Why Seeking Reassurance Feels Good – But Makes Anxiety Worse.

If you’re a millennial who’s spent your life feeling like you’re probably fucking everything up — welcome. You’re not broken. You’re likely stuck in something I call the feedback anxiety cycle.

For many neurodivergent adults – especially those with late-diagnosed ADHD, autism, or anxiety – the relationship with reassurance, feedback, and anxiety can get pretty tangled. You’ve probably spent years masking, overcompensating, and constantly trying to read the room so nobody gets annoyed with you. But that survival strategy eventually backfires, leaving you feeling anxious, burnt out, and disconnected from your own internal compass.

Let’s break down why this happens, why reassurance feels so good (and so bad), and how to actually start untangling the feedback anxiety loop.

What Is the Feedback Anxiety Cycle?

The feedback anxiety cycle is a pattern where anxiety, perfectionism, and fear of failure drive you to seek reassurance from others. The flip side of that reassurance is it only provides temporary relief. Over time, it actually makes your anxiety worse.

Here’s how it usually plays out:

1. You feel anxious about how you're doing at work, in relationships, and in life in general.
   
   
2. That anxiety triggers a need to hear that you're doing okay. You ask your boss, your partner, your friends, your therapist.
   
   
3. You get reassurance. For a moment, you might feel calmer.
   
   
4. But then your brain starts picking apart what they said. Were they just being nice? Do they secretly think I suck? What if things change tomorrow?
   
   
5. Anxiety ramps back up. You seek more reassurance.
   
   
6. Rinse and repeat.

For many neurodivergent professionals with anxiety and perfectionism, this cycle can feel endless. It can also be confusing, because different people’s reassurance styles may amplify your sense of rejection. Or you might interpret a neutral or even positive facial expression or text as negative, and that can make you even more anxious. 

The more you try to manage your anxiety with reassurance, the less you trust your own judgment, the more likely you are to have communication mishaps, and the more anxious you become.

Why Neurodivergent Adults Are Prone to the Feedback Anxiety Cycle

If you’ve spent your whole life feeling different but didn’t get an actual diagnosis until adulthood, you’ve likely absorbed a lot of painful stories about yourself along the way. Many neurodivergent millennials grow up hearing things like:

• “You’re so lazy.”
• “You need to try harder.”
• “Why can’t you just focus?”
• “You’re too sensitive.”
• “You always overreact.”

When executive dysfunction, emotional sensitivity, or sensory overwhelm were dismissed or misunderstood, you learned to mask. Masking is hiding your true self in order to fit in and avoid criticism. Over time, this trains your nervous system to scan for threats constantly, which can sound like: Did I mess up? Is my boss mad? Was that email okay? It’s that underlying feeling of hypervigilance and constant anxiety buzzing just below the surface. 

And because you were taught not to trust your own experience, you turn outward for confirmation that you’re okay. This is where feedback anxiety starts to take hold. You might:

• Over-apologize in emails.
• Ask your boss repeatedly if you're doing a good job.
• Overthink every piece of feedback, even minor stuff.
• Struggle to make decisions without polling 5 different friends first.
• Feel sick to your stomach after hitting "send" on a vulnerable message.

You’re not weak for any of this. You’ve been conditioned to need external validation because it never felt safe to trust your own instincts.

How Reassurance Can Actually Make Anxiety Worse

Unfortunately, the very thing you’re doing to calm your anxiety is feeding it.

Reassurance-seeking gives you short-term relief but long-term fuel for your anxiety.

When you ask your boss if your work is okay and they say, “Yes, it’s great!” you feel better for about 10 minutes. But soon after, the anxiety creeps back in:

• Did they mean it?
• What if I mess up tomorrow?
• They probably just don’t want to hurt my feelings.

Because the relief is temporary, you start needing reassurance more often. You never get the chance to sit with the discomfort and learn that you can survive uncertainty.

And as reassurance becomes a habit, your tolerance for uncertainty goes down. You become more dependent on others to regulate your anxiety, and more distressed when you don’t get the reassurance you crave. This is what turns feedback anxiety into a self-perpetuating cycle.

The Feedback Anxiety Cycle at Work and in Relationships

While a lot of neurodivergent millennials feel this most at work, the feedback anxiety cycle absolutely shows up in personal relationships too.

At work, it can trigger boss anxiety and imposter syndrome. Even minor feedback or gentle requests for improvement feel catastrophic, and you’re constantly wondering if you’re secretly failing. You might obsess over emails, overcompensate by working extra hours, or struggle to delegate because you’re terrified of dropping the ball.

