The Feedback Delay That Fuels Anxiety

Izabella Rehák
17 hours ago
4 min read

High-responsibility professionals often find themselves searching for a perfect solution while they have already figured out a decent one three days ago. This anxiety is often caused by a feedback delay. By becoming aware of when the solution is good enough, we can save ourselves from much of the worry, over-doing and spiraling thoughts.

I’ve recently came across an interesting idea in a micro learning app. Although I haven’t had the chance to read the entire book yet, this piece really resonated with me. It is Thinking in Systems by Donella Meadows. In the app the idea of system oscillation was described in the following way: you are the owner of a small coffee shop. All of a sudden you run out of coffee beans so you go ahead and immediately order a big batch. After three days, the beans are still not delivered. So you go on to find a different supplier, that delivers faster, so you can finally serve your customers. The next day, both orders come in and now you are drowning in coffee beans, with an inventory that can’t be sold. The trap you fell in is the oscillation caused by delay in feedback and over-correcting. Essentially there is a delay between your action and it’s effect and instead of trusting the system that it will eventually balance out, you apply additional corrective actions and overcompensate.

Of course, this idea was developed for systems thinking, which is about understanding how parts of a whole interact over time. But I do feel there’s a strong analogy between this systems behaviour and the way a typical high-responsibility, high-performer acts in uncertain situations.

Meet Tom

Tom, an engineer known for his reliability, is working on a piece of code ahead of a big review on Monday. He runs into an issue and starts to fix it—but instead of leaving it there, he keeps adding extra checks, monitoring, and fallback logic “just to be safe.” What if he missed something? What if it fails in review? Because there are a few days left to show his code, he rewrites, refactors, and adds more conditions to it. He works late into the evening, unable to switch off. By the end of the week, the code is bloated with safeguards, slower than before, and occasionally gets stuck in its own loops. It’s because Tom kept correcting a system that hadn’t yet had the chance to prove it was already good enough.

Many high-performers and high-responsibility professionals like Tom take deadlines very seriously. There is the underlying urge to get it all right and avoid making a mistake by all means. And the only way for the system to know that we indeed did a good job is by getting a positive feedback, reassurance or - in Tom’s case- an acceptance of the code to go live. But this validation usually doesn’t happen immediately. Therefore many high-responsibility professionals who have the tendency to overthink and worry will start to do just that. Start to question if their solution is good enough, if it would be praised and seen as outstanding solution. So what they will do is very similar to what Tom did: check, review, edit, add a few extras, tweak, and redesign. While they do it, the tension continues to grow, the doubt takes over and the worry of not getting it right keeps pushing them to try more and go beyond. Essentially what they do is ordering that second batch of coffee beans, that may in the end create more problems than solutions. They lose track of the big picture while focusing so much on trying to reduce that anxiety that has built up while waiting for the feedback.

The takeaway: trust the system, in this case your actions. Once you applied a reasonable corrective step, you can let it go. Perfecting it further doesn’t necessarily deliver better feedback or better results.

Reflection - your anxiety built up during feedback delay

In this exercise we will break down a recent situation to catch where we had done enough and possibly continued over-correcting. With the awareness and understanding the underlying feelings that urged us to keep going, next time it may be easier to catch that sweet spot of doing just enough.

Recall a recent situation that stayed “active” in your mind longer than expected about solving a problem. What was the actual problem or ask? And what did you do? Go through systematically all the steps, actions you have taken until the moment there was a feedback about your solution.
Try to recall how you felt in the various stages. Were you anxious, driven, challenged, afraid or perhaps something else?
Now that you have the full timeline outlined, spot the first moment there was a decent solution. Not a perfect one, but a decent one. How do you feel now about this solution, does it still feel like it needed further tweaking?
Catch the feelings and thoughts that kept you going after the decent solution was ready. What made you feel that it hasn’t yet been sufficient?
How was the feedback you received? How do you imagine the feedback would have been if you stopped at the decent solution?
Next time in a similar situation, how could you notice the decent solution and let go of the pressure to keep perfecting it after? How could you ‘reward’ yourself for finding the good enough solution - as a form of feedback before the real feedback?

Conclusions

Our mind is a complex system, and the anxiety and the fear of failing behind it triggers this system, so we not only fix a problem but keep perfecting and tweaking until the very final moment. Why? Because until feeling validated, we might be uncertain whether what we have done in the first place was good enough. Trusting ourselves, our judgment and our solutions can move us past that doubt and allow us to let go a problem when it is fixed in a decent way. Because, hey, a decent solution will be just as good for our boss as a perfect one - at least in many cases.