Summary: Yes, uncertainty can affect mental health.
Key Points:
- Studies show uncertainty is not always negative.
- Some people say uncertainty represents opportunity and increases hope
- Other say uncertainty represents doubt and increases fear
- Techniques like acknowledgment, acceptance, and reframing help people cope with uncertainty
New Research on the Impact of Uncertainty on Quality of Life
In this article, we’ll discuss uncertainty by sharing information published in two articles on the topic. One study is quantitative, meaning it includes outcomes that are measurable and can be described with discrete numbers and/or figures. The other study is qualitative, meaning it includes outcomes defined by properties or characteristics that refer to how good or bad something is, what something is like, or feelings and ideas about a thing, rather than outcomes that can be expressed in numbers or figures.
Here’s a simple way to think of the difference: quantitative refers to specific numbers, i.e. quantities, while quantitative refers to a range of concepts, ideas, or feelings, i.e. qualities.
We’ll look at these two studies:
- Quantitative: The Association Between Uncertainty and Mental Health: A Scoping Review of the Quantitative Literature (2022)
- Qualitative: Uncertainty and Mental Health: A Qualitative Scoping Review (2024)
We’re fortunate to have peer-reviewed studies from these two perspectives. We know that different people feel uncertainty about different things. For instance, one person might be happy about not knowing the schedule for tomorrow, while for another person, not knowing may elicit feelings of dread: those are outcomes of quality. When we pool experiences, count the outcomes, and give them numbers, such as “50% of the sample set said uncertainty cause no mental health symptoms, while 50% of the sample set said uncertainty caused symptoms of anxiety,” those are quantitative outcomes.
The combination of both will expand our perspective and increase our understanding of how uncertainty might affect mental health. We’ll start the discussion by using the first study – the quantitative one – to define uncertainty and recap the current state of knowledge on the subject.
What is Uncertainty?
Mental health experts define uncertainty as a subjective state that occurs when an individual encounters situations wherein:
“…details are ambiguous, complex, unpredictable, or probabilistic…when information is unavailable or inconsistent…and when people feel insecure in their own state of knowledge or the state of knowledge in general.”
Simplified definitions offer various additional concepts of uncertainty, including:
“A state characterized by lack of control”
“An incapacity to foresee future outcomes”
“ A situation characterized by entropy and disorder”
“The inability to determine the meaning of an event.”
Common themes that appear in those definitions refer to internal and external states characterized by the presence of significant ambiguity and risk, while research identifies uncertainty as a trigger for the escalation of mental health symptoms associated with depression and anxiety. Studies cited in the quantitative paper we cite also connect uncertainty to increased rates of specific mental health disorders and negative psychosocial consequences, including:
- Depression
- Anxiety
- Post-traumatic stress disorder
- Decreased wellbeing
- Decreased quality of life
- Increased distress
- Poor psychosocial adjustment
Next, let’s look at the data the researchers collected on what people are uncertain about. They investigated three areas that commonly elicit uncertainty in most people:
1. Medical situations.
People experience uncertainty about:
- Treatment: intensity, side effects, duration, effectiveness
- Symptoms: severity, level of disability, frequency, duration
- Diagnosis: accuracy
- interpersonal relationships: absence, harm, judgment
- Caregiving: presence or absence of support
2. Disaster and conflict situations.
People experience uncertainty about:
- Personal issues: future, safety, and livelihood for self, family, and friends
- Structural issues: job, housing, and food security, future stability and safety of community/region/country
3. Work and school situations
People with jobs experience uncertainty about:
- Work reorganization, job-specific tasks, future employment
People in school experience uncertainty about:
- Personal future, safety, health
- Future, safety, and health of community/region/country
We’ll share the quantitative outcomes of this study in a moment. First, we’ll move laterally and discuss two things: first, recent and current events that may cause uncertainty, and second, the qualitative aspect of uncertainty as identified in the qualitative study we introduce above.
Uncertainty Today: What’s Going On?
This section will be brief.
The World Uncertainty Index (WUI) measures economic uncertainty around the world by analyzing economic and other reports for frequency of the appearance of the word uncertain in official documents. According to the WUI, recent events that cause uncertainty include:
- The climate crisis
- Brexit
- U.S.-China tension
- The invasion of Ukraine by Russia
Current events that cause uncertainty include:
- The ongoing war in Ukraine
- Domestic U.S. politics
That’s the broad picture of what causes uncertainty – writ large – among people in the U.S. in 2025. These events are, of course, in addition to any uncertainty caused by personal connections to medical issues, natural disasters, or personal school and/or workplace issues.