In personal relationships – with partners, friends, or family – it can sound like:

• Are you mad at me?
• Did I upset you?
• Was that okay?
• Do you still love me?

Because many neurodivergent adults have experienced rejection, misunderstandings, or being “too much” for others growing up, the fear of disappointing people runs deep. Even small changes in someone’s tone or response time can send you spiraling into reassurance-seeking. 

When you do end up upsetting a loved one – and you will, because nobody’s perfect, and being in relationship means hurting, getting hurt, and finding ways to repair – it can send you into a spiral of anxiety and self-loathing.

The same pattern happens: you feel anxious, you ask for reassurance, you get temporary relief, but then you doubt the reassurance. The anxiety returns. Over time, this can create strain in relationships, where both people feel stuck.

Working on tolerating distress, building internal trust, and communicating openly about your needs can help break this cycle, not only at work, but at home too.

Why Sitting With Anxiety Is So Damn Hard

At the root of the feedback anxiety cycle is a difficulty tolerating negative emotions and situations, like uncertainty and distress.

For many neurodivergent adults, emotional regulation has always been a challenge. Your nervous system may go into hyperarousal quickly, making even small doses of uncertainty feel unbearable. Seeking reassurance becomes a way to offload that discomfort.

The problem is, nobody else can give you certainty. People will always have different opinions. Bosses may be vague. Friends may give conflicting advice. Partners might be tired or unable to show up in the “right” way or use the “right” tone of voice to soothe your system. Eventually, you end up even more confused, distraught, and disconnected from your own truth.

Real healing comes from building the ability to sit with hard feelings instead of trying to make them go away instantly. That means learning to trust yourself and your inherent worthiness.

How to Start Breaking the Feedback Anxiety Cycle

This isn’t about saying, “just stop asking for reassurance.” That’s not helpful or realistic when this pattern has been happening throughout your entire life. But here are some ways you can start loosening its grip:

1. Name the Pattern

As always, the first step to making a change is to notice when the thing you’d like to change is happening. When you notice yourself spiraling into feedback anxiety, pause and say (even out loud): "Oh hey, it’s my brain trying to seek reassurance again. That’s familiar, and makes sense because I’m feeling pretty anxious right now."

Labeling the pattern takes some of its power away and reminds you this is a nervous system habit, not a personal flaw.

2. Practice Sitting With Uncertainty

Instead of immediately seeking reassurance, try waiting for a set period of time. Try an hour. But if that doesn’t feel doable, try just 10 minutes. Give yourself time to feel the anxiety without acting on it. It’s going to be uncomfortable, so settle in. Over time, you can stretch that window longer. The goal isn’t to never feel anxious; it’s to learn you can handle it without needing instant relief.

Over time, you’ll probably find that the big, urgent sense of needing reassurance might go away on its own, or maybe change in its intensity. That’s all normal, and it’s safe to feel those ebbs and flows.

3. Build Internal Validation

Start collecting your own evidence that you’re okay. This might look like:

• Keeping a "proof list" of things you’ve done well.
• Writing down positive feedback to review later.
• Reminding yourself: “It’s okay to not know 100% for sure. Uncertainty is a fact of life. Nothing is ever certain, so why should I expect myself to feel that way?”
• Asking yourself when you have had constructive criticism from people, and how that went. Was it the end of the world? Did your anxiety about it eventually decrease? Did you get through it? Remembering that you can handle hard things, even things that feel like your worst fears, can be powerful. 

4. Seek Support From Someone Who Gets You

A lot of traditional anxiety advice doesn't work well for neurodivergent adults, because it skips over the lifetime of invalidation that trained you to need reassurance in the first place.

Working with a coach or therapist for neurodivergent adults who understands anxiety, neurodivergence, perfectionism, and burnout can help you build real tools to untangle these patterns at the root, not just slap a band-aid on the anxiety symptoms.

You’re Not Broken. Your Brain Wants to Protect You.

The feedback anxiety cycle isn’t proof that you’re weak or needy. It’s your nervous system doing what it learned to do in order to survive. 

But you, just like countless other clients I’ve worked with, can unlearn this. With the right support, you can build the capacity to trust yourself again, tolerate uncertainty, and slowly untangle yourself from the reassurance trap.

If you want support, I’m here to help. I offer coaching and therapy for neurodivergent millennials who are feeling anxious, unworthy, and stuck in unhelpful patterns. Get in touch if you’d like to learn more and set up a free consultation.