Lessening the Impact of Doubt and Exercises to Help you get There.
You know that little voice buzzing in your ear.. You think you’ve got a problem sorted but it tells you, “oh just maybe check again just to make sure, just incase” “I’m pretty sure it will happen this way, but what if…” “what if I missed something?” “what if I am doing the wrong thing?” yeah, that thing called doubt. It can creep in and take over.
Doubt stems from uncertainty. For some of us, doubt is a part of life, and we live with it. It may be lurking there, but it takes up little space, because in reality, we can never really know anything for sure.
For others, we can become very wrapped up in it, it is a highly anxiety inducing experience, and it can take over; meaning that we do all that we can to get rid of it. We may check things over and over. Go through the things we have planned multiple times. Try to determine every possible way things could go wrong and preemptively solve the problem. Read on if this is your experience of doubt, because there are some things you can do to lessen the impact.
First, we want to create awareness around the doubt.
Exercise 1: Be on the lookout for these key thoughts that may indicate an experience of doubt:
“What if…”
“I should just check one more time…”
“Well, maybe I should make sure…”
“Maybe I should ask my friend what they think…”
When you notice these thoughts, I want you to label them “ oh hey there doubt”.
Dr. Reid Wilson explains that “Doubt relates to clients’ perception that their skills won’t match the challenges they face.” This is very important. This means that we want to focus on enhancing the trust we have in our abilities and our skills.
Exercise 2 : write out all the times you handled a situation without having pre-planned how you would react/solve it.
I am sure there have been times where you have unexpectedly had to change a tire on the side of the road, or where you were faced with a work problem that you didn’t anticipate.
Now, write out the skills and abilities that were necessary for you to solve these challenges.
As mentioned above, when doubt is experienced as a painful thing, we do things to try to change it. Some may call these rituals, compulsions, or ways of temporarily alleviating the anxiety. And in the short term they do alleviate the doubt, but in the long term, they perpetuate and make the doubt worse. So, we need to resist the urge to answer the doubt. We must resist these rituals, compulsions, the checking, the over planning.
Exercise 3: Resisting these compulsions may be difficult initially. Here is a way to start to break the habit of checking. Let’s say you are used to triple checking that you locked the door because you don’t trust that you did it properly the first time. Add another part to the act of checking the door. Perhaps you have to spin around, or go downstairs first. This is going to give you time to slow down and notice what is going on. It will also make it a bit harder and will change the experience of the ritual.
Finally, a shift in perspective can be helpful in lowering the anxious feelings associated to the experience of doubt. How can we look at doubt differently?
Thich Nhat Hanh explains that in Zen tradition, “The greater the doubt the greater the enlightenment”. So, perhaps doubt is a way to learn, a way to explore. Perhaps doubt is a way of seeing things from a larger picture, encouraging critical thinking. The doubt can remain, it doesn’t need to be solved right away. Perhaps it is showing us that we have things to learn, that things remain a mystery.
The Buddhist tradition shows us that perhaps the remedy for doubt is not certainty, it is trust/faith. Trusting/ having faith that things will work out, that we will solve the problems as they arise, that even though we may not know the absolute truth/certainty, that we will be okay.
Exercise 4: Journal about how these ways of seeing doubt impacts your experience of doubt.
Doubt is a common experience with generalized anxiety, as always, I am here to support you in a one on one therapeutic setting!