Adam Strauss is standing in his New York City apartment, holding the limp cord of his headphones, trying to choose between the two MP3 players on his desk: the iPod and the iRiver, its Korean counterpart. He cues up the same song on each, toggling the silver plug of his headphones back and forth like a 1930s switchboard operator.

He tries different songs, different genres, different instruments. The iRiver tends to sound better overall, but the iPod offers a little more nuance in the midrange. The iPod has a better battery life, but the iRiver still lasts eight hours—­longer than he’s ever continuously listened to music. Then again, he’s never owned an MP3 player. Is eight hours enough?

He goes back and forth, back and forth, testing vocal ranges, button resistance, interface aesthetics. His internal monolog races like ticker tape. Do aesthetics even matter? It’s going to be in my pocket most of the day. I’ve never seen a line out the door for the iRiver, but people line up at the Apple Store to get the iPod. Maybe those people know something I don’t. Or maybe those people are all chumps, paying a premium for an inferior device!

It would be one thing if it were just Adam’s decision of which MP3 player to buy. After all, it was 2003, the height of the personal audio device revolution, and Adam was a 29-­year-old audiophile. But it wasn’t just the iPod versus the iRiver. For Adam, it was also other decisions—­what shirt to wear to work, what to order for lunch, even what side of the street to walk down.

At one point, in an effort to simplify his decisionmaking process for what to wear, Adam bought 11 identical blue button-­down shirts. But he quickly found variations in each shirt’s fit and fading. He believed there was a right shirt to pick; each morning he would spend 20, 30, then 45 minutes trying to find it. If he could only determine which shirt was best, he could control his fate.

On one level, Adam knew how ridiculous it all had become. He was no fool; he’d graduated from an Ivy League university and ran his own company, which, at the time, was the world’s largest digital library of downloadable sound effects. He was educated, talented, and successful—but lately, his obsessive-­compulsive disorder was taking over his life.

OCD arises from a complex mix of brain chemistry, genetic predisposition, and environmental factors. In conversation, though, Adam compares his OCD to a drug addiction. “Heroin isn’t what the opiate addict is looking for; they’re looking for the high. The heroin is just the thing that gives them the high,” he told me. “With OCD, certainty is the heroin, and the high is the brief dopamine hit you get when you feel like you’ve found it.”

But with OCD, he didn’t need to go out to the street to get his fix. The only tools he needed lived in his head. Adam would make up his mind—­it’s got to be the iRiver—­and then convince himself that he hadn’t listened to enough hip-­hop. Before he knew it, the two boxes were open on his desk and he was moving the headphone cord back and forth again.

Soon Adam was canceling plans with friends, showing up late for work, and passing sunny Saturdays locked inside of his Manhattan apartment. In an effort to conceal his OCD from others, he closed himself off from social situations, which, in turn, left him with more time to spend trapped in his thoughts.

“For junkies, heroin is a great simplifier,” he told me. “All you care about is getting your next fix. Everything else pales in comparison.” For Adam, it was the same with decision­making. The rest of life could begin only after he knew which was the better MP3 player. He was stuck in a vicious cycle and in desperate need of a way out.

The desire for control shapes our decisions, relationships, and perceptions about our environment. Psychologists consider the desire for control to be a fundamental psychological need. Yes, being in control of your life is generally a good thing. But when the desire for control becomes all-­consuming, or when we attempt to control what we fundamentally cannot, ­it can be devastating.

Often, the desire for control is rooted in a fear of uncertainty. Rather than accept that we live in an unpredictable and chaotic world, we try to find a sense of security and predictability by seeking to control the uncontrollable. Adam’s condition reveals the paradox at the heart of our relationship with control: The more of it we seek, the more we become enslaved by the illusion of it. Like personality traits and mental health in general, the desire for control exists on a spectrum, but for people with OCD, it can leave little room for anything else. By examining how Adam learned to relinquish control, we can come to see how we might loosen the reins on our own lives.

Obsessive-­compulsive disorder affects both people’s internal thoughts and their external actions. Obsessive thoughts like my hands might be dirty may lead to compulsive actions like washing your hands 10 times. Your brain convinces you that engaging in the compulsive behavior might help keep your worry under control. But in practice, compulsive behaviors can interrupt your life as much as the thoughts.

Colloquially, OCD is known as the doubting disorder, because it causes people to second-­guess what they know to be true. There are risks to not introducing enough doubt or skepticism into your thought processes. OCD represents the other extreme: What happens when there is so much doubt that it takes over your life?

