Our brains weren\'t wired to deal with the "psychological pandemic" of not knowing what the future holds. Here\'s how to cope with living in limbo.

If there\'s one defining feature of the coronavirus pandemic, it\'s uncertainty. Will there be a vaccine? When can schools safely reopen? Will I still have a job next week? Should I book a spring vacation abroad? A crisis that we\'d all hoped would be short-lived is dragging on indefinitely, and the list of unanswered questions keeps growing.

"Waiting periods are marked by two existentially challenging states: We don\'t know what\'s coming, and we can\'t do much about it," explains Kate Sweeny, professor of psychology at University of California, Riverside. "Together, those states are a recipe for anxiety and worry. People would often rather deal with the certainty of bad news than the anxiety of remaining in limbo."

That\'s what researchers at three institutions in the UK found in a 2013 experiment, when they attached electrodes to 35 subjects and asked them to choose between receiving a sharp shock immediately or waiting for a milder one. The vast majority chose the more painful option, just to get it out of the way. "It\'s counterintuitive," admits Giles Story, one of the academics behind the study. "But it\'s a testament to how anxiety-inducing and miserable it can be to have things looming in the future."

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