The biopsy is booked, the application is in, the decision is with someone else. Most affirmations for uncertainty tell you to embrace not knowing. The people who have actually studied waiting found something less comfortable and more useful than that.
What affirmations for uncertainty are working against
A wait you cannot shorten, in which almost nothing you do changes the outcome. That's a different problem from an unmade decision, because the decision is no longer yours. A prepared line here isn't going to produce calm. What it can do is stop you adding a second failure on top of the first. That's what happens when you decide you're also waiting badly.
The first week, while you still feel fine
It's been sent. You're oddly steady about it, and vaguely suspicious of that.
Feeling fine today isn't a prediction.
I did the part that was mine to do.
Nothing happening isn't the same as going badly.
When you start checking
Phone face up on the table. Refreshing an inbox that updates itself.
Looking again will not make it arrive.
There is no version of this where checking helps.
The phone can go face down for an hour.
What happened when researchers followed a real wait
Two hundred and thirty law graduates in California sat their bar exam and then waited four months for the result. Researchers surveyed them before the exam, every two weeks through the wait, and again shortly after they found out.
The team asked two separate questions. Could people wait in a way that eased their distress during the wait? And could they wait in a way that softened bad news or sharpened the pleasure of good news?
On the first question the answer was almost entirely no. The strategies people reached for did not reduce their distress, and in some cases appeared to make it worse. Four months of trying, with very little to show for it.
On the second, something stranger. The graduates whose wait was marked by anxiety, rumination and pessimism responded more productively to bad news, and more joyfully to good news, than those who had sailed through relatively untroubled.
Read that carefully, because it is easy to turn into advice it does not support. Nobody found that making yourself feel worse improves anything, and this is one study of one profession waiting on one kind of news. What it does undercut is the assumption underneath every page on this topic: that a difficult wait means you are doing the waiting wrong.
The last few days, when you start expecting the worst
Your estimate of your chances has quietly dropped, and it dropped on its own.
Expecting the worst now is normal, not a forecast.
Lowering my hopes is something people do near the end.
Whatever I decide to expect, the answer already is what it is.
Lines that ask for peace, and lines that ask for less
Almost every list on this topic is written in the language of acceptance. Said in week nine of a four month wait, acceptance reads as one more thing you are failing at.
I embrace the beauty of not knowing.
Nobody waiting on a biopsy result has ever thought this.
I don't have to like this to get through it.
Sets the requirement at something reachable.
I trust that everything is working out as it should.
A claim about the outcome, made by someone who cannot know it.
I did my part. The rest is happening without me.
Accurate, and it stops you looking for a job to do.
I am at peace with uncertainty.
You can test this one against the facts every hour, and lose.
Getting through this badly still counts.
Removes the second thing you were failing at.
The one thing that went with less worry
The same research group looked at what the graduates did with their four months. One thing stood out, and it wasn't positive thinking.
It was absorption. Graduates who spent more of the wait deep in something demanding, the state where you look up and an hour has gone, reported less worry, fewer negative emotions and more positive ones.
Two things to be clear about here. It's an association rather than a proven remedy, and nobody showed that taking up a hobby fixes a wait. It also works in an entirely different way from the usual advice: not by improving how you feel about the outcome, but by occupying the attention that would otherwise be spent rehearsing it.
So the practical version is unglamorous. Something hard enough to need you. Not a podcast while you refresh your email.
When someone tells you to stay positive
Meant kindly, and it lands as an instruction you cannot follow.
I don't have to be calm about this to be handling it.
Trying to feel fine was costing me more than the waiting.
This is hard because it's hard, not because I'm bad at it.
I did my part. The rest is happening without me.
A line to return to
Keep expectations realistic
Dropping the requirement from calm to getting through takes away the second problem, and for a long wait that is worth having. It will not shorten the wait, change the answer, or make the weeks pleasant, and the research here suggests nothing reliably does the last one. Everything on this page is about a wait with an end: a date, a result, an answer that is coming. Worry that runs for months with no pending answer attached is a different thing and is not what these lines are for. Nor is this page telling anyone to suffer more, which the study does not support and which would be a foolish thing to take from it. If the waiting is stopping you eating, sleeping or working, that belongs with a doctor rather than with a better sentence.
Sources and further reading
These references support the research and practical guidance discussed in this article.
- Two definitions of waiting wellSweeny, Reynolds, Falkenstein, Andrews and Dooley, Emotion, 2016. Two hundred and thirty law graduates surveyed every two weeks across a four month wait for bar exam results. Coping strategies failed to reduce distress and in some cases appeared to backfire. Those whose wait was harder responded more productively to bad news and more joyfully to good news.
- Exploring the benefits of flow during uncertain waiting periodsRankin, Walsh and Sweeny, Emotion, 2018. Among law graduates waiting on the same exam results, more absorption in demanding activity went with less worry, fewer negative emotions and more positive ones. An association, not a prescription.
- Positive self-statements: power for some, peril for othersWood, Perunovic and Lee, Psychological Science, 2009. Why nothing here announces that everything will be fine, a claim the wait exists precisely because nobody can make.
