Depression and Anxiety Make Me Doubt Everything I Do

Chronic self-doubt is normal when you have both depression and anxiety. However, you can learn to manage it instead of letting it run your life.

Photo by Vitaly Gariev on Unsplash

Self-doubt is a recurring theme in my life. It affects multiple areas of my life, from ethics and relationships to my personal and professional choices. What I experience isn’t a healthy level of doubt; it is extreme and therefore unhelpful. And my depression and anxiety are responsible for this. Like many people, I have both, and together they make my self-doubt more potent.

What Chronic Self-Doubt Does to Your Professional Life

Chronic self-doubt is bad for both your personal and professional life. Speaking from personal experience, doubting yourself all the time fills your heart and soul with immense fear.

You’re afraid of failure when you dare to be proactive or try something new. Conversely, you’re also afraid of underachieving or being stuck in the same place. It’s a lose-lose situation because, irrespective of whether you take action or not, you will end up doubting yourself.

From what I’ve seen, most people with depression make the safest possible choice to reduce the risk of failure.

Even if they have a good chance of succeeding by taking a calculated risk or making an informed decision, they will stay right where they are. Or else, they will take so much time to act that someone else will jump on the opportunity and outshine them.

For example, I have a friend with depression who has hated her job for years. She knows she should quit, as there is no shortage of better opportunities in her field. However, she is afraid she isn’t capable enough to land a better job. So she finds some reason or another to postpone her job search.

In fact, even though her work life has only worsened since the pandemic, she is not doing anything to change her situation. And we are now in 2026! Oh, I’m not judging. I fully understand her point of view because chronic self-doubt makes a person indecisive, unassertive, and operate from a place of fear.

Preventing Self-Doubt from Taking Over Your Life Is Tough, Not Impossible

When you have both depression and anxiety, self-doubt is probably going to be a routine part of your life. But this does not mean you have no option other than to allow it to control your decisions and hold you back. With some effort, you can make bold career choices even when you feel like you are not good enough, unqualified, or doomed to fail.

Watch the video below to know how I handle self-doubt. And once you’re done, use the comments section below to tell me how you overcome it at work.

[embed]

This piece was originally published on HealthyPlace.com, the world’s largest consumer mental health website. I created mental health content for HealthyPlace for four years and nine months, and I miss every minute of it. While it’s been a couple of years since it went dark, I can’t help but hope that it gets a revival.