The career-hobbling addiction you might not have been warned about

Reassurance seeking is addictive: it wastes your time, damages your craft, dims your light, and makes you feel progressively worse with time. So why is it so tempting to indulge?

Is this normal?

Should I worry?

Are they mad at me?

What’s taking so long?

What are they going to say?

Is this a bad sign?

Am I too late?

I’m addicted to answering other people’s unanswerable questions.

I know I shouldn’t. I know that in the long term, my “answers” make things worse—much worse—for the anxious people asking; we’ll get to why in a moment.

Oh, but to indulge such questions is just that—an indulgence. How delicious it is to feel helpful and needed. How soothing to scratch together, baboon-like, at all our ancient itches: Am I safe? Do I matter? Do I mean something? Yes, yes, yes—aaaah: for a moment, pain becomes peace under the fingernails.

Whenever someone compliments me on my ability to deliver a good pep talk—which is often—I feel like they’re handing me a cocaine-sugared donut. Gobble, gobble, gobble, YES PLEASE: I’m useful, I’m useful, I’m useful.

As with any drug, though, the high never lasts. Inevitably, the sufferers I’ve “soothed” come back to me itchier than ever, jonesing for more pep. My anxiety and irritation spike: what do you mean, you’re still itchy? Insecurities resurrect themselves hive-like all over my body: the same old suspicion of my uselessness, joined now by shame, resentment, and anger. Now my peace requires a whole Scarface Dozen to recover. What a cliché!

Which is all to say: although I’m about to tell you that unproductive reassurance seeking might be the single most dangerous and counterproductive habit you have, I say this as a fellow sufferer, not a scold. Hilariously, providing too much reassurance is a form of seeking the same—and it’s all bad for us, in general and highly specific professional ways.

Consider the following post a warning label against unproductive reassurance seeking, like those sad-trombone autopsy lung photos they put on cigarettes in the UK. Today I’m going to walk you through:

• what unproductive reassurance seeking is;

• how to tell the difference between it and productive self-advocacy;

• why it might be making you a much less successful writer/literary agent/editor/whatever than you could be—EVEN RIGHT NOW, AS YOU READ THIS; and

• what you can do to kick the habit without leaving yourself dangling in misery the next time you’re feeling anxious and uncertain in this field, which, let’s be honest, will probably be today or tomorrow if not within the next hour, ha ha ha ha ha book publishing yay.

OK, so:

Here’s what unproductive reassurance seeking looks and feels like.