Lesson 4 of 6 · Living with an open question
What is actually being avoided
Once you see that, the question changes shape. The problem was never the content of the doubt. The problem is what not knowing does to you.
Some people find not knowing genuinely intolerable, independently of how bad the unknown thing would be. It is the not knowing itself that is aversive, and the response is to search, to ask, to check, to get information, to make the uncertainty go away.
That is a describable, studied thing, and it may be the more useful target. Not the doubt. The intolerance of the open question.
Which is also why more evidence has never helped for long. You were never short of evidence. You were short of the ability to be at rest without a final answer, and no amount of evidence supplies that.
What the research says
Pooling the studies, difficulty tolerating uncertainty is strongly linked to all three of these problems and belongs to none of them in particular. That the link is real is well established; that aiming at it is the better move is this course's reading, and you should hold it that way.
Pooling the studies, difficulty tolerating uncertainty is substantially associated with all three, and belongs to none of them in particular. That the association is real is meta-analytic. That it is the better thing to aim at is a reasonable inference from it rather than a finding, which is why the paragraph above says may.
Gentes EL, Ruscio AM (2011). A meta-analysis of the relation of intolerance of uncertainty to symptoms of generalized anxiety disorder, major depressive disorder, and obsessive-compulsive disorder. Clinical Psychology Review, 31(6), 923 to 933 doi