by Tom Swarbrick, Content Team editor

How to start something new without letting anxiety win

There is a particular kind of dread that settles when you decide to start something new. Perhaps it’s a career change, a new field of study, a creative project or simply walking into a room full of strangers. Irrespective of the context, the feeling remains – chest tightness, a flood of worse-case scenarios and a deliberation of whether you are good enough.

But we need to remind ourselves: being a beginner is not a failure state. It is the only possible starting point. Expertise in any field doesn’t grow overnight – it’s earned through mistakes, clumsiness, fatigue and drudgery. To begin is to voluntarily accept a period of confusion and vulnerability, and that takes more courage than most people give themselves credit for. So why does it feel so unbearable?

Why your brain hates the unknown

The anxiety you feel when facing the unfamiliar isn’t a character flaw. It’s wired into the very structure of your brain. Research has shown that areas such as the amygdala – the brain’s alarm system – light up in direct response to uncertainty and indecision (Williams et al, 2015). In other words, not knowing what comes next activates the same neurological machinery that would fire if you were facing a genuine physical threat. Your brain, in its well-meaning but occasionally dramatic way, treats “I’ve never done this before” with the same seriousness as “there may be a tiger nearby”.

This helps explain why stability feels so appealing. When uncertainty enters our professional lives, for instance, Campagna and Curtis (2007) found that career uncertainty reliably increases anxiety – even when the uncertain outcome is not necessarily bad. It’s the not knowing that does the damage, not the outcome itself.

Psychologists have a name for this: Intolerance of uncertainty (IU). Put simply, it describes how much discomfort a person experiences when things are unpredictable or ambiguous. Researchers Buhs and Dugas (2009) describe it as a dispositional characteristic – a tendency to react negatively on emotional, cognitive and behavioural levels to uncertain situations. Crucially, the very strategies we deploy to soothe our anxiety – excessive worry, avoidance, over-preparing, all may actually reinforce our intolerance of uncertainty rather than resolve it. Worrying can be understood as a misguided attempt to achieve certainty about the future; a kind of mental rehearsal for disasters that may never arrive. The more we do it, the more we convince ourselves that the unknown is something to be feared rather than navigated.

The pessimism trap

Compounding this is a well-documented quirk of anxious thinking: when we try to imagine how an unknown situation will unfold, we instinctively gravitate towards the worst-possible outcome. Research by McEvoy and Mahoney (2010) found that individuals prone to anxiety tend to engage in what’s known as negative future thinking – a bias towards imagining how things could go badly rather than how they could go well. This isn’t pessimism as a personality trait so much as a cognitive habit, a default setting that anxiety quietly installs without asking.

The practical result of this is that we end up making decisions (or, more commonly, not making decisions) based on imagined catastrophes rather than realistic assessments of risk. The new job feels impossible before we’ve even applied. The conversation feels humiliating before we’ve opened our mouth. We are, in a very real sense, scaring ourselves.

So, what can we do about it?

The good news is that intolerance of uncertainty is not a fixed trait. It responds to practice, perspective and in some cases, professional support. Here are some of the most evidence-backed approaches.

(1) Recognise the bias and challenge it

The first and arguably most important step is simply becoming aware that your anxiety is producing a distorted picture of reality. When you notice yourself catastrophising about a new situation, pause and interrogate that image. Is what you’re imagining actually likely, or is it the worst-case version your brain has conjured?

Research by Stopa and Jenkins (2007) found something striking: when socially anxious individuals held a positive self-image in mind before entering a challenging situation, they reported feeling significantly less anxious and actually performed better than those who had been holding a negative self-image. The mental rehearsal we run before walking into the unknown matters enormously – and we have more control over it than we often realise.

This doesn’t mean forcing toxic positivity or pretending that new things are easy. It means deliberately making space for the possibility that you might thrive, rather than assuming you’ll fail. It means beginning your internal monologue with “what if this goes well?” before allowing the other questions in.

(2) Embrace the arbitrariness of it all

One of the more liberating things you can do when facing a new situation is to accept how much of life is simply arbitrary. The colleague who seems effortlessly confident in meetings was once a nervous new starter too. The expert whose work you admire was once clueless in exactly the same way you feel now. Expertise has an origin story, and that story always begins with not knowing.

Accepting this doesn’t mean abandoning ambition – it means releasing the idea that you should arrive anywhere already knowing how to do it. This kind of acceptance is closely related to what mindfulness-based approaches call psychological flexibility: the ability to sit with discomfort rather than fighting it, and to continue moving towards what matters to you even when things feel uncertain.

(3) Reframe what “uncertain” means

Much of the suffering caused by uncertainty comes not from the situation itself, but from how we interpret the feeling of not knowing. A growing area of research suggests that actively attempting to see the potential positive outcomes of uncertain situations – rather than defaulting to the negative – can meaningfully reduce anxiety over time.

This is more than just optimism. It’s a cognitive retraining of sorts, a practice of noticing when your brain is catastrophising and redirecting your attention towards alternative possibilities. Over time, this kind of reframing can shift your default response to novelty from dread to something closer to curiosity.

(4) Let exposure do its work

Perhaps the most reliably demonstrated finding in this entire area of psychology is this: the more often you face something new, the less frightening it becomes. Psychologist Robert Zajonc’s landmark research on what he called the mere exposure effect demonstrated that simply being repeatedly exposed to a stimulus – whether a person, an environment or a task – reliably increases positive feelings towards it (Zajonc, 1968). Initial fear gives way, step by step, to familiarity and familiarity to comfort. A meta-analysis of over 200 experiments confirmed that the mere exposure effect is robust and consistent across cultures and stimulus types (Bornstein, 1989).

Applied to starting something new, this means the most important thing you can do is simply begin – and keep going. The first time you do something unfamiliar will almost certainly be the hardest. The second time will be easier. The tenth time, you may not even notice the thing that used to frighten you. Discomfort is not a signal that you’re doing something wrong; it’s a signal that you’re somewhere new. And somewhere new is exactly where growth lives.

(5) Seek support when you need it

For some people, intolerance of uncertainty isn’t just a mild inconvenience – it’s a persistent source of significant distress. If you recognise that anxiety about the unknown is substantially limiting your life, it may be worth speaking to a therapist. Cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) approaches specifically designed to target IU have been shown across multiple randomised controlled trials to be highly effective at reducing both intolerance of uncertainty and associated worry (Dugas et al., 2003; Ladouceur et al., 2000). And even CBT approaches that don’t specifically target IU tend to reduce it as a by-product, suggesting that good therapy – whatever its flavour – tends to help people become more comfortable with not knowing (Boswell et al., 2013).

The necessary clumsiness of beginning: The bottom line

Being a beginner is uncomfortable. There’s no framework yet, no fluency, no rhythm. You will feel uncertain and probably look it too. That’s not something to be overcome before you start – it is the start.

What the research tells us, and what experience tends to confirm, is that the anxiety surrounding new beginnings is not a warning. It’s a normal, neurologically explicable, cognitively distorted response to the unknown – one that can be worked with, reframed and over time, genuinely reduced. The fear of uncertainty is deeply human. So is the capacity to walk towards it anyway.

You don’t need to feel ready. You just need to begin.