Hypnosis and living better with Uncertainty

Why uncertainty is so hard

The brain prefers the predictable. Faced with the unknown, it triggers alert responses designed to protect us. That is normal, and in small doses it is even useful.

What is less useful is what we put in place to try to escape it.

Researchers have a name for the mechanism: intolerance of uncertainty, a concept developed in Quebec by Professor Michel Dugas and his team, and since become an international reference in anxiety research. The idea fits in one sentence: it is not uncertainty itself that eats away at you, it is the demand for certainty.

Worry is an attempt at control

When you worry, you feel you are doing something. You anticipate, you prepare, you picture the worst so as not to be caught out. Worry gives the feeling of taking back the reins.

That is exactly why it is so hard to let go: it presents itself as a form of responsibility.

Except that it produces no certainty. It produces exhaustion, and one further conviction: that without it, you would be defenceless.

The circle

A doubt appears. The discomfort rises. You try to bring it down — check the news once more, ask someone's opinion, verify, plan one more scenario.

The relief is real, and it is short. Then the doubt comes back, a little stronger, because you have just recorded that checking was indeed necessary.

Every attempt to remove uncertainty lowers a little further your capacity to bear it.

What it costs

Shortened nights, thoughts going round, a clenched jaw, a locked neck, unreliable digestion, difficulty concentrating. These signals are real and deserve a medical opinion before being put down to stress. And there is the cost that gets measured least: a present entirely occupied by a future that isn't here yet. Decisions get pushed back — the project, the move, the conversation — and the waiting often ends up costing more than the decision itself.

The people close to you take their share. The irritability, the repeated questions and the need to be reassured wear down those around you, who end up answering beside the point, or saying nothing.

What hypnosis can offer

It does not make the future predictable, it gives no certainty, and it does not replace follow-up if your situation calls for it. It guarantees no result.

What the work aims at:

• Settling the body. For a system that has been on alert for months, a spell of deep relaxation is new information.
• Tolerating the discomfort of doubt without answering it straight away. That is the heart of it, and it can be learned.
• Taking back the initiative on checking — the news, the opinions sought, the scenarios — at your own pace, with support for the moments when the urge to check comes back.
• Taking some distance from thoughts. A worried thought is a mental event, not information about the future.
• Getting your sleep back, often the first change noticed.
• Reactivating what you have already come through. Not to tell you that you are strong, but because under worry, the memory of uncertain times that did come to an end becomes hard to reach. Recovering it counts.
• And making you self-sufficient, through self-hypnosis.

A word about positive statements

You will often read that it is enough to replace "the future is bleak" with "everything will be fine". That is not how we work.

A sweeping, unverifiable statement gives a worried mind an immediate foothold — it will find the counter-example before the sentence ends. What we see in session is that formulations which are precise and attached to a fact hold better: "I have already come through a period like this one", rather than "I can face anything".

What the research says

There is no study specifically on hypnosis and intolerance of uncertainty. We prefer to tell you.

What is documented is the effect of hypnosis on anxiety in general, with better results alongside other psychological approaches than used on its own. The quality of that work is uneven, and the authors of the most recent syntheses call for caution in reading it.

On the body's side, sessions conducted with suggestions of relaxation are accompanied, in the studies, by a fall in sympathetic nervous system activity — the alert system. Researchers insist on two points: the effect is largely due to the relaxation established during the session, and it reverses when the suggestions turn to unpleasant images. So it is the content of the session that produces the effect, not the state itself.

As for the wager this page makes — working on tolerance rather than chasing certainty — it comes from cognitive behavioural research: in a follow-up of patients treated for generalised anxiety disorder, the fall in intolerance of uncertainty accounted for 59 % of the fall in worry, and it came first. The study is small and had no control group; it points a direction, it does not prove one.

For excessive and lasting worry, Quebec's clinical practice guideline puts cognitive behavioural therapy and applied relaxation on the same footing, and states that no evidence shows psychological follow-up to be superior to medication: the choice belongs to the person. We encourage you to discuss it with your doctor.

How the work unfolds

The first conversation. What worries you, since when, and above all what you actually do when the worry rises. That last question is the most useful one. Your practitioner will also check that your situation isn't first a matter for a doctor.

A concrete objective. Not "stop worrying", which is neither realistic nor desirable. Rather: sleep without running the scenarios, don't reopen the news after eight in the evening, make a decision I've been putting off for six months.

The induction, then the work itself: settling the body, tolerating discomfort, distance from thoughts, sleep.

What carries on afterwards. A self-hypnosis exercise, to be practised at a set time rather than in response to a surge of worry — otherwise it would become one more check.

How many sessions? That's discussed at the first conversation. Nobody can know in advance.