Hi! Welcome. You being here means more than you know. Knowing it lands with someone like you keeps me going. I'm Lavena Xu-Johnson. I write about psychology for founders. Why? Because scaling a business means scaling ourselves first.
Hi lovely founders,
Last week, I shared why we can't stop doomscrolling: an underlying mechanism psychologists call the Intolerance of Uncertainty, or IU, and how being uncomfortable with ambiguity can turn doomscrolling into a coping strategy.
What I didn't get to in last week's issue: across numerous clinical studies, intolerance of uncertainty shows up as one of the most significant upstream contributing factors of anxiety disorders: generalised anxiety, health anxiety, OCD, panic.
Most people have never heard of this term. But we've spent a lot of energy understanding anxiety as a feeling. We’ve normalised it, written about it, built wellness apps around it, but the root cause - the belief that uncertainty is dangerous and must be eliminated rarely gets addressed.
That’s what this essay is about - how to effectively reduce the intolerance of uncertainty.
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Why IU matters more than we've been told
Most anxiety interventions focus on the emotion itself: calming our feelings, regulating our bodies, and reframing our thought processes. These are indeed useful, but they treat anxiety after it has already arrived. IU-focused interventions go further back, to what's generating it in the first place.
The concept of intolerance of uncertainty itself has been building for decades. In 1949, researcher Frenkel-Brunswik observed that some people found ambiguity inherently threatening. Researchers Michel Dugas and Mark Freeston first mapped IU as a transdiagnostic construct in the 1990s, and their work has since been replicated across hundreds of studies: besides general anxiety, IU also underpins worry, panic, OCD, social anxiety, health anxiety, and depression - across cultures and populations (Carleton, 2016).
A large-scale network analysis of 108,540 adolescents found IU to be a central, interconnected node in the anxiety system: when IU is lowered, symptoms reduce with it. This is what clinicians call a ‘transdiagnostic risk factor’: a single mechanism can alter the entire architecture.
When you're in a spiral, what do you usually do?
Can uncertainty tolerance actually be trained?
A randomised controlled trial published in the Behavioral Assessment found that even a single-session, computerised IU psychoeducation intervention led to significant reductions in IU at four-week follow-up, with reductions in both anxiety and depression.
The brain's response to ambiguity is learned. That means it can be retrained. What follows are the five evidence-based methods that clinical research has found to actually work.
1. Behavioural experiments: teaching your brain that uncertainty doesn't kill you
The most powerful IU interventions work through exposure: controlled, deliberate encounters with uncertainty.
This is how to design it for yourself: choose a specific behaviour (refreshing notifications or checking the news), set a defined delay before acting on the urge, and log how you feel.
This is called habituation, it teaches our threat detection system something it cannot learn any other way: I can tolerate not knowing, and nothing catastrophic happened (Dugas & Robichaud, 2006).
If you have experienced anxiety, you’d know this: anxiety peaks quickly - and then naturally decreases, without the feeling of ‘security’ or ‘outcome’ you thought you needed.
Start with 30 minutes of not checking, and extend the tiny experiment each time - over time, the threat appraisal begins to recalibrate from:
‘Not acting = danger’ to ‘Not acting = nothing dangerous happened’.
2. Response prevention: breaking the reinforcement loop
Every time we check, we are telling our brain: this was necessary. Checking protected me.
This is the same mechanism behind compulsive behaviour in OCD, and it is why cognitive-behavioural therapy for IU incorporates response prevention: deliberately stopping the checking ritual for defined intervals (Hebert et al., 2019).
Identify your rituals, and be as specific as possible. Then resist the urge to act on it for a set window. Write down your distress trajectory. Every time you let it go before acting, you weaken the reinforcement that's been sustaining it.
3. Cognitive re-labelling: updating your beliefs about uncertainty
IU is maintained by a set of beliefs rather than facts. Write them down and examine them:
"I must know what will happen."
"Uncertainty is dangerous."
"If I don't check, something bad will happen."
Then test alternative appraisals:
"Checking doesn't give me control. It gives me the feeling of control."
"Uncertainty is uncomfortable, but not dangerous."
"I have tolerated uncertainty before. I'm still here."
This cognitive restructuring weakens the threat appraisal that gave rise to these ‘safety behaviours’ (Dugas et al., 2004).
One re-phrasing I find especially useful for the loop of abstract rumination:
When we are ruminating, we think: "Why is this happening?"
Say this instead: "What are three facts I know right now?"
When we are circling, we think: "What if this doesn’t go as planned?"
Replace it with: "What is the next concrete action I can work on before I go to bed?"
Abstract, evaluative thinking sustains rumination. But specific, action-oriented thinking interrupts it.
4. Mindfulness: decoupling discomfort from compulsion
There's a word in the mindfulness literature that founders need more of: decentering.
It means the ability to observe a thought without immediately entering into a contract with it. To notice a fear without treating it as a ‘prediction’, to notice the thought without reacting to it.
A 2025 systematic review and meta-analysis of 29 randomised controlled trials found that mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT) significantly reduced rumination, with effects sustained at follow-up, and also improved self-compassion, decentering, depression, and anxiety.
The mechanism behind it is not relaxation, but the weakening of the automatic link between an uncomfortable internal state and a compulsive behaviour. Most of us have been treating every anxious thought as if it requires an immediate response. Mindfulness practice interrupts that assumption.
5. Reframing uncertainty
Perhaps the most counterintuitive intervention: teaching people to see uncertainty as an indicator of growth rather than danger.
Kang and colleagues (2021) found that a single-session "uncertainty mindset" reframe: repositioning ambiguous situations as opportunities for learning rather than threats to manage - reduced both IU and anxiety symptoms one month later.
The reframing is not "everything will be fine" but something very honest: uncertainty means I am in new territory; I don’t know where this is going yet, and that is the nature of building anything new.
Every significant decision a founder makes lives in uncertainty. The ones who tolerate it best aren't those with the highest risk appetite, but those who have trained themselves to sit with not-knowing and, over time, learned that it doesn't have to be resolved to be survivable.
We cannot eliminate uncertainty. We never could.
Not knowing is part of the process. It always has been.
If today's essay landed with you, forward it to a founder who needs it. And if you have a question or a topic you'd like me to write about, just reply to this email.
Until next week.
Lavena
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