Does hating uncertainty go with feeling less satisfied with life?

UnderSelf editorial desk · September 23, 2026 · 2 min read · Source: psypost.org

A team led by Osman Hatun at Marmara University in Türkiye, working with Mark D. Griffiths and Tuğba Türk Kurtça, surveyed 485 adults ages 18 to 63, every one of them having lived through at least one adverse life event. Published in Psychological Reports and reported by PsyPost on September 23, 2026, the study measured how well each person tolerated not knowing what comes next, how much meaning they felt their life held, how much death anxiety they carried, and how satisfied they were with life overall. The researchers' full statistical model explained 43 percent of the variance in life satisfaction, and intolerance of uncertainty together with meaning in life accounted for 27 percent of the variance in death anxiety.

What the study measured is not how much uncertainty people faced, since everyone in it had been through something hard, but how well they could sit with not knowing. Two people can face the same unresolved situation, a decision still pending, a job in limbo, a relationship that has not been named yet, and carry it very differently: one can leave it open for a while, the other feels it as something that has to be settled now. In this sample, people who found uncertainty harder to tolerate also tended to report more death anxiety and lower life satisfaction.

This is a snapshot of 485 adults recruited on social media in one country, answering questionnaires about their inner life in a single sitting; it cannot say whether a low tolerance for the unknown came first or the death anxiety did, only that in this sample the two showed up together, alongside lower life satisfaction.

Bedtime can be when uncertainty gets its loudest hearing, once the day's noise cuts out and whatever has not been resolved gets the run of the room. This study never asked anyone what happens between turning off the light and falling asleep, so it says nothing about dreams or what the night does with any of this. But the pattern it does show, that struggling with the unknown tends to travel with heavier thoughts about mortality, is worth noticing on your own terms. What is it that stays unresolved for you once the room goes quiet, and where does your mind usually take it?