities or our towns that we live in.

It's really easy to just stay in that comfortable place, but discomfort is necessary in order to learn and to grow.

And so in the same way that unlearning is a precursor to being able to learn new information, developing the ability to not know, or maybe we can call it unknowing, is a precursor to being able to learn and to grow.

I think it's a very popular idea in sort of education pedagogy about the necessary tool to trade some of our hubris, some of our assumption that we know best for humility.

And whether that's updating your thinking about something that you once believed that's no longer true or opening your mind to receiving new information, one sign of a good learner, we close our minds.

It narrows our scope.

But when we are able to maintain that level of uncertainty, of unknowing, we actually open our minds to what actually emerges.

We can maybe surprise ourselves by learning that their neighbor that voted for someone different than you actually has things to teach you.