Intolerance of Uncertainty Therapy for Generalized Anxiety Disorder

Generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) involves chronic, excessive, and uncontrollable worry about a range of everyday problems. Unlike other anxiety disorders that involve specific types of fears, such as the fear of negative evaluation in social anxiety disorder, and the fear of escalating physical symptoms in panic disorder, the fear in GAD is more difficult to pinpoint.

Intolerance of Uncertainty

To address this gap in understanding fears in generalized anxiety disorder, researchers in Quebec, Canada developed a model in the early 1990s. Developed by Michel Dugas and Robert Ladouceur, this model consists of four components.

People with GAD are thought to have higher intolerance of uncertainty than those with other anxiety disorders. They have a belief system in which uncertainty is viewed as stressful, unfair, upsetting, and to be avoided.

Worrying as Coping

In this model, when you worry, you are trying to reduce feelings of uncertainty. If you worry that you might be late for an appointment, you will leave much earlier than necessary to be absolutely certain you get there on time.

Since it is the uncertainty of events, and not some aspect of them in particular that triggers your worry, what you worry about through the day will change. In the morning, you might be worried about making it to a dentist appointment on time, while by evening you could be fretting about making a decision over which cell phone plan to choose.

In this way, worry is a tactic you use to try and mentally plan and prepare for any possible outcome, especially bad ones. However, the worry in generalized anxiety disorder can be so severe that it becomes a problem itself.

Symptoms

The following thoughts and behaviors reflect an intolerance of uncertainty. Ask yourself if any of these apply to you:

• You look for information and solutions to every possible problem you may face.
• You worry about things even if the odds of them happening is very low (e.g., being in a plane crash, being diagnosed with cancer).
• You require perfect solutions that must have a 100 percent chance of working.
• You seek reassurance from others that everything will be okay, and get second and third opinions on medical matters.
• You make lists, double-check, refuse to delegate tasks, or over-prepare to manage uncertainty.
• You think that uncertainty means something bad will happen.
• You feel it is irresponsible or dangerous for there to be uncertainty in your life.
• You avoid new situations out of fear of uncertainty.
• You procrastinate, keep predictable routines, or ask others to make decisions for you.
• You feel that you can't tolerate not knowing the outcome of a situation.
• You feel that you would rather know for sure that the outcome of a situation will be bad rather than be left not knowing the outcome.

Treatment

Those same researchers in Canada realized that changes in intolerance of anxiety come before changes in worry in treatment for GAD. This led them to suggest treatment that targets intolerance of uncertainty for people with GAD. The goal of this type of treatment is to help people become more tolerant of uncertainty.

This type of therapy can take different forms and involve different components:

1. Identifying situations and strategies

Here you are taught how to identify problems that you can solve versus those that are outside of your control, and strategies that can be used for each type of problem. 

2. Behavioral experiments

Behavioral experiments involve testing out feared predictions. Here, you would be asked to write down the following three aspects of a situation:

• Your feared outcome
• The actual outcome
• How you coped with the outcome

For example, you might choose to do a behavioral experiment about choosing a restaurant for dinner. Your feared outcome might be that you won't like the food. You would then record the actual outcome (either you did or did not like it) and your coping response.

If you liked the food, there would be no coping response recorded. If, however, you did not like the food, you might write down something like "I had something else to eat when I got home" or "I was quite upset with myself for having chosen the wrong restaurant."

Over time, the goal of the behavioral experiments is to move from small events to larger ones, across multiple settings (work, home, social settings) and to observe that in most uncertain situations, the outcome is tolerable, and when it is not, that it can be managed.

Self-Help Strategies

What if you think to yourself, "Well that's fine, but I really can't deal with the uncertainty of not liking the food at a new restaurant. I'd rather just stick to what I know?"

Ask yourself this: Are there any advantages to accepting some uncertainty?

Some you might identify include:

• Feeling less anxious and worried
• Having new experiences and taking on new challenges
• Having time to focus on solving real problems instead of worrying about ones that may never happen

If these reasons are important to you, you can move toward accepting uncertainty by practicing behavioral experiments on your own (as outlined above), distancing yourself from your anxious thoughts, and practicing staying in the moment.

Distancing Yourself From Your Thoughts

To distance yourself from your thoughts, realize that your thoughts are just thoughts, and that you don't have to react. You might think "Well, this could be the day the plane crashes." Then, think, that's an interesting thought, and let it float away. Don't react to it, just realize it is only a thought.

Keep letting it float by until your anxiety subsides. Whether or not the plane crashes, worrying about it doesn't affect the outcome, beyond taking normal safety precautions.

Staying in the Moment

In order to manage your anxiety about uncertainty, you can engage in various mindfulness practices such as mindful breathing to help you stay in the moment and mindfulness meditation to learn how to quiet your mind.

A Word From Verywell

The key to managing your fear is to learn to live with uncertainty rather than to avoid it. Learning to tolerate and deal with uncertainty is key to decreasing your worry and anxiety. If, however, you find that you are unable to manage your anxiety on your own, traditional treatment such as medication or cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) may be helpful.