Breaking the Cycle of Reassurance Seeking

Reassurance seeking is a coping mechanism for avoiding uncertainty and the emotions that come with it. For example:

• After “bombing” a job interview, you immediately call your spouse looking for “support.” But in reality, you’re unwilling to sit with the uncertainty and fear around how the interview went and what will come of it.
• You’re considering buying a home and find yourself compulsively calling your father or mother asking them for their “advice.” But in reality, you’re terrified of making a mistake and are using them to manage that fear.

Reassurance seeking means outsourcing the emotional labor of uncertainty management to other people. While it often brings relief in the short term, the long-term consequences are increased anxiety, diminished confidence, and chronic self-doubt. Constantly avoiding managing your uncertainty communicates to your mind that you can’t handle it, creating a vicious self-fulfilling prophecy.

If you want to break your habit of reassurance seeking and improve your confidence, here are a few ways to get started:

1. Anticipate Your Reassurance Seeking Triggers

Despite how it may feel, it’s unlikely that you lack confidence and seek reassurance in every aspect of your life. There are probably specific contexts or situations which tend to provoke an unusually strong need for reassurance seeking. For example:

• You might be much more likely to seek reassurance at work compared to at home or with friends.
• Maybe you tend to seek a lot of reassurance when you’re stressed and tired.
• Maybe your reassurance seeking pattern tends to show up most around your family because it’s so easy to fall into old family dynamics.

Identifying your reassurance seeking triggers allows you to anticipate them and eliminate the element of surprise. This is helpful because surprise is an emotional amplifier: take any difficult emotion, add surprise, and the emotional intensity becomes much greater. On the other hand, eliminate surprise, and many difficult emotions—including the ones behind your reassurance seeking—become much less intense.

Finally, the exercise of identifying your reassurance seeking triggers has the side benefit of showing you that you don’t seek reassurance everywhere, which boosts your confidence in breaking the habit.

2. Confront the Emotions Behind Your Impulse to Seek Reassurance

Reassurance seeking is a behavior motivated by strong emotions. Specifically, we seek reassurance to gain relief from uncomfortable or painful emotions like fear or guilt. Many people justify their reassurance seeking behavior by claiming that they’re just asking for advice. But if you’re sincere about the motivation behind your reassurance seeking, you’ll usually find that you’re not primarily motivated by the desire to learn and gain new information—you want to feel less bad.

For example:

• Did you immediately call your spouse after your interview to learn something new? Or were you feeling afraid that you wouldn’t get the job and looking for something to take away that fear?
• Do you really think that your mother is going to have some new information that will meaningfully change your mind about buying the house? Or are you worried about making a bad decision and hoping that she’ll ease that fear by encouraging you to do it (or not)?

Asking for advice is motivated by the desire to learn; reassurance seeking is motivated by the desire to feel better. The problem is that if you’re constantly using other people to feel better, you’re teaching your mind that you can’t handle feeling bad, which makes you feel more insecure and indecisive in the future.

To become more confident handling these difficult emotions behind your reassurance seeking, look for them, confront them, and be willing to have them instead of trying to avoid them or make them go away. A simple way to get started is to keep a feelings file—make a new notes file in your phone and, each time you find yourself reassurance seeking, write down A) the trigger, B) the reassurance seeking behavior, and C) what emotion is motivating that behavior. The more awareness you bring to the emotions behind reassurance seeking, the less of a prisoner you will be to them.

3. Validate the Desire for Reassurance Seeking

Seeking reassurance is a bad habit, but there’s nothing wrong with the desire for reassurance. Nobody likes feeling anxious and indecisive. We all wish we knew the right thing to do. And everyone would prefer the comfort of reassurance to the pain of uncertainty.

This is important to acknowledge because many people who struggle with anxiety and reassurance seeking also tend to beat themselves up for it with lots of self-criticism and judgment, which only makes them feel worse and less confident. But you can counteract this habit by acknowledging your desire for reassurance and validating it, which is as simple as saying to yourself something like this:

Okay, I’m feeling really anxious about this decision. And even though I don’t like feeling anxious, it’s not bad. Most people would feel some anxiety in a situation like this. It’s okay to feel anxious and make the decision anyway.

