Sent you many messages 💌💌But you are ignoring me 😞😭😞 Tap to open and accept it ❤️💕

Finally, they text you back. You feel relief, and the tension you have been feeling drops. Suddenly you’re feeling better.

Everything’s fine, right?

Until the cycle starts all over again.

Some days you get a reply from your friend, but some days it’s quiet. One day they really want to talk, and the next they seem distant and don’t say a word. You shouldn’t care. They are probably just busy, but your mind can’t stop thinking about the person who didn’t respond.

Immediately, you may start replaying past conversations and interactions with this person. You keep checking your phone to see if they texted. You think this relationship really matters, and the more you wait, the more it matters.

Psychology may have a different explanation: You may care for this person, but the fixation you feel may be the brain’s desire for the uncertainty to end. What you are feeling could reflect two different things going on at once: The desire for the other person and the desire for the uncertainty of not getting a response to end.

Your Brain Wants to Know What Comes Next

The brain is wired to predict circumstances in order to keep you safe. For example, if one of your friends is tired and grumpy and then goes quiet, the brain learns to predict what the quiet from this person means through the patterns it associates with events. Research shows that the brain continuously makes predictions and adjusts expectations to adapt to the challenges it faces in life (Clark, 2013; Friston, 2010).

However, when the brain encounters a person it cannot predict, someone who behaves in unexpected ways without warning, it focuses its attention on this person without responding. The brain generates a signal to learn from the unexpected events, becoming hypervigilant. The brain then uses these signals to update its expectations about any given situation (Schultz et al., 1997).

Erratic behaviour creates a problem for your brain to solve. Research suggests that uncertainty about a reward (such as when you will receive a text) can sustain activity in dopamine neurons while the outcome remains unknown, keeping the brain engaged and thinking as it waits to figure out what will come next (Fiorillo et al., 2003). With the brain constantly focusing on one person, dopamine neuron activity can feel like it is signalling a connection, when it could simply reflect uncertainty.

Uncertainty Can Make Us Feel Stuck

The brain tends to stick to things that feel unresolved. Let’s look at the end of two different conversations to understand this process.

In the first conversation, a friend says, “Great, see you on Saturday!” In the second, the same friend says, “We’ll see.” Which conversation seems to stick out the most? Most likely, the second one.

The brain does not like having an open loop in conversations with uncertainty. It wants to know what will happen to avoid any potential danger and keep you safe, but until that happens, it stays on alert, trying to solve the open puzzles like a sent text message with no reply. When there is an information gap, our brain will keep focusing until it finds out the missing information (Loewenstein, 1994).

You might find your mind wandering to messages you sent. What did they mean? Did I say something wrong? Are we OK?

You may find yourself even replaying conversations in your mind over and over, rereading messages, and attempting to provide explanations, all to predict what will happen next.

Here is where the connection between you and another person can get confusing: Just because someone occupies your thoughts, you may believe they occupy your heart, but attachment to a person and attention in the brain are not the same thing, even when they may feel the same.

Thinking about a person constantly may not be evidence of a connection but of uncertainty.

Ask Better Questions

Instead of wondering whether uncertainty or connection is present because of a lack of response, consider asking better questions to figure out where your feelings are coming from. For example: How do you feel when you are around that person? Are you typically unsure of your status with them? Do you receive mixed messages from their actions or words? Do you enjoy the relationship? Or do you spend a lot of time trying to decipher messages and understand where you stand with them?

Your answers can help you see that your connection with a person isn’t determined by how much mental space they might occupy; that feeling of connection can be caused by someone who leaves you hanging with the most unanswered questions.

So, when a person’s inconsistency leaves you constantly checking your phone or analysing their behaviour, ask yourself, Do I want this person—or do I just want the uncertainty they cause to stop?