Despite the jokes about your hyper-organized friend being “so OCD,” obsessive-­compulsive disorder is a clinical disorder with debilitating symptoms. It can manifest as a fear of contamination, repeatedly checking locks, or an obsession with symmetry. The surface behavior often covers up a deeper anxiety lurking underneath.

“Maybe I can’t be certain about whether I’m in the right relationship or how my boss feels about me, so I try to find things I can be certain about,” Adam explained to me. “But the vicious irony is that even if you try to narrow down to one specific, binary thing—­‘are my hands clean?’—­you still can’t be absolutely sure.”

Jonathan Grayson, a psychologist and one of the world’s leading OCD specialists, explains that two factors drive patients’ behavior. The first is deep discomfort with uncertainty. We’re hardwired to feel discomfort with uncertainty, but those with OCD are particularly intolerant.

Researchers debate whether the ability to tolerate uncertainty is driven more by nature or by nurture. Some believe we are born tolerant of uncertainty and then become less tolerant when we experience instability in our childhood. Others believe we are born intolerant of uncertainty and become more tolerant after positive exposure to uncertain situations. But regardless of the explanation, it takes people with OCD less uncertainty to feel more anxious. That’s why people with the disorder might treat a seemingly trivial decision such as which MP3 player to buy as if it were a matter of life and death.

The second factor that drives patients’ behavior, according to Grayson, is unusually high levels of self-­doubt. Most of us feel a sense of satisfaction after we complete a task. This biological reward system drives us toward progress, and it also explains why completionists like me sometimes put a task they’ve already done on their to-­do list just to feel the satisfaction of checking it off. But the brains of people with OCD don’t reward them with the same feeling of completion, and so they think twice. Logically, they might know that their hands are clean, but without the internal validation, they’re prone to wash them again.

Of course, not everyone with OCD is anxious in the same way. One person might not fear contamination but needs to check to make sure the stove is off multiple times before leaving the house. That’s because, in addition to biological factors, there’s also a learned component to the disorder. Sometime in your past, you may have developed a fear of an intruder or slept through your alarm. If you don’t have OCD, this might lead you to double-­lock your front door or double-­check your alarm before bedtime. But if you have OCD, it can spark a vicious cycle. Before you know it, you’re postponing or even canceling your plans because you’re busy checking and rechecking that you did, in fact, lock the door.

Adam didn’t always struggle with OCD. He had a fairly conventional childhood. He grew up in Newton, Massachusetts, which, perhaps apocryphally, is said to have one of the highest concentrations of psychotherapists in the country. As a kid, he had a rich imagination. He often got lost in books or Dungeons & Dragons fantasies. Like many of his peers, his early teenage years brought on a new obsession: girls. But Adam became convinced that he was too ugly—­specifically, that his lips were too big—­for anyone to like him.

Now in his early fifties, Adam is conventionally attractive—­tall and lean, with a scruffy beard and long wavy hair. You might mistake him for an elongated Mark Ruffalo. But as a teenager, he believed he needed to do something to compensate for his big lips. He obsessively lifted weights to build up his physique, but then settled on a better idea. Mick Jagger gets girls and his lips are bigger than mine, Adam thought. I should become a musician.

Music became the through line for Adam’s late teens and early twenties. He played blues piano and Hammond organ. And while at Brown University in Rhode Island, Adam drove five hours each way to New Jersey to see a famous piano teacher named Kenny Werner. Werner had pioneered a philosophy that he dubbed “effortless mastery,” which valued relinquishing control. Werner argued that “playing music should be as simple and natural as drawing a breath” and that mastery required playing without thinking. But asking Adam not to think was like asking a fish not to swim. “You’re trying so hard to play everything perfectly,” Werner would say. “You’re not allowing yourself to be any good.”

When Adam was 26, a friend invited him out to a bar in Tribeca for a Friday night drink. Adam figured he’d stop by for a quick nightcap before heading home—­a decision that would ripple profoundly through the rest of his life.

At the bar, Adam met Annie, his friend’s girlfriend’s sister. The sparks weren’t immediate, but as the night went on, it was clear that Adam and Annie had chemistry. Adam left the bar with a pep in his step.

