Why Might You Doubt Yourself?

Nov 13

Learn about doubt and how it can be both good and bad.

We can define doubt as a lack of certainty and confidence in what we are experiencing or feeling (Lazarov et al., 2012). When we feel doubt, we are likely to experience most or all of the following (Baek, 2010):

Mixture of positive and negative feelings. If you feel uniformly positive or negative about a situation, you are unlikely to be experiencing doubt. Instead, doubt comes up when we have both unpleasant and pleasant feelings at the same time about a topic. For example, you might be very excited by the prospect of moving to a new city but also afraid of what it would mean to start over socially.

Conflicting attitudes. Thoughts or beliefs that conflict with each other are at the heart of doubt. Take a look at the food menu at any restaurant, and instantly face these conflicting attitudes: when you know the salad would be nutritious and tasty, but will you regret not getting a dish with some meat in it? Your mouth is watering when you look at the burger menu, but might you feel unpleasantly full afterward?

Conflicting ideological constraints. This one sounds complicated, but promise it’s not. What this means is that sometimes our values pull us in opposite directions, and that’s another reason that doubt can enter the picture. If you planned to call your parents tonight but a friend invites you to do something you think would be much more fun instead, what should you do? Your valuing of your family relationships and your valuing of friendship and quality leisure time are suddenly in conflict.

Conflicting reference groups. Similarly, suppose a loving parent is at work and gets a call from their adolescent son, who forgot to bring an important homework assignment to school and wants the parent to come to the rescue. The parent might be torn between their role as an employee (one reference group) and their role as a parent (another reference group).

To summarize, situations where doubt arises are likely to involve conflicting emotions, thoughts, values, and/or roles (Baek, 2010). In doubting situations, we are not indifferent to what’s happening, nor are we necessarily uncertain about what’s happening. Rather, because of the internal conflict we are experiencing, we have a hard time trusting ourselves to make the right decision.

Why is Doubt Important?

As one psychologist writes, learning to doubt things is an important developmental task – something children must learn to do in order to survive and thrive (Mills, 2013). Perhaps you remember how quickly you believed everything you were told as a young child and how you gradually came to recognize that people might deliberately mislead you. While we may begin our lives needing to be as open to learning from others and the world as possible, as we mature it becomes more important to know when to doubt something (Mills, 2013).

Healthy Doubt

Adults who are overly trusting are often taken advantage of by others; they have not become sufficiently aware of the signals that somebody may be deceiving them or that the information available may be incomplete or distorted. I think this is also part of why critical thinking skills are often the focus of curricula in high schools and colleges: knowing what to believe and not believe and how to weigh evidence by thinking about the source, among other reflective skills, are key components of effective and mature decision-making.

At the same time, it’s important to study doubt because it is clear that while a healthy dose of doubt can be beneficial, too much doubt can be painful and disempowering (Braslow et al., 2012). For example, all of us, when faced with too much self-doubt, develop strategies for coping with those strong and persistent thoughts.

These responses can be adaptive or maladaptive, depending on how far we take them. Some of us self-handicap in the face of self-doubt: we take ourselves out of the running through self-sabotage, eliminating the anxiety of being in doubt by confirming that doubt. At other times, we may turn to overachievement, pushing through doubts to continually prove to ourselves that our doubts were unfounded. Or, we may succumb to imposter syndrome instead. Imposter syndrome is a phenomenon familiar to people in high-pressure professional settings: over time, we come to believe our doubts and see ourselves as incompetent or unworthy of the responsibility we have been given.

While there are some ways that self-handicapping, imposter syndrome, and overachievement can be adaptive responses to our doubts, they are usually unhelpful responses, in the sense that we continue to feel pressure and uncertainty. This makes the skill of resolving one’s doubts a crucial ability to develop.

Tips on Making the Most of Doubt

To make the most of doubt, we can try to focus on checking the facts related to our doubt (Tuckett, 2011). This can look like acknowledging the attractive and unattractive qualities of the situation but being as honest with ourselves as possible about how certain each of those qualities is. For example, when we critically examine the upsides and downsides of a situation, we may find that fear or excitement is causing us to overestimate the pros or cons.

We can also take the perspective that doubt is here to help us adjust to the situation (Fong, 2006) – we can accept that it is asking us to adjust our flexibility or level of engagement (Rothman et al., 2017). And when our doubts are hard to resolve, we can just do our best to tolerate ambiguity, recognizing it as an inevitable part of life (Greco & Roger, 2001).

In Sum

Our doubts can be our teachers – they can show us where we need to adjust our approach or expectations, where we might want to work harder to improve our sense of competency, or where we really need to surrender control because we’re just not in charge. I hope reading this article makes it a bit easier to experience the upsides of doubt.

References

Baek, Y. M. (2010). An integrative model of ambivalence. The Social Science Journal, 47(3), 609-629.
Braslow, M. D., Guerrettaz, J., Arkin, R. M., & Oleson, K. C. (2012). Self‐doubt. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 6(6), 470-482.
Fong, C. T. (2006). The effects of emotional ambivalence on creativity. Academy of Management Journal, 49(5), 1016–1030.
Greco, V., & Roger, D. (2001). Coping with uncertainty: The construction and validation of a new measure. Personality and Individual Differences, 31(4), 519-534.
Lazarov, A., Dar, R., Liberman, N., & Oded, Y. (2012). Obsessive-compulsive tendencies and undermined confidence are related to reliance on proxies for internal states in a false feedback paradigm. Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry, 43(1), 556-564.
Mills, C. M. (2013). Knowing when to doubt: developing a critical stance when learning from others. Developmental Psychology, 49(3), 404-429.
Rothman, N. B., Pratt, M. G., Rees, L., & Vogus, T. J. (2017). Understanding the dual nature of ambivalence: Why and when ambivalence leads to good and bad outcomes. Academy of Management Annals, 11(1), 33-72.
Tuckett, D. (2011). Minding the markets: An emotional finance view of financial instability. Palgrave Macmillan.