Rewriting emails
Reading and editing routine messages repeatedly before you feel able to send them.
Workplace Anxiety · Checking · Decision Confidence
Fear of Making Mistakes at Work
Cognitive Behavioural Hypnotherapy for professionals who become overly cautious, anxious or avoidant because getting something wrong feels too costly.
Problem
Checking · Hesitation · Fear of getting it wrong
For
Professionals under pressure
Sessions
55–60 minutes · £125
Start
20-minute discovery call
Nothing may actually have gone wrong
But routine work has started to feel unusually risky.
You reread emails before sending them.
You hesitate over decisions you would once have made quickly.
You overprepare for meetings, check your work repeatedly or delay submitting something because you are worried you may have missed something.
The more carefully you try to eliminate the possibility of making a mistake, the less confident you may become in your own judgement.
The problem is not simply that you care
about doing good work.
It is that the possibility of being wrong
has started to affect how freely
and confidently you can work.
When being careful stops feeling proportionate
Professional standards are useful. Fear-driven checking is different.
The issue is not whether you care about accuracy. It is whether the cost of being wrong has become so threatening that ordinary work begins to feel unsafe.
Delaying decisions
Waiting for more certainty even when there is enough information to act.
Overpreparing
Spending far longer than necessary preparing for meetings or conversations.
Repeated checking
Reviewing numbers, wording or documents beyond proportionate quality control.
Seeking reassurance
Asking colleagues to confirm work you would previously have trusted yourself to complete.
Avoiding ownership
Feeling safer when somebody else makes the final decision.
Difficulty delegating
Feeling responsible for checking everything personally.
Reluctance to submit work
Reaching a point where work is good enough, but still not feeling safe enough to release it.
“What if I get this wrong?”
The anticipated consequence can become larger than the task itself.
Fear of mistakes is often not simply about accuracy.
The anxiety may come from what you imagine the mistake could mean about your competence, reputation, responsibility or future.
What if my manager thinks I am incompetent?
What if the client loses confidence?
What if this affects my reputation?
What if I get blamed?
What if I make the wrong decision?
What if somebody senior challenges me?
What if this costs the business money?
What if I cannot undo it?
Different industries, same mechanism
Fear of mistakes can look different depending on the work.
On a trading floor it may mean hesitating over a decision. In technology it may mean repeatedly reviewing code. In professional services it may mean rewriting a recommendation.
The surface behaviour changes. The underlying pattern may be the same: uncertainty feels dangerous, so checking and caution expand.
Fear of being judged for mistakes
Often the real fear is: “What will this say about me?”
A possible mistake can become threatening because of the judgement you expect to follow.
The concern may be less about the error itself and more about appearing careless, inexperienced, weak or incapable.
When professional identity becomes tied
to avoiding visible mistakes,
uncertainty can begin to feel personally dangerous.
Overchecking can reduce confidence
The strategies that make you feel safer temporarily may make the next decision harder.
Checking, delaying and asking for reassurance may reduce anxiety for a short time.
But they can also leave you with less opportunity to experience yourself making proportionate decisions under ordinary uncertainty.
Possibility of mistake
→ threat prediction
→ anxiety
→ checking / delaying / reassurance
→ temporary relief
→ less confidence in your judgement
→ more anxiety next time
Fear of making the wrong decision at work
Some professional decisions do not come with complete certainty.
If being wrong feels especially costly, decision-making can become increasingly difficult.
Delaying decisions
while looking for more information.
Repeatedly revisiting a decision
you have already made.
Asking others to confirm what you should do.
Trying to remove every possible uncertainty
before acting.
Avoiding responsibility for final decisions.
Choosing the safest option
rather than the best one.
Decisions under scrutiny
The fear often becomes stronger when other people are watching.
Client-facing work, senior meetings and high-responsibility decisions can intensify the sense that a mistake would be difficult to recover from.