When he got back to his apartment, he couldn’t fall asleep. This was rare. Throughout his life, Adam had always been a great sleeper. His musician friends called him Sleepy Strauss for his ability to sleep while his housemates were banging the drums and practicing their high notes. But the night he met Annie, it was as if a switch had flipped. Suddenly Adam was an insomniac.

After that first night, his insomnia began to spiral. He fell into a relatable loop. I didn’t sleep well last night, so I’ve really got to sleep well tonight. But the pressure to get good sleep only fueled more anxious nights. Sleep was like playing the piano—­the more he tried to control it, the more elusive progress became.

Adam sought the help of a therapist who shared various exercises to normalize his sleep anxiety. For months, Adam would visualize himself not sleeping. As he lay in bed, his therapist advised him to repeat the mantra, “I hope I don’t sleep.” And then one night, something clicked. Adam was in bed, repeating “I hope I don’t sleep, I hope I don’t sleep,’’ and for whatever reason, it worked. Adam surrendered to the idea that he might not sleep, and sure enough, off he dozed. Almost instantly, his insomnia was cured.

But sleep was not his only issue. Adam and Annie dated for two and a half years—­a relationship that he describes as the most significant of his life. A few weeks after their breakup, more serious OCD symptoms began to kick in, interfering with nearly every decision of the day.

Adam would spend hours agonizing over whether to take the 12:44 or the 1:37 bus back home to see his family for Thanksgiving. He would order something off the menu at a restaurant and then ask the waiter to change it and then a few minutes later ask to change it back. No decision felt right. For a brief moment after he changed his mind, he would be flooded with the relief of certainty, only for his intrusive thoughts to return.

Adam got into the habit of obsessively searching the phrase “OCD cure” on Google. By then, he had tried the standard treatments: cognitive behavioral therapy, antidepressants, mindfulness meditation. Nothing seemed to work. Then one day, Adam’s search results surfaced something entirely new.

The previous year, the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry had published a study titled “Safety, Tolerability, and Efficacy of Psilocybin in 9 Patients With Obsessive-­Compulsive Disorder.” Psilocybin, the key ingredient in magic mushrooms, seemed like a strange drug to treat a psychiatric disorder. But Adam had already tried a small pharmacy’s worth of more common OCD drugs—­Prozac, Paxil, Lexapro, and Zoloft—­to no avail. Adam wasn’t alone. According to a 2024 article, 30 to 60 percent of OCD patients do not respond to medication and are considered treatment-­resistant. He wasn’t particularly drawn to psychedelics, but he was desperate for a remedy.

Because OCD has both a biological and a behavioral component, drugs that treat the biological component alone tend to have mixed results. Fewer than 20 percent of those treated with medication will experience a complete remission of their OCD symptoms. The drug therapies might treat some of the biological causes of OCD, but the behaviors persist.

However, in the study published in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, lead researcher Francisco Moreno and his team had some remarkable findings. The research was conducted with patients who were each given up to four single doses of psilocybin, one week apart. The doses were administered in a clinical setting where the patients could be observed. Remarkably, every single patient exhibited improvements in their OCD symptoms—­ranging from 23 percent improvement to complete remission.

Moreno’s team cites several possible explanations for why psilocybin can ease OCD symptoms. The drug can break down cycles of doubt and rumination by dramatically changing and resetting the patient’s default mode network, the regions of the brain responsible for self-­referential thinking. Like most antidepressants, psilocybin can allow patients to receive more serotonin, which influences their mood. But psilocybin has also been shown to facilitate a state of openness, in which patients might be more receptive to new insights and attitudes.

Adam decided immediately to embark on a mission of vigilante psychopharmacology, using himself as the test patient. But first, he needed to find some mushrooms.

Unsurprisingly, Adam went about this mission obsessively. Alright, I’ve got to get the right type of mushrooms, at the right dose, in the right setting, and I’ll fix myself. But that’s not exactly how psychedelics work.

Neurobiologically speaking, psychedelics have two main effects. First, they allow parts of the brain that don’t normally talk to each other to connect. Second, they enable the brain to build new pathways. Psychedelic researcher Mendel Kaelen has likened our brains to snow-­covered hills with sleds frequently taking a small number of main trails. A psychedelic can temporarily flatten the snow, erasing the main routes and making it easier to go in other directions.

For people with mental health disorders, the grooves tend to be particularly deep. Adam, for example, had developed a conditioned response around decisionmaking. Every time he needed to make a choice, he fell into a well-­worn pattern of rumination and doubt. Breaking that pattern required fighting against what had become second nature.

