Intolerance of Uncertainty Test: See How Much Not Knowing Drives Your Worry

How the intolerance of uncertainty score works

You rate 18 statements on a five-point agreement scale, scored 0 (strongly disagree) to 4 (strongly agree), for a total from 0 to 72. Nine statements describe prospective anxiety, the drive to know what is coming and to remove doubt in advance. Nine describe inhibitory anxiety, the tendency to stall, avoid, or withdraw when you cannot predict an outcome. The two groups are reported as separate bars under your total, each out of 36, so you can see whether your discomfort with uncertainty mostly makes you seek control or mostly makes you freeze. Many people lean clearly one way; a minority score high on both.

The four result bands split the 0 to 72 range into quarters. They are educational ranges we chose for reflection, not clinical cutoffs, and the validated research instruments in this area, the 27-item Intolerance of Uncertainty Scale (Freeston and colleagues, 1994) and the 12-item short form (Carleton and colleagues, 2007), do not publish diagnostic thresholds either. A high score here does not mean you have an anxiety disorder. It means not knowing costs you more than it costs most people, which is a pattern you can learn to change.

Reading the two bars together tells you more than the total. If prospective anxiety is clearly higher, your discomfort with not knowing mostly pushes you into action: planning, researching, asking, checking. That pattern is tiring, but it keeps you engaged with life, and the work is mainly about tolerating the gap between what you can know and what you want to know. If inhibitory anxiety is clearly higher, the discomfort mostly stops you: decisions wait, opportunities pass, and the unpredictable gets avoided. That pattern is quieter and easier to miss, because from the outside it can look like caution or patience, and the work is mainly about acting before you feel certain. If both bars are high, you probably swing between the two, over-preparing and then stalling anyway, which is the most draining version and the one most worth taking to a therapist. If both are low but you still worry a lot, the worry may be attached to one specific domain rather than to uncertainty in general.

Why intolerance of uncertainty is the engine behind so much worry

Worry, compulsive checking, and health anxiety look different from the outside, but a large body of research finds the same fuel underneath them. The person who worries about a job interview, the person who checks the stove four times, and the person who searches symptoms late at night are all trying to do the same thing: turn an unanswerable question into a settled one. Worry simulates every outcome so none can surprise you. Checking tries to convert a probable 'it is off' into a certain one. Symptom searching tries to replace 'probably nothing' with proof. None of these ever delivers certainty, because certainty about the future is not available, so the behavior repeats.

A 2019 meta-analysis by McEvoy and colleagues pooled studies across diagnostic groups and found higher self-reported intolerance of uncertainty in people with generalized anxiety, obsessive-compulsive symptoms, post-traumatic stress, depression, and eating-related difficulties. That is why researchers call it transdiagnostic: it is not owned by one condition. Carleton's 2016 review goes further and argues that fear of the unknown may be one of the most basic fears, sitting under several more specific ones. In plain words: if you score high here, the worry you notice day to day may be the visible part of a more general discomfort with not knowing. The sibling tests at Anxiety Test, OCD Test (Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder), and Health Anxiety Test (Hypochondria) look at the specific forms it can take; Overthinking Test looks at the rumination loop it often feeds.

The loop works like this. An unanswered question arrives, such as whether a mole is serious or whether a friend is upset with you. The not-knowing feels dangerous, so you do something to reduce it: you search, you ask, you check, you replay. For a moment it works, and that moment of relief teaches the brain that the question really was dangerous and that the checking really did save you. Next time the urge is stronger. Because the future cannot be made certain, the loop never ends on its own; it ends when you stop feeding it. The same mechanism explains why reassurance from other people rarely lasts, why one more search is never the last one, and why intolerance of uncertainty often shows up in relationships as difficulty trusting: a partner's inner life is the one thing you can never fully verify.

Uncertainty as a treatment target, in plain words

Because intolerance of uncertainty drives so many problems, treating it directly has become a focus in cognitive behavioral therapy. Dugas and Ladouceur's treatment for generalized anxiety was built around it, and newer transdiagnostic programs borrow the same core idea: instead of helping you get more certainty, therapy helps you practice living well with less. The main tool is exposure to uncertainty. You deliberately do small things without the usual safeguards, such as sending an email without rereading it, ordering something new at a restaurant, or leaving a plan open, and you notice that the discomfort rises, peaks, and falls without anything terrible happening. Over many repetitions the brain updates its estimate of how dangerous not knowing really is.