Now let’s take a look at that study on the quantitative mental health outcomes related to uncertainty.
Subjective Experiences of Uncertainty and How They Affect Mental Health
This qualitative study collected and examined narrative accounts of uncertainty published in 47 different studies with information from over 1,500 participants. For the most part, qualitative accounts align with the quantitative accounts.
For example, sources of uncertainty from quantitative research include uncertainty around illness, giving or receiving support when sick, being displaced by disaster or war, and employment security. However, the qualitative accounts about the mental health effects of uncertainty offer more textured and nuanced characterizations.
Remember: this study identified both negative and positive mental health outcome associated with uncertainty. We’ll report on both, starting with the negative.
Participants described the negative effects of uncertainty as leading to:
Diminished quality of life
Shattered worldviews
In addition, many participants indicated the following:
Uncertainty can be worse than the source causing it.
Participants reported experiencing the following negative mental health symptoms related to uncertainty:
- Anxiety
- Depression
- Stress/distress
- Worry/fear
- Anger/frustration
- Hopelessness/sadness
We expected to read about outcomes like those when researching this article. However, as we mention, there’s another set of emotions and consequences associated with uncertainty – and they’re positive.
For example, some participants describe the positive effect of uncertainty with words like:
Potential, opportunity, lifeline.
And they describe the following positive effects of uncertainty on mental health:
- Hope/positivity
- Deeper appreciation of life/value life more
- Personal growth
- Social growth
- Increased optimism
At this point, we’ve defined uncertainty and described the various mental health outcomes, both positive and negative, related to how uncertainty can affect mental health. We’ll report on the types of support people received, and how that support helped next – but first, we promised to report the quantitative outcomes from the first study we introduced.
By the Numbers: Quantitative Outcomes
Among the studies examined in the review:
- 23% measured depressive symptoms
- 19% measured symptoms of anxiety
- 15% measured symptoms of psychological distress
- 10% measured symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)
- 10% measured symptoms of general stress
Among those:
- 79% reported significant association between uncertainty and negative mental health outcomes, including:
- Depression
- Anxiety
- PTSD
- Stress/distress
- 15% reported both positive and negative associations between uncertainty and mental health outcomes, including
- Hope
- Optimism
- Renewed appreciation for life
That’s the quantitative data, which shows clearly that when considering how uncertainty can affect mental health, the most common outcomes are negative, which occur in roughly 8 out of every 10 people, while a smaller percentage, less than 2 out of every 5 people, report positive associations between uncertainty and mental health. t
Next, we’ll look at what helped people with negative experiences related to uncertainty manage and resolve them.
Uncertainty and Negative Emotions: What Helps?
The researchers examined the different types of interventions that are effective for reducing the negative effect of uncertainty on mental health. The following interventions helped:
- Community-level support: help from people in their area
- Interpersonal support: help from friends and family
- Problem-focused support: help designed to address issues that cause uncertainty
- Individual treatment: one-on-one counseling with mental health professionals.
Study participants who received one or more of the interventions above reported the following coping skills helped them mitigate the negative impact of uncertainty.
Managing Uncertainty: 8 Things That Work
- Acknowledging the reality of the situation
- Fully accepting the situation and its consequences
- Learning the facts about uncertain situations
- Making sense of the facts
- Reframing the situation from hopeless to hopeful
- Making lifestyle changes that promote positive mental health
- Learning to identify and advocate for personal needs
- Helping others
These results confirm things we expected to learn from the studies. We understand that while uncertainty can increase or exacerbate symptoms related to mental health disorders, we also understand that receiving support from a variety of sources can help mitigate the impact of uncertainty on mental health symptoms. The final bullet list, above, is particularly powerful. It reads like a how-to guide for finding your way out of anxiety, fear, and worry about current events: take a breath, acknowledge what’s going on inside you, check the facts on what’s bothering you, and restructure your thoughts to reduce your emotional distress.
It may be possible to do that yourself. However, if you need the support of your community, your friends, or your family, ask for that support: it helps – and if one thing is certain, it’s that life, ultimately, is filled with uncertainty, and for our own happiness and wellbeing, we need to learn how to manage that uncertainty. If mental health researchers and clinicians find better ways to manage uncertainty than those we list above, we’ll be the first to report them, right here.
We’ll close with this insight, offered by the authors of the quantitative study:
“As uncertainty is likely to accompany humanity across some of the biggest challenges of the future, an improved understanding of how it impacts mental health and what can be done to address its effects represents a crucial research priority.”
