The COVID-19 pandemic has filled life with a lot of unknowns. Will we get sick? Will a family member or friend end up hospitalized? Will we lose our jobs? Will we need to cancel our wedding? How long will the virus be at the forefront of our everyday lives?

All these what-ifs piling on top of one another are a recipe for panic. This is because we can’t control what we don’t know, Karla Ivankovich, PhD, a clinical counselor in private practice and adjunct professor of Counseling Psychology at North Park University in Chicago, tells Health. “ The fear of the unknown becomes terrifying because no matter how many ways we try to perceive an outcome, we understand there may be so many more scenarios that we couldn’t even consider,” she explains.

Fight-or-flight response kicks in when we start to fear, which is a “natural mechanism to protect ourselves,” says Ivankovich. “But when the circumstances remain unknown, we stay in a heightened state of awareness, which wreaks havoc on the mind and body. This causes us immense stress, which leads to panic, turning to anxiety. The unknown steals the one thing that gives us comfort in scary times, and that’s control.”

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Jud Brewer, MD, PhD, a neuroscientist, addiction psychiatrist, and an associate professor of behavioral and social sciences at Brown University School of Public Health in Rhode Island, says “powerlessness” can lead to a couple of different responses. One is a “defeatist” attitude. “You might think, Why should I devote energy to this? I don’t have control over my own life,” he tells Health. That mentality can spiral into anxiety or depression.

But a feeling of powerlessness might also tell your brain to kick things into gear and “do something to regain control,” says Dr. Brewer. “It might not be obvious what to do, but it doesn’t stop us from trying something. What do you do at a time like this? Just do something. That gets into the loops of the brain, that doing something is better than doing nothing. But no, it could in fact make it worse.”

Panic is motivated by such thinking, and it's exacerbated by social contagion. When everyone is rushing to grocery stores to buy up all the supplies, and respected newspapers are filled with constant negative headlines, you panic. And it's called “blind panic” for a reason, he says; you’re not really thinking things through. “Toilet paper became the meme, because it’s ridiculous,” says Dr. Brewer. “It doesn’t make sense. There’s not a shortage of toilet paper.” Basically, you don’t see clearly at all when you’re worrying.

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Ken Yeager, an associate professor in the department of psychiatry and behavioral health at Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center, says COVID-19 is also a trigger for people who already have anxiety. When looking for concrete answers amid uncertainty, everything is a trigger point.

“People who are prone to anxiety have that reinforced by even the smallest things,” Yeager tells Health. “If you’re prone to anxiety and you think you’re going to get sick, a sneeze or a sniffle can feed into that anxiety. If you are fearful you’re losing your job and you hear about someone from Poughkeepsie who cannot get a job, you worry that will happen to you.”

That said, no one is immune from anxiety right now. Yeager notes the definition of clinical anxiety is “excessive anxiety and worry occurring more days than not” for at least six months. “Probably most of us fit that criteria right now,” he says.

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It’s important to remember that you can’t control what you don’t know, and worrying isn’t an effective remedy for fear. “We have to sit back and learn to be with the uncertainty rather than try to do something to make it go away,” says Dr. Brewer. Think selling off stock, or constantly checking your fever.  “[Whatever we do] is very unlikely to make it better.”

Here are some ideas for coping with the unknown and feeling better about it.