Therapy also works on the beliefs that make uncertainty feel unbearable: that worrying keeps you safe, that a surprise would be unmanageable, that doubt means something is wrong. A 2024 meta-analysis of psychotherapy trials by Näsling and colleagues found that treatment reliably lowers intolerance of uncertainty, and that the drop tracks with improvement in anxiety and worry. If your result lands in the high or very high range, that is the evidence base a therapist will draw on. Perfectionism often travels alongside this pattern, since both are attempts to eliminate the possibility of things going wrong; Perfectionism Test covers that side. Difficulty trusting others can also be partly a certainty problem, which Trust Issues Test explores.

Small practices you can start this week

You do not need a diagnosis or a therapist to start loosening the grip. Pick one low-stakes uncertainty each day and leave it unresolved on purpose: do not check the weather before you go out, do not look up the answer to a trivia question, say yes to a plan without knowing every detail. Write down what you predicted would happen and what actually happened; most people find their predictions were far darker than reality, and that gap is useful evidence. If you tend to seek reassurance, try delaying it by ten minutes, then twenty, and notice that the urge usually passes on its own.

For the freezing side, use a decision deadline. Give yourself a fixed window to decide, choose a good-enough option, and then stop researching. Treat the discomfort afterwards as the practice itself, not as a sign you chose wrong. Over a few weeks these small acts add up to a different relationship with not knowing. If the discomfort feels too large to approach alone, or if worry is costing you sleep, relationships, or work, a therapist who works with anxiety can structure the exposures with you. The find-a-therapist link below your result searches for exactly that.

Knowing when to get help is its own skill. Daily practice is enough for many people in the low and moderate ranges. Consider a therapist if worry or avoidance is costing you sleep most nights, if you are turning down things you want because you cannot predict them, if people close to you have started to manage your need for reassurance, or if the checking and researching has started to feel compulsive. None of those mean something is wrong with you; they mean the pattern has grown past the point where willpower alone tends to shift it. A therapist who works with anxiety can build a graded series of uncertainty exposures with you, work on the beliefs that make doubt feel dangerous, and help you tell the difference between a real problem that needs solving and a question that simply has no answer yet. Most people find the second category is far larger than they thought.

Methodology & sources

This test is informed by the two-factor model of intolerance of uncertainty established by the Intolerance of Uncertainty Scale. The original 27-item scale was published by Freeston, Rheaume, Letarte, Dugas, and Ladouceur in 1994, and the 12-item short form by Carleton, Norton, and Asmundson in 2007 identified two factors: prospective anxiety (desire for predictability and active seeking of certainty) and inhibitory anxiety (uncertainty-related paralysis). Both are research instruments, and this page does not reproduce either of them: we wrote 18 original statements, nine per factor, in plain language, each describing one behavior or feeling, and then checked every one against the published item lists of both the 27-item scale and the 12-item short form so that none of them repeats or paraphrases a published item.

Each statement is rated on a five-point agreement scale scored 0 to 4, giving a total of 0 to 72 and two subscores of 0 to 36. The split into prospective and inhibitory anxiety is our own grouping of our own items, named after the two factors in the research model, not a validated subscale structure. The four result bands divide the range into equal quarters and are educational, not clinical cutoffs. The test is for self-reflection and education only; it is not a diagnosis and cannot tell you whether you have generalized anxiety disorder, OCD, or any other condition.

Reviewed by Michael Callans, MSW
Reviewed the split between prospective and inhibitory items, the plain-language explanation of the transdiagnostic research, and the exposure-to-uncertainty guidance for accuracy and tone. Last reviewed October 5, 2026.

References

1. Freeston MH, Rheaume J, Letarte H, Dugas MJ, Ladouceur R. Why do people worry? Personality and Individual Differences. 1994;17(6):791-802. doi.org/10.1016/0191-8869(94)90048-5.
2. Carleton RN, Norton MA, Asmundson GJG. Fearing the unknown: a short version of the Intolerance of Uncertainty Scale. Journal of Anxiety Disorders. 2007;21(1):105-117. doi.org/10.1016/j.janxdis.2006.03.014.
3. Carleton RN. Into the unknown: a review and synthesis of contemporary models involving uncertainty. Journal of Anxiety Disorders. 2016;39:30-43. doi.org/10.1016/j.janxdis.2016.02.007.
4. McEvoy PM, Hyett MP, Shihata S, Price JE, Strachan L. The impact of methodological and measurement factors on transdiagnostic associations with intolerance of uncertainty: a meta-analysis. Clinical Psychology Review. 2019;73:101778. doi.org/10.1016/j.cpr.2019.101778.
5. Näsling J, Åström E, Jacobsson L, Ljungberg JK. Effect of psychotherapy on intolerance of uncertainty: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Clinical Psychology and Psychotherapy. 2024;31(4):e3026. doi.org/10.1002/cpp.3026

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