The better you are at validating the emotion behind your reassurance seeking, the easier it will be to resist the pull to act on that emotion. And the more you practice tolerating rather than acting on those emotions, the less intense they will become over time.

4. Find a Self-Assurance Role Model

One of the reasons it’s easy to fall into and stay stuck in reassurance seeking behavior is because we’re surrounded by it. For example:

• Maybe you grew up with a parent who was highly dependent and constantly seeking reassurance.
• Maybe your best friend uses you all the time for reassurance seeking.
• Maybe your therapist unwittingly encourages it in your therapy sessions.

Examples of and opportunities for reassurance seeking are pervasive, making it easy to fall into. On the other hand, people who struggle with reassurance often idolize (or envy) those who seem to be supremely confident and never struggle with reassurance, falling into the trap of comparing themselves disparagingly to those folks.

Luckily, there’s a middle way that is much more conducive to managing anxiety and uncertainty in a healthy way: seek out and cultivate self-assurance role models. These are people you can look up to for their resistance to reassurance seeking but also relate to.

For example:

• Let’s say you tend to seek a lot of reassurance at work. Maybe you have a coworker who is similar to you along several factors—works on the same project, is your same gender and age, etc.
• But they also seem pretty good at being decisive when faced with uncertainty.
• So start studying this person and watching how they respond to difficult circumstances.
• Then, when you’re faced with anxiety and uncertainty and feel the pull toward reassurance seeking, ask yourself: What would (self-assurance role model) do?

Having a model for specific alternatives to reassurance seeking behavior is extremely helpful for building better habits in response to anxiety and uncertainty.

5. Take Action Using the 3Ms

At this point, you might be saying to yourself:

Okay, sure, all that other stuff about anticipating triggers and validating emotions sounds great. But when I’m feeling anxious and want reassurance, what am I supposed to DO instead?

To be honest, if you commit to and consistently follow through with identifying and anticipating your reassurance seeking triggers, confronting the emotions behind reassurance seeking, validating the desire to seek reassurance, and patiently cultivating self-assuredness role models, you’ll likely find you don’t need anything else. However, when you’re early on in the process of breaking out of your reassurance seeking habit, it can be helpful to have some alternative healthy actions you can take when you feel the pull to seek reassurance.

Here’s a framework called The 3 Ms: Move, Make, and Meet. It’s a good way to think about how to move on from difficult emotions generally—for example, what to do when you’re sad instead of ruminating; or what to do when you’re feeling angry rather than criticizing. But it’s also helpful as a way to generate alternative behaviors for reassurance seeking.

The basic idea is that moving your body physically, making something, or connecting with someone meaningfully all tend to be healthy behaviors that can outcompete the desire to seek reassurance. Here’s how it works:

When you find yourself wanting to seek reassurance, remind yourself that it’s okay to feel uncertain and anxious and get on with your life anyway. Then ask yourself these questions:

• How can I move my body? Can I go for a 15-minute walk around the block? Or get a 30-minute workout in on my lunch break?
• Is there something small I can make, create, or fix? Could I bake some scones? Maybe replace those old light bulbs in the garage? Or perhaps just tidy up my office?
• Can I connect with someone in a meaningful way? Can I send a text to an old friend telling them one thing I really appreciate about our friendship? Or maybe I can invite a new coworker to grab lunch?

In short, the antidote to reassurance seeking is to consistently resist the impulse to do it. This can be a lot easier if you have a compelling and healthy set of alternative behaviors to choose from.

All You Need to Know

Remember that when you habitually seek reassurance, you are essentially outsourcing the emotional labor of uncertainty management to other people. While this can feel relieving in the short term, it ultimately makes you more anxious, more indecisive, and less confident. To break the cycle and stop seeking reassurance so much, here are 5 tips:

1. Anticipate your reassurance seeking triggers

2. Confront the emotions behind your impulse to seek reassurance

3. Validate the desire for reassurance seeking

4. Find a self-assurance role model

5. Take action using the 3Ms: Move, Make, Meet