Chapter 10: The Need to Know

Gabriel had interviewed for a promotion on a Wednesday, and it was now Friday afternoon, and he had refreshed his inbox forty-one times.

He knew the number because he had been counting, in a half-ashamed way. The hiring manager had said she would decide “by the end of next week.” That gave him seven more days of not knowing. He could not bear it. Every refresh was a small hope, and every empty inbox was a small stone.

The refreshing was only the visible part. In his mind he kept reviewing the interview, one answer at a time. Had he said too much about his weaknesses? Had that story about the failed project sounded like an excuse? And in the evenings, he turned to Sofia, his girlfriend, with a question he had already asked in various forms. “Do you think I did okay? Be honest. Do you think I blew it?”

Sofia, to her credit, always answered kindly. “You were prepared. You did great. I’m sure it went fine.” And for ten or fifteen minutes, Gabriel felt the world loosen. Then the doubt came creeping back in, with a slightly different shape. But she wasn’t there. She doesn’t know how it went. And he would ask again.

On Sunday evening, Sofia put down her fork. “I love you,” she said, “and I’m not helping. Every time I tell you it went fine, you feel better for a bit and then you need it again. I can’t be your off switch.”

Gabriel wanted to argue. But he recognized, with an uncomfortable clarity, that she was right.

How reassurance works, and why it stops working

The pattern Gabriel was caught in is one of the best understood in psychology. When something causes distress, and an action brings quick relief, the mind learns that the action is the way out. Psychologists call this negative reinforcement: a behavior is strengthened because it takes away something unpleasant. Checking, refreshing, asking, and mentally reviewing all bring a moment of relief, and that moment trains the mind to do them again.

The trouble is that the relief is brief and the cost is cumulative. Each time Gabriel was reassured, the message his brain received was not I’m safe. It was that doubt needed an answer. The next doubt arrived with greater urgency, because the first one had been treated as an emergency.

Researchers, including the psychologist Thomas Joiner, have studied what they call excessive reassurance-seeking, the repeated asking of others for comfort about the same worry. They have found that although it may soothe in the moment, it tends to strain relationships over time, because the person being asked starts to feel used as a tool or helpless to make a difference. That is exactly what Sofia was trying to say.

Checking makes doubt grow

It seems logical that checking something should make us surer of it. But for many people, in some conditions, the opposite is true.

In experiments reported in 2003, the psychologists Marcel van den Hout and Merel Kindt asked healthy volunteers to check a computer-simulated gas stove again and again. Afterward, the volunteers’ memories of the stove felt less vivid and less detailed, and they were less confident in them, even though the accuracy of their memory had not changed. A 2019 meta-analysis of 28 experiments of this kind found the same pattern: repeated checking tended to lower confidence rather than raise it. One explanation the researchers offer is that checking makes the thing more familiar, familiar things leave fainter impressions each time we recall them, and a fainter impression is harder to trust. The more you look, the more the doubt.

You may have felt this yourself. You check that you locked the door, and then wonder whether you really checked, so you check again. Or you reread an email you sent, and by the third reading the words begin to look wrong. Checking was supposed to buy certainty. It ends up selling doubt.

The invisible kind of checking

Not all checking is physical. A great deal of it happens silently inside the head. When Gabriel replayed his interview answer by answer, he was checking, using his memory as a tool to arrive at a verdict. When he scanned for tiny signs in Sofia’s expression as she answered, he was checking her. When he googled how long do companies take to decide, he was checking the world.

These mental versions are especially sneaky, because they are hard to notice and impossible to put down. No one can see you do them. They don’t leave the house. But they work by the same mechanism: a moment of relief, and then a return of doubt.

The belief underneath

What is the mind trying to protect when it checks and seeks reassurance? Usually, it is the belief we met in Chapter 5, that uncertainty is unacceptable, and that peace must wait until we know.

That belief, if you look at it directly, is a hard one to live with. It makes every open question an emergency. It promises that relief is just one more answer away. And it hides the fact that the only thing the checking has ever given us is a moment, and then a larger appetite.

The alternative is not to pretend that we don’t care about the outcome. It is to discover, gradually and through experience, that we can not know and still be all right. This is the heart of learning to tolerate uncertainty, and it is something that you can only learn by doing. You cannot argue yourself into it. You have to leave a question open and see what happens.

When it is more than a habit

For most people, checking and reassurance-seeking are habits that tighten under stress and loosen when life calms down. But for some, they are part of a pattern that takes over: hours of checking, rituals that must be performed in a particular way, distressing intrusive thoughts that feel impossible to dismiss. These can be signs of obsessive-compulsive disorder or another anxiety condition, and they respond well to treatment. A type of therapy called exposure and response prevention has strong evidence behind it. If your checking is taking up significant time, causing significant distress, or interfering with work or relationships, please consider talking with a mental health professional. It is a treatable pattern, not a character flaw.

Try this: Leave one question unanswered

This practice is simple and uncomfortable. Choose a low-stakes question that you tend to answer immediately by checking or asking: refreshing an inbox, rereading a message, checking whether someone has seen your text, asking are you sure? Then:

1. Notice the urge. Say to yourself, There’s the urge to check. Rate its strength from 0 to 10.

1. Delay. Wait ten minutes before acting. You are not forbidding the check forever. You are only postponing it. The psychologist G. Alan Marlatt, who worked with people recovering from addiction, called this urge surfing: imagine the urge as a wave that rises, peaks, and falls, and your job is to stay on the board until it passes.

1. Do something absorbing. Make tea, walk around the block, call someone about something unrelated. The aim is not to distract forever. It is to let the wave pass.

1. Rate it again. Notice what happened to the urge, even if it is only slightly lower.

1. Lengthen the delay next time. Move from ten minutes to thirty, then to an hour, and then to a fixed schedule (I will check my inbox at noon and at four.).

Gabriel chose two things. He would check his email only at noon and at four, and he would ask Sofia for reassurance at most once a day, and never about the same question twice. When the urge arrived, he said, quietly, I want to know, and I don’t know yet. The first two days were harder than he had expected. By the fifth day, the waves were smaller. When the hiring manager finally called, on Friday of the following week, he had stopped counting.

If you are the person being asked, as Sofia was, there is a kind way to help. You can say: I believe you can handle not knowing. I love you, and I’m not going to answer that again, but I’ll sit with you while it’s hard. This is not coldness. It is trust.

What the first weeks are like. Expect the urge to feel stronger for the first few days, because your mind is used to getting its answer. That surge usually means the practice is working, not failing. Progress looks like a longer delay, a lower rating at the end, or one fewer check a day. Go slowly. If checking or reassurance takes up hours of your day, seek professional help.

A THOUGHT TO CARRY

You do not need to know before you can be all right. You need to be all right in order to bear not knowing, and that comes from practice, not from answers.