How outcome-driven mentalities increase your anxiety

In this article I talk about my experience in academia with outcome-driven mentalities, how these may cause you anxiety, and several tips to overcome this.

Although anxiety can take many shapes, when I talk about anxiety, I refer to the inherent feeling that something is going to go wrong in the near future.

Anxiety usually feeds of the uncertainty of something that’s going to happen. Since we can’t predict the future, your mind may tend to think of the worst-possible-scenario.

As a consequence, the lack of control in combination with this gloomy perspective increases your anxiety. At some point, it is hard to trust that “you’re going to be all right”. In fact, many authors like Dr. Jud Brewer believe that anxiety is a mental habit. 

While many people seem to be able to get rid of their anxiety effortlessly, this mental habit was so deeply rooted that it became a recurrent struggle in my academic life.

In academia, like in many other jobs, a big part of your professional stability relies on your performance. Securing a future position –particularly when you are still a PhD candidate or a postdoc– is extremely tied to your performance.

The more articles you publish, the more grants you obtain, the more conferences your attend the higher the chances of landing a tenure position in a prestigious university. The higher the opportunities to be interviewed and settle in a university permanently.

Until you reach that high-performance level it feels like you’re in limbo. Not here, not there… and always working to potentially secure your future.

All the years I spent studying and researching at several European universities inadvertently engrained the belief that my professional stability exclusively relied on my performance.

Most of my time in academia revolved around my outcomes, the results that I was obtaining. The moment I wouldn’t finish a chapter, got rejected on an application, didn’t get the regression I was testing or didn’t meet my targets, a wave of uncertainty and anxiety would wash over me.

Whenever I wasn’t able to produce or reach what I (and others) were expecting from me as an academic, not only did I feel like a failure but also that everything was going to crumble. At that the future didn’t feel like it was going to be as bright and safe as I had pictured it.

Very soon I learned to disregard the importance of all the little steps that make a publication, a project, a conference presentation or an article possible. All those minutes writing and rewriting that one paragraph that doesn’t feel right, or all those hours polishing a database until you operationalised the most efficient variables for your study.

At some point feeling stressed, fearful or having an exhausted body didn’t really matter. Whenever I would doubt my abilities and feel incompetent, I would do my best to work even harder. I would basically push that emotion as far as possible from me. Very rarely would I take the time to acknowledge those feelings and offer some compassion or understanding towards myself.

Part of me didn’t want to look at those emotions in the eye because in doing so it felt like admitting that I wasn’t going to “make it.” It is as if deep down I believed that having doubts about my own performance would make it very clear for others that I wasn’t professional enough.

Although I wasn’t aware of it, I was constantly living in the future. All my present time focused on securing a future. Projecting so much on the future, detached me from whatever I was doing in the present moment even when, the present time was where I indeed spent most of my time.

Trusting what the future held for me was very difficult. Mostly because my trust was already being undermined with every obstacle I faced in my daily activities. The outcome-driven mentality was preventing me from appreciating my day-to-day routine whilst it also ruined any sense of hope of my future.

Focusing so much on the future detaches you from whatever is happening right now. For this reason, bringing your attention back to the present moment can be one of the most powerful ways to regain your balance and let go of the anxiety.

Here are some ideas that will help focus on the present moment and therefore feel less anxious:

• Appreciate all the tiny things that bring you closer to your desired outcome: bring your awareness and appreciate all the tasks that support your goals. No matter how mundane they look, can you bring your curiosity about them? Can you appreciate the value they bring?
• Be grateful for showing up daily: when we believe that showing up matters, we appreciate whatever comes our way. Having a productive or unproductive morning is irrelevant when you value the fact that you’re doing the job, you’re showing up.
• Practice compassion: stress is part of life but that doesn’t make it easy. Compassion can bring a sense of lightness and connection in the midst of a storm. Remember that you’re human, not a non-stop production machine.
• Celebrate the small accomplishments: did you finish writing a difficult email? Yay! Did you advance your research literature? Awesome! Just take some time to celebrate the everyday accomplishments.
• Take time to recharge your batteries: nobody benefits from chronic stress or anxiety, specially you. If you notice that you’re reaching your limit, see if it’s possible to take a break or even a short holiday to disconnect and replenish yourself.
• Notice what you appreciate from your work: sometimes we get in such a negative mental space that it’s hard to remember that there is also pleasurable stuff at work. You may simple ask: “What did I like from this and why?”
• Invest time practicing non-outcome-driven activities that bring you joy: going for a walk, singing, drawing, reading, bird watching, hiking. The more you practice this type of activities, the better you will get at bringing your attention to the present moment regardless of the outcome.

After I quitted academia, I noticed how my mind was fixated with my performance, my outcomes.

While there’s nothing wrong with having an end goal, this shouldn’t blind everything that takes place until the goals are achieved.

In my case, I inadvertently became obsessed with the outcome. To the point that, every time I didn’t meet my expectations, I would mistrust my abilities. As a consequence, I ended up having lots of anxiety when I thought of the future.

Just to clarify, I am not advocating for a job that doesn’t value and acknowledge employee’s performance. Of course, that’s important. However, when we exclusively praise results, when we are constantly outcome-driven, we tend to overlook the value of the daily progress and detach from our experience, from the process.