Reassurance seeking
Reassurance seeking is asking others again and again whether we are loved, safe or doing all right. The answer calms us for a moment, and then the doubt comes back.
A woman asks her partner, “Are we okay?” after he goes quiet at dinner. He says yes. An hour later she asks again, then checks his face for the rest of the evening.
This page can't say whether the asking is part of OCD, health anxiety or depression. Reassurance seeking shows up in all three, and in people with none of them. If the asking comes with weeks of low mood, or with a fear that takes up hours of the day, a doctor or therapist is the place to start.
How it shows
At work
Checking with a manager several times whether a piece of work was all right. Rereading a “fine, thanks” email for hidden criticism and then asking a colleague what it meant. Finding it hard to send or decide anything until someone has looked at it.
In close relationships
“Do you still love me?” several times a day. Asking a partner to repeat that they aren't angry. Needing a reply to a text before being able to settle. Watching someone's face closely while they talk, for signs of approval.
In ourselves
Relief that lasts minutes or hours. Then a small sign brings the doubt back, and the urge to ask comes with it. Looking up symptoms, rereading old messages or going over a conversation in the head can do the same job as asking.
How it differs from similar ideas
Anxious-preoccupied attachment
Anxious attachment is a lasting style of relating, built around a fear that a partner will leave or doesn't care enough. Reassurance seeking is one thing that style can lead to. It can also come from health anxiety, OCD or low mood, with no attachment worry behind it.
Bids for connection
A bid for connection is a reach for attention or warmth, such as pointing out a bird or sharing a joke, and a warm reply settles it. Reassurance seeking asks for proof against a doubt, and the reply settles it only for a while.
Obsessive-compulsive disorder
In OCD, asking for reassurance can work like a compulsion, tied to a specific intrusive fear, such as having caused harm. In the studies below, people with OCD asked more often and more intensely than people with depression or without either. Most reassurance seeking is not OCD.
What it doesn’t mean
It isn't the same as needing comfort. Everyone asks for comfort sometimes, and asking can be healthy. The idea describes a loop in which the answer stops helping and the asking keeps going.
Calling it neediness misses what it does. The person asking is usually trying to end a painful doubt, and may already know the answer they will get. Many feel embarrassed about asking again, and ask anyway.
An example: Elena and one Tuesday of “was that okay?”
Elena is 38 and has worked on the same finance team for three years. Her reviews have been good. On Tuesday morning she presents the quarter's numbers to her manager and two colleagues.
- 9:40 a.m., after the meeting Her manager says, “Thanks, good,” and leaves for another call. Elena messages her colleague Priya: “He seemed short. Did that go okay?” Priya replies, “It was fine, he's always like that on Tuesdays.” Elena feels better and gets on with her morning.
- 12:30 p.m. The manager posts in the team chat that one figure on slide four needs correcting. Slide four was Elena's. She asks Priya whether he sounded annoyed, then writes to him directly to ask whether the mistake was a problem. He replies, “No, all sorted.” The calm lasts until she is back at her desk.
- 4:00 p.m. Priya has gone home and the manager is in meetings. Elena rereads “Thanks, good” and “No, all sorted” several times, comparing the punctuation. She searches for signs that a boss is unhappy with someone's work and reads three articles.
- 9:00 p.m., at home She tells her husband about the day and asks whether he thinks she is in trouble. He says no, and adds, “You asked me something like this on Sunday too.” Elena says nothing for a while. A few minutes later she asks whether he is annoyed with her.
Each answer Elena got held for a few hours at most. When there was no one left to ask, the doubt moved to rereading and searching. By the evening it had found a new question, about the person who had been answering all week.
Several things in the story match what the research describes. The relief is real and short. Rereading messages and searching online do the same job as asking, and researchers study them alongside it. And the person being asked starts to tire, which is where James Coyne's 1976 account of depression begins: in his account, repeated asking can, over time, lead others to reject the person who asks. The question at 9 p.m. is no longer about work. That shift is common in the loop, since the answer itself becomes the next thing to doubt.
