Why we don't recognise uncertainty until it's already done its damage

When did you last feel anxious, irritable, or suddenly certain you weren't good enough for the job you've been doing for years?

Now, did you connect any of that to uncertainty?

I'm willing to bet you didn't. I'm writing a book on this topic, and I've been interviewing leaders about their experiences of uncertainty. Not one of them recognised it as the thing shaping their reactions while it was happening. Not one.

Leaders from very different worlds, different industries, different countries, different kinds of pressure. People who had navigated genuinely high-stakes situations, some over years. Experienced, capable, self-aware people.

All of them were deeply affected by uncertainty. All of them, in the moment, called it something else: Stress. Pressure. A terrible situation. Just a really hard week.

Why does that matter? Because if you can't name it, you can't respond to it. You just react. And the reactions, the overwork, the withdrawal, the decisions made too quickly or not at all, create their own damage, on top of whatever the uncertainty was already doing.

The uncertainty itself is rarely what does the most damage. It's everything we do while trying to escape a feeling we couldn't name that is the most damaging.

I find this fascinating. And also completely understandable.

Because your brain doesn't experience uncertainty as "uncertainty." It experiences it as threat. And when you're in threat mode, you don't pause to diagnose the cause. You react. You work harder, or you freeze. You pull away from the people around you, or you grip them too tightly. You start questioning decisions you've made a hundred times before. You stop sleeping.

You are, in survival mode. And survival mode is not interested in self-reflection. It's interested in getting through the day.

So the uncertainty does its work unseen. And not because it's subtle, but because we're too busy responding to the symptoms to name the cause.

One of the leaders I spoke to put it simply:

"If I'd been able to name what was happening — to say "I'm feeling like this because I'm uncertain, I don't know what's going to happen next, and that's making me feel uneasy" , I wouldn't have spent so much energy trying to fix the feeling."

Instead, they fought the discomfort. Constantly. Exhaustingly.

That's what the hidden toll of uncertainty often looks like. Not a dramatic breakdown. Not a moment of obvious crisis. Just a long, draining, largely invisible war with a feeling you never quite named.

I've been thinking about why this happens — why capable, self-aware leaders consistently miss uncertainty as the thing affecting them.

Part of it is the performance pressure. Leaders are supposed to be certain. Decisive. Unshaken. So even when uncertainty is everywhere, the job is to project the opposite. And when you spend long enough performing certainty for others, you start to lose access to what you're actually feeling underneath it.

Part of it is that uncertainty doesn't announce itself. It works through other things — through your relationships, your confidence, your sleep, your body. By the time you notice the symptoms, the cause has been operating for weeks or months.

And part of it is simply that we don't have good language for it. We talk about change. We talk about risk. We talk about stress. But uncertainty — the specific experience of not knowing how something is going to turn out, and having to keep going anyway — doesn't have much of a vocabulary in most organisations.

But what is notable from every conversation I've had is also that every single leader came through. Not without cost — there were real losses, real things they'd do differently. But they came through. And when I asked what helped, the answers were consistent:

Space to think. Someone to talk to. And for some, a moment of finally naming it for what it was.

It suggests the most powerful thing wasn't a strategy or a framework. It was simply the act of recognition. Of saying: this is uncertainty. This is what it does. And I am not alone in feeling it.

So when did you first recognise that uncertainty was behind something you were going through?

Was it in the moment, or only looking back?

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Annabelle White is a chartered coaching psychologist. Her book, Could I Be Wrong? The Hidden Toll of Uncertainty, and How to Respond Wisely, is forthcoming. She works with leaders and teams navigating change and uncertainty through her practice, Change Navigating Ltd