Following the discovery of LSD’s psychedelic properties in 1943, psychedelic research exploded. The National Institutes of Health is reputed to have funded over 130 grants for the study of LSD alone. But after the counterculture movement of the 1960s, an extreme backlash from policymakers, who felt that psychedelics might be a threat to American values, led to the drugs being strictly regulated, effectively halting all medical research.

Beginning in the early 2000s, advances in neuroscience research, increased scientific interest, and new FDA approvals encouraged some researchers to reengage in psychedelic research. Groundbreaking studies at places like Johns Hopkins found that drugs such as psilocybin and MDMA were effective in treating certain anxiety-­based disorders, including depression and PTSD. Around the same time, Moreno and his team were conducting the first modern clinical trial for how psychedelics might impact OCD.

Though the sample size of Moreno’s study was small—­only nine patients—the outcomes after only a few doses were remarkable. Typical OCD interventions such as antidepressants and cognitive behavioral therapy have modest success rates and can take weeks or months to take effect. The benefits from psilocybin were tremendous—­and almost immediate.

Adam started asking his friends whether they knew where he could get magic mushrooms. This was 2007, over a decade before psilocybin would be decriminalized in Oregon and Colorado, the first states to do so. Perhaps there’s some sort of post–Burning Man mushroom drought, Adam thought. He couldn’t find mushrooms anywhere. But he had a friend with a connection to a gray-market chemical supply lab in China. Good enough. Rather than organic psychedelics like mushrooms, this lab specialized in synthetic alternatives, each with its own enigmatic name: 2C-B, 2C-­I, 4-­HO-­MiPT. Adam placed an order.

Two weeks later, a beat-­up manila envelope arrived on Adam’s doorstep. Inside were 14 ziplock bags of white powder, each labeled with a string of letters and numbers. Like a research scientist about to embark on a new study, Adam first read everything he could about each of the white powders on Bluelight, an online forum and community dedicated to harm reduction in drug use, before he began to experiment.

Over the next year and a half, Adam tripped about two times per month, documenting his experiences on Bluelight and in a journal. “There was no method to the experimentation besides ‘I’m going to fix my OCD come hell or high water,’” he told me. “I was desperate and had nothing to lose.”

Psychedelic experiences are rated on a scale from no observable effects to plus four (“a religious or transcendent experience”). Alexander Shulgin, the biochemist responsible for the rating scale, describes a plus-­four trip as “potentially life-­changing.” That’s what Adam was looking for. But even after several months, the drugs were not having much effect.

Adam researched what might be affecting his trips. First, he weaned himself off of his antidepressants, which can dampen the effects of psychedelics. Second, he tried to optimize his “set and setting.” (One’s mindset, or “set,” and physical/social environment, or “setting,” can alter a psychedelic experience.) In his early trials, Adam had brief, elusive moments of freedom from his intrusive thoughts, but before long, his OCD returned like a hungry stray cat.

So, in the fall of 2008, Adam decided to create the conditions for a Shangri-­la psychedelic experience. He had scored a new strain of mushrooms from a friend in New York and rented a house on the beach in Martha’s Vineyard for the weekend. But when the mushrooms arrived at the rental house, they looked small and shriveled. Fuck it, Adam thought before consuming the whole bag, a so-­called “heroic dose.”

The rest of Adam’s day was a blur. It was the most intense trip Adam had ever experienced—­a plus four. A rush of fear and a deep sense of foreboding coursed through his body, but when he tried to reach out to others for help, no one answered the phone. For minutes or hours, or perhaps minutes that felt like hours, Adam gripped onto his anxiety, hoping someone or something would come whisk it away. He frantically paced around the house. He berated himself for potentially overdoing it with the mushrooms. He worked himself up to the point of exhaustion. And only then, after he depleted his last ounce of energy, did he finally let go. Like that night in bed when he repeated “I hope I don’t sleep,” Adam gave in. He surrendered to the reality that his impulse to control his trip—­not to mention his thoughts and his OCD—­might ultimately be futile. And just like that, a profound sense of relief swept over him. Adam was powerless. And for the first time in as long as he could remember, he felt free.

Nearly two decades after the publication of Moreno’s study, there are several scientific trials underway to explore psilocybin as a potential treatment for OCD.