A different story would point elsewhere. If the manager had in fact been criticizing Elena's work for weeks, checking would be a fair response to a real signal, and this pattern would fit less well. If the asking centered on one partner and on whether he would leave, the closer fits are anxious attachment and the library's page on needing constant reassurance from a partner. If the doubt were about having caused harm, with rituals to undo it, the OCD page describes that. And if the asking came with weeks of low mood, the depression research below is the closer match.
What the research shows
Reassurance seeking has been studied in two places: in depression and close relationships since the 1990s, and in anxiety and OCD as a habit that keeps fear going. The studies below cover both. The research on couples, including a 2008 review of 38 studies, is on the library's page about needing constant reassurance from a partner.
Reassurance seeking goes with depression and with anxiety and OCD. In students, heavy asking came before later low mood, and in one study of roommates, rejection followed for men who also had low self-esteem. In therapy for anxiety and OCD, asking fell as people improved. What drives it may differ: fear of harm in OCD, and something the studies haven't pinned down in depression.
Mildly depressed students who sought a lot of reassurance and had low self-esteem were rejected more by their roommates, among men only
In 1992, Thomas Joiner, Mark Alfano and Gerald Metalsky set out to test James Coyne's 1976 theory with college roommates. At the start, they measured each student's depressive symptoms, reassurance seeking and self-esteem. Five weeks later, they asked each student's same-gender roommate how they saw them.
Mildly depressed students did ask for reassurance in the way Coyne described. Among men, mildly depressed students were rejected by their roommates if they sought reassurance strongly and also had low self-esteem. They were not rejected if they sought little reassurance or had high self-esteem. Among women, this pattern did not appear. Roommates' own low mood rose a little over the five weeks, but that did not explain the rejection.
Doesn’t show One group of college roommates over five weeks. The rejection finding needed heavy asking and low self-esteem together, and held for men only, so it is a narrow result. Later studies found the link between reassurance seeking and rejection to be small overall.
In six studies, reassurance seeking stood apart from related habits and came before later low mood
In 2001, Thomas Joiner and Gerald Metalsky reported six studies. The first two found that reassurance seeking hangs together as one measurable habit, distinct from related ways of relating to others. The third, with people who had clinical diagnoses, found it was specific to depression, where the other interpersonal measures were not.
The fourth followed people who had no depressive symptoms at the start. Those who later developed symptoms had higher reassurance-seeking scores at the start than those who stayed well, and did not differ on the other measures. The fifth and sixth found that reassurance seeking predicted who reacted to stress with low mood.
Doesn’t show Coming before low mood is a long way from causing it, since a shared cause, such as a lasting insecurity, could drive both. The 2008 review on the partner page described the studies that followed people over time in words, without pooled figures, and named several caveats.
In 738 people starting therapy for anxiety or OCD, reassurance seeking fell over treatment, and the fall went with getting better
In 2019, Neil Rector and colleagues asked 738 people seeking treatment to fill in a reassurance-seeking questionnaire before and after cognitive behavioral therapy. All had panic disorder with agoraphobia, social anxiety disorder, generalized anxiety disorder or OCD.
The questionnaire split into three kinds of asking: about decisions, about attachment and the security of relationships, and about threat and anxiety in general. Scores were moderately linked with anxiety and depression and with each condition's own symptoms. Reassurance seeking dropped over therapy across the treatments, and the people whose reassurance seeking dropped more improved more on their main condition.
Doesn’t show There was no group that went without treatment, so the study can't say whether asking less helped people get better or followed from it. Everyone was seeking treatment, so it says little about milder, everyday asking.
People with OCD asked for reassurance more, and out of fear of harm; in depression the reason was less clear
In 2022, Emma Smith, Neil Carrigan and Paul Salkovskis compared 28 people with OCD, 18 people with depression and 29 people with neither. Each filled in a questionnaire on how often and how intensely they sought reassurance, and why.
The OCD group sought reassurance more often and more intensely than both other groups, and their asking was linked with concern about threat. The depression group's asking was not much higher than the comparison group's, and it was not linked with either threat or worries about relationships. The authors concluded that in depression the motive is less clear, and that worry about relationships may not be a separate driver.
Doesn’t show Small groups, and many in the OCD group were also depressed, which blurs the comparison. A larger 2020 study of 361 people with depression and 156 with OCD, by Danielle Katz, Judith Laposa and Neil Rector, found more asking about relationships in depression than in OCD, so the two studies don't fully agree.
