If you’re someone who keeps waiting for reassurance before you move or make a decision, this Mindset Debrief episode is for you. It addresses the pattern and shows how it turns capable people into hesitant decision-makers.

You’ll see what it’s costing you in momentum and self-trust, and you’ll leave with a practical way to act while uncertainty’s still present.

A lot of people assume they’re delaying because they’re being careful. The research points to a more uncomfortable driver. Avoidance often shows up as emotion regulation, not bad time management. When a task or decision stirs up tension, the brain looks for quick relief, and delay becomes a short-term mood fix.

Reassurance works the same way. It can lower anxiety for a moment, but it teaches you to treat discomfort as a problem that needs to be removed before you’re “allowed” to act. In clinical research, excessive reassurance-seeking is tied to worsening depressive symptoms and strained relationships, partly because it can pull other people into a loop that never really resolves the fear underneath.

This gets louder when you’ve got a low tolerance for uncertainty. Intolerance of uncertainty reliably predicts higher anxiety, and it pushes people toward behaviors that feel safe in the moment, like checking, overplanning, and seeking repeated confirmation.

In decision-making research, that “safety behavior” can backfire by keeping you dependent on certainty you can’t actually secure.

Springer

So this episode draws a hard line between two things that get confused: information and permission. Information helps you make a better call. Permission is emotional outsourcing. If you can’t tell the difference, you’ll keep collecting opinions long after you’ve already got enough to decide.

We talk through what reassurance-seeking looks like in real life at work and at home, why it feels responsible, and how it quietly trains you to distrust your own judgment. Then we shift the standard you’re using. You’re not waiting for confidence. You’re waiting for discomfort to go away. It won’t. The move is learning to decide with it still there, and to treat self-trust as something you practice, not something you earn from other people.

Share this episode with someone who could benefit from the information.

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