Health Anxiety and the 'Intolerance of Uncertainty'

Key points

The 'intolerance of uncertainty' is associated with health anxiety.

One key strategy to improve health anxiety is to learn how to tolerate a little uncertainty about health.

Learn several cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) strategies to help improve tolerance of uncertainty.

Everyone experiences uncertainty at times, and that’s normal. But for some people, the need for absolute certainty can become overwhelming, taking over daily life. This is called the “intolerance of uncertainty” (IU). IU involves interpreting uncertain situations as threatening and assuming that unknown outcomes will inevitably be negative. In other words, if you can’t be sure about what will happen, you might feel certain that the outcome will be terrible and unmanageable.

People with health anxiety