That can create a shift from contributing normally to monitoring yourself, second-guessing and trying to avoid visible error.
Fear of making mistakes in front of clients or senior people
Scrutiny changes the perceived cost of getting something wrong.
If the anxiety is strongest around client confidence, senior evaluation or visible performance, there may be overlap with other workplace-anxiety patterns.
Perfectionism, procrastination and fear of mistakes
Fear of error can produce both overworking and avoidance.
For some professionals, fear of mistakes leads to excessive preparation.
For others, it creates delay: work is postponed, submission is avoided or the task becomes difficult to start because there is no point at which it feels safe enough.
Where avoidance is becoming a wider pattern, see procrastination and avoidance .
Where the stronger issue is rigid standards and difficulty accepting anything less than perfect, see perfectionism and paralysis .
What if a mistake has already happened?
That is a different point in the same wider anxiety cycle.
This page is about the anxiety that happens before something goes wrong: checking, hesitation, overpreparation and fear of getting it wrong.
If something has already happened and the main difficulty is that you cannot stop replaying it, worrying about the consequences or checking what happened, that is a slightly different pattern.
Made a Mistake at Work and Can’t Move On? →Cognitive Behavioural Hypnotherapy
Therapy focuses on the pattern maintaining the anxiety.
Bohangar uses Cognitive Behavioural Hypnotherapy , combining cognitive and behavioural principles with focused attention, imagery and hypnosis within a structured therapeutic approach.
CBH is not simply CBT followed by hypnosis. Methods are selected and combined around the pattern that appears to be maintaining the problem.
Catastrophic predictions
about getting things wrong.
Repeated checking
and reassurance seeking.
Fear of uncertainty.
Perfectionistic rules
about competence and mistakes.
Avoidance of decisions
or responsibility.
Fear of judgement
from managers, clients or colleagues.
Reduced confidence
in professional judgement.
The goal is not to make you careless. It is to help you work with appropriate care without the possibility of being wrong controlling how you think, decide or perform.
Therapy for workplace anxiety in London
Soho · Greenwich · Online
Cognitive Behavioural Hypnotherapy is available in person from both London practices and online where appropriate. Sessions are £125 and normally last 55–60 minutes.
Soho W1F
14A Broadwick Street, Soho, London W1F 8HP.
Greenwich SE10
15A Nelson Road, Greenwich, London SE10 9JB.
Online
Structured online sessions are also available where appropriate.
Fear of Making Mistakes at Work: FAQs
Why am I so scared of making mistakes at work?
Fear of mistakes may be maintained by several factors, including fear of judgement, perfectionistic standards, responsibility, uncertainty and concern about professional consequences. The important question is whether the fear has started affecting how you work.
Can anxiety make me check my work too much?
Yes. Anxiety can increase the urge to seek certainty through repeated checking. The issue is not ordinary professional quality control, but whether checking becomes excessive, difficult to stop or begins interfering with normal work.
Why do I keep delaying decisions at work?
Decision delay can sometimes be maintained by trying to remove uncertainty before acting. If the perceived cost of being wrong is high, more information or reassurance may feel necessary before a decision feels safe.
Is fear of making mistakes the same as perfectionism?
Not necessarily. Perfectionistic standards may be part of the pattern, but fear of mistakes may also involve responsibility, uncertainty, professional judgement or fear of consequences.
What if I have already made a mistake and cannot stop thinking about it?
That is a related but slightly different pattern. If the main problem is replaying a mistake after it has happened, worrying about consequences or struggling to move on, the Bohangar page on being unable to move on after a mistake at work may be more relevant.
Professional care without fear-driven overcontrol
Work carefully without needing certainty before every decision.
If fear of making mistakes is leading to repeated checking, hesitation, avoidance or reduced confidence in your judgement, a 20-minute discovery call gives you an opportunity to discuss what is happening and whether Cognitive Behavioural Hypnotherapy may be appropriate.