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If not knowing makes you itch, the work is learning to sit with the itch rather than making it go away. The plan can stay unfinished while you get on with today.
For some of us an unresolved question hums in the background until it is settled, and settling it becomes urgent even when nothing depends on it. Practise leaving one small thing open for a day: the holiday not yet booked, the reply not yet sent. Notice that the discomfort rises, stays a while and then drops, without you having done anything about it. That is the skill, and it travels to every other uncertain thing in your life.
Qur’an and Sunnah
And turn to your Lord for everything (Quran 94:8). Effort and reliance are put side by side, so you are not asked to hold the whole outcome yourself.
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
A meta-analysis in people aged 6 to 24 found the same pattern between perfectionism and symptoms of anxiety, obsessive compulsive difficulty and depression seen in adults, suggesting it sets in early. That is background for why unfinished questions grate on some people far more than others. It shows an association rather than testing whether tolerance can be trained.
Lunn J, Greene D, Callaghan T, Egan SJ. (2023). Associations between perfectionism and symptoms of anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder and depression in young people: a meta-analysis.. Cognitive behaviour therapy doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
The discomfort of not knowing fades on its own if you stop rushing to end it.
When not to
If the discomfort of uncertainty is severe or has taken over daily life, this is worth working on with a therapist rather than alone.
This one is still a draft. It is waiting on a scholar and a clinician to read it before it is published.
Near this one
Working towards something you want will carry you further than working away from something you dread. Before you start, name in your own words what the finished thing gets you.
Next time you tell yourself you will remember it, ask what you would bet on that. A month's rent, for or against. The answer usually arrives before you have finished asking.
Some tasks are avoided because nobody has said what they want. Not knowing what good looks like is its own reason to keep walking past something.