Benjamin Kelmendi leads psilocybin trials at Yale University. He’s seen profound improvement for some patients after just one dose. Though drugs can influence our neurobiology, Kelmendi attributes a lot of the improvement to an almost spiritual sense of acceptance of the uncertainty in their lives. Like Adam, Kelmendi’s patients realized that perhaps it was OK that they couldn’t control their fate.

“Uncertainty, at some level, is very protective—­the anxiety we feel is there to guide us in how we navigate the world,” Kelmendi told me. “But it becomes an issue when trivial decisions are being approached with a massive analytical framework.” For many of his patients, there’s a mismatch between the decision they’re making and the tools they use to make it. Adam approached choosing what shirt to wear, for instance, with the scrutiny of a general deciding whether to go to war.

Even those of us without OCD can benefit from thinking about whether the tools we use to make decisions are commensurate with the impact of the choice. Imagine a 2 × 2 matrix. On one axis are decisions we can and cannot control. On the other axis are decisions of high and low consequence. Of these four quadrants, the only decisions really worth worrying about are those of high consequence that we can control—­the other three either don’t matter or we can’t change them anyway.

Decision science expert and former professional poker player Annie Duke taught me two heuristics for determining whether decisions are of high or low consequence.

The first she calls the Happiness Test. Imagine you’re at a restaurant and deciding between two dishes—­the pasta or the pizza. You finally make up your mind, and the waiter brings you your food. Maybe it’s delicious, maybe it’s fine, maybe it’s so revolting you can only manage a few bites.

Now imagine I run into you a week later and ask, “Remember that dinner you had last week? On a scale of 1 to 5, how much of an effect did that food have on the happiness of your week? Now, how about your month? And how about your year?” For most people, the choice about what dish to order likely would have had little effect on their long-­term happiness. It’s a low-­consequence decision—­like what shirt to wear in the morning—and you should probably make the choice quickly. This may sound intuitive, but research has shown that the average person spends about 250 to 275 hours each year stuck in analysis paralysis over small decisions like what to wear, what to eat, and what to watch on TV. The Happiness Test helps us recognize that most of us would benefit from deliberating less.

The second heuristic I learned from Duke is called the Only-­Option Test. Imagine you’re deciding between two vacation destinations: Rome or Paris. Your vacation will likely affect your happiness next week, next month, and possibly even next year. It’s an expensive trip, so the stakes seem high. Many of us agonize over decisions like these, whether it’s deciding between apartments, jobs, or schools. Like Adam and the MP3 player, you might spend weeks, if not months, researching the subtle differences between your options.

Duke offers a question that cuts through the noise: For any option you’re considering, ask yourself, “If this were the only option I had, would I be happy with it?” It’s a telling provocation. As Duke writes in her book How to Decide, “When a decision is hard, that means it’s easy. The very thing that slows you down—­having multiple options that are very close in quality—­is actually a signal that you can go fast, because this tells you that whichever option you choose, you can’t possibly be that wrong, since both options have similar upside and downside potential.”

I can already hear your inner skeptic shouting, “So much could go wrong!” You could spend thousands of dollars on flights and hotels only to get food poisoning from undercooked escargot! You could get swindled by a charming Italian cab driver and end up lost and penniless in a foreign city where you don’t speak the language! So you create spreadsheets and pro-­con lists and ask everyone you know for their counsel, all so you can make the perfect choice.

Putting aside the fact that the probability of these worst-­case scenarios occurring is low (and likely similar for Rome or Paris), it’s difficult not to focus on the potential negative outcomes. If the trip turns out poorly for whatever reason, you’ll think you made an awful choice. But that’s a common cognitive fallacy called resulting. Resulting is the tendency to judge a decision based on its outcome, rather than its quality. Just because a decision had a bad outcome doesn’t necessarily make it a bad decision.

The Only-­Option Test forces you to look at the choice based on the relative quality of the options. If your only option was to take a vacation to Rome, would you be happy? How about to Paris? If the answer is yes to both, perhaps your choice matters less than you think. This isn’t to say that you shouldn’t spend any time deliberating, but recognizing that your options are equally good can help you spend less time trying to decide.

To be clear, we make plenty of life decisions where the stakes are high, and we’d often benefit from taking our time and conducting a thorough analysis. But we spend a surprising amount of time trying to decide in situations when more research does not always lead to better decisions. When you find yourself stuck in analysis paralysis, you’re often searching for certainty where there is no certainty to be found.