Try it: how long the answer held
Think of the last time you asked someone for reassurance about something that was worrying you. Write three short notes.
- What I asked, and who I asked
- How long the calm lasted, and what brought the doubt back
- What I did when no one was there to ask: rereading, searching, going over it in my head
If the second note is measured in minutes or hours, and the third note has something in it, the loop on this page may have been at work. If one answer settled the question for good, that may have been ordinary asking, which everyone does.
What is reassurance seeking?
Asking others, again and again, whether we are loved, safe, forgiven or doing all right, when each answer brings only brief relief. Researchers call it excessive reassurance seeking when it becomes a habit. It has been studied in depression since the 1990s, and in anxiety, OCD and health anxiety as something that keeps fear going.
Is there a name for needing constant reassurance?
Researchers call it excessive reassurance seeking. In close relationships it is often linked with anxious attachment, a lasting fear that a partner will leave or doesn't care enough. The library also has a page on needing constant reassurance from a partner, and one for the partner on the other side.
Is reassurance seeking a sign of OCD?
It can be part of OCD, where asking may work like a compulsion tied to a specific fear. In a 2022 study, people with OCD sought reassurance more often and more intensely than people with depression or with neither. But reassurance seeking also shows up in depression, health anxiety, other anxiety and in people with none of these, so asking a lot doesn't point to any one of them.
Why doesn't reassurance work for long?
In the cognitive behavioral account, each answer ends the doubt before it has a chance to fade on its own, so the next doubt arrives just as strong. Memory may play a part too. In a 2006 experiment by Winfried Rief and colleagues, 33 patients with medically unexplained symptoms listened to a recorded doctor's report that ruled most medical causes out, Afterwards they remembered the doctor as rating a medical cause more likely than healthy volunteers did. People with depression who heard the same report did not differ from the volunteers.
Is it normal to need reassurance?
Everyone asks for reassurance sometimes, often for good reason. The research is about a narrower loop: the same question asked many times, an answer that stops helping, and doubt that comes back within hours.
How is excessive reassurance seeking treated?
In cognitive behavioral therapy for anxiety and OCD, therapists often work with people on asking less, in steps, while the doubt is allowed to sit. In the 2019 study of 738 people above, reassurance seeking fell over therapy and the fall went with improvement. The study had no untreated group, so it can't show that asking less was the cause.
Where the idea comes from
The idea has two roots that grew mostly apart. The first is in depression. In 1976, the psychologist James Coyne proposed that people who are depressed may seek reassurance from others again and again, and that others may in time grow frustrated and reject them. In the early 1990s, Thomas Joiner, Gerald Metalsky and colleagues tested this and named the habit excessive reassurance seeking. They measured it with four questions, part of a longer questionnaire called the Depressive Interpersonal Relationships Inventory. One asks whether a person often seeks reassurance from the people close to them about whether those people really care.
The other root is in anxiety. In 1985, the psychologist Paul Salkovskis described asking for reassurance in OCD as one way of trying to put things right after a frightening thought, alongside checking and washing. With Hilary Warwick, he wrote in 1986 about reassurance in health anxiety. In this account the relief is real and brief, and by ending the doubt each time, it keeps the doubt from being tested and fading on its own. Salkovskis, and later Rachman in a 2002 theory of compulsive checking, pointed out how close asking for reassurance is to checking.
More recent work brings the two together. Questionnaires now measure reassurance seeking across conditions, and studies compare what drives it in depression and in OCD.
The question it adds
When someone asks the same question again, this idea looks past the answer to how long the answer lasted.
What was I hoping the answer would settle for good?
James Coyne, 1976 (interactional theory of depression). Thomas Joiner, Gerald Metalsky and colleagues, 1992 onward (excessive reassurance seeking). Paul Salkovskis, 1985, and Paul Salkovskis and Hilary Warwick, 1986 (reassurance in OCD and health anxiety)
Questions to carry
- After the last time I was reassured, how long did the calm last, and what brought the doubt back?
- What am I afraid would happen if I let the question sit unanswered for an hour?
Situations where it comes up
Related
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