You Keep Asking If You're Doing the Right Thing
By Dr. John S. Tamerin · 5 min read · August 14, 2026
The stories in my writing are drawn from over fifty years of practice. Names, details, and circumstances have been changed. No real patient is identifiable.
You sent the message. Then you screenshotted it and sent it to a friend to ask whether it sounded strange.
She said it was fine. For about an hour, it was fine.
Then the doubt reassembled itself out of nothing, wearing slightly different clothes, and you were composing the next question before you had noticed you were doing it.
The tell is who you are asking
A young woman worked this out on her own, and her formulation is better than anything in the textbooks. She realized that she was asking constant questions, and that many of them were questions nobody had enough knowledge to answer.
Sit with that for a moment, because it is the whole diagnosis.
Was that the right thing to say. Does he still like me. Should I have taken the job. The people you put these to cannot know. They were not there, they cannot see the future, and half of them are guessing to be kind.
If the point were information, you would ask someone who had it. The point is not information. The point is the twenty seconds of quiet that arrive when a human being says it is fine.
Why the quiet does not last
Because nothing was answered. Something was administered.
Reassurance behaves like a substance. It works, it works quickly, the effect is real, and it wears off. And as with any substance, the dose required climbs. What used to need one friend now needs two friends and a rereading of the message thread.
Underneath, something worse is happening. Every time you outsource the verdict, you file another small piece of evidence that you are not qualified to make it. You are not just failing to build confidence. You are actively dismantling it, several times a day, with great sincerity.
Every question you hand to somebody else is a vote against yourself, cast by you, counted by you, and remembered by you long after the person you asked has forgotten they were consulted.
What it does to the people close to you
This is the part nobody warns you about, and it is why I take the habit seriously rather than treating it as a quirk.
The woman I mentioned was terrified of ending up alone and unloved. That fear had her asking constantly for proof that she was wanted. What she eventually saw was that the asking was producing the very thing she was frightened of. The pressure of it pushed people back. She described herself as giving off a desperate energy, which is an unkind phrase and she chose it herself, and she was right.
I should be exact here. This is not a moral failing and she was not doing anything wrong. It is simply that a person who needs constant proof of affection is exhausting to love, and the exhaustion arrives in the other person before either of them can name it.
The instruction I give, and why it is deliberately small
Not to stop asking. Telling an anxious person to stop is the same as telling them to relax.
I ask them to delay. When the question arrives, wait one hour before putting it to anybody. That is all. Not forever. An hour.
I choose an hour on purpose. It is short enough to be possible on a bad afternoon and long enough for the person to observe something they have never once observed, which is what happens to the feeling when nobody comes to remove it.
It goes down on its own. It always goes down on its own. But you have to see it with your own eyes forty or fifty times before you will believe it, and you cannot see it while somebody keeps intercepting it at minute four.
Then the hour becomes a day. Then it stops being an exercise.
What the first session looks like
You will probably ask me, at some point in the first hour, whether what you are describing is normal. I will not answer that in the way you want, and I will tell you plainly why not, because doing so in the room is more useful than any explanation of the mechanism.
There will be a lot of questions from my side, and one of them will be what you already suspect the answer is. You almost always know. That is worth establishing early.
An Invitation
If you have been running your decisions past a committee of people who could not possibly know, you are not weak and you are not broken. You have a habit that has quietly taken over the job of your own judgment.
It gives the job back faster than you would think.