Backstage at a 100-­seat theater in Manhattan, Adam is waiting for the lights to come up. The song “Gila” by Beach House blares through the theater’s speakers: “Don’tcha waste your time / No oh oh oh oh.” As the chorus fades, Adam emerges—­scruffy beard, dark jeans, blue button-down shirt—­and launches into a monolog. “There’s the iPod and there’s something called the iRiver. They’re both sitting on my desk, and they’re both playing the same song on repeat in my headphones …”

In the years since his transcendent psilocybin trip, Adam has made it his mission to educate others about OCD, primarily through his one-­man show, The Mushroom Cure. “People sometimes come to the show thinking that this is the story of this guy who cured himself with mushrooms,” he told me. Of course, the mushrooms didn’t cure him outright. Instead, they helped him learn how to keep moving forward without a definitive “cure.”

One way Adam has tried to move through his discomfort is with stand-up comedy and theater. Being on stage is a type of exposure therapy for Adam’s anxiety. When he’s on the mic, he can’t afford to stay stuck in a deliberative state of mind because the show must go on. I was curious to see how theater could be therapeutic for someone with crippling anxiety, so I bought tickets to see Adam in action.

Adam has been performing The Mushroom Cure off and on for over a decade at black box theaters across the country, but there’s something off about tonight’s show. About five minutes in, Adam cuts himself off mid-line, looks up at the audience, and says, “I’m going to come back in one minute.”

Adam abruptly exits stage left. The crowd awkwardly looks around, wondering if this is all part of the act.

One minute later, as promised, he returns. “I’m debating whether to explain what’s happening right now,” he tells the audience, breaking the fourth wall.

“I didn’t realize how this was going to be visually with everyone on the stage—­seeing you all really changes the energy.” The show had sold out, and the theater had decided to add additional seats around the perimeter of the stage. The space looked different from how Adam had pictured it, and he could feel his anxiety start to spike.

“Do you want to close your eyes for a minute?” someone suggests from the floor.

“Maybe we can turn the lights down,” another audience member offers.

“Honestly, there’s nothing anyone can do,” Adam responds. “This isn’t a horrible catastrophe; it’s just a novel experience that I was not expecting. I’m feeling my way through it.”

Adam takes a deep breath to compose himself and continues with the show. Eighty minutes later, the lights go down and the crowd showers him with applause.

“I’m feeling my way through” is an apt characterization of how Adam’s approach to OCD has evolved since he first experimented with psychedelics nearly 20 years ago. At 51, Adam still has OCD episodes. The obsessive thoughts come less frequently, his compulsive behaviors are less all-consuming, and he rarely uses psychedelics. But Adam still has to manage his OCD on a daily basis.

After all of his experimentation with antidepressants, cognitive behavioral therapy, yoga, meditation, exposure therapy, and psychedelics, the best way Adam has found to deal with his OCD symptoms is to face his anxiety head-­on.

“At the top level, people with OCD are looking for certainty, and with certainty comes safety,” Adam told me on a brisk San Francisco evening, as the two of us climbed the steep slopes of Buena Vista Park to catch the sunset. “But I think what is often missed is that the OCD serves to mask something else.”

For Adam, his symptoms began after experiencing a deep heartbreak. “When I say heartbreak, I don’t mean metaphorically so much as anatomically. There was a deep sensation of loss in the center of my chest after my breakup with Annie,” he said. “I think the strategy my brain came up with was like, ‘Alright, we don’t know what’s going on down there. This is intolerable. Let’s not even worry about that. Let’s just go up here,’” he said, gesturing at his head. “And if we figure everything out, then we won’t have to feel all this,” he finished, pointing at his heart.

Whether we suffer from OCD or not, our brains play masterful tricks to help us avoid undesirable emotions. Decisionmaking is hard because before we make a choice, every option is available to us. Making a choice requires forgoing other opportunities, which can feel like loss. Rather than accept the consequences of commitment, our brains can convince us to perpetually stay in a place of indecision.

But as the aphorism goes, what we resist, persists. For Adam, magic mushrooms were not a magic cure for his OCD. But they did help him stop avoiding—­and eventually accept—­his full range of emotions. To act in spite of uncertainty requires exposing ourselves to vulnerability. The only way to keep going is to feel our way through.

Excerpted from How to Not Know: The Value of Uncertainty in a World that Demands Answers. Copyright © 2026 by Simone Stolzoff. Used with permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.