Daily Brain Snack: The Link Between Anxiety, Depression, and Low Self-Belief
A persistent focus on the negative despite good performance leads to low self-belief
I could imagine there is a link between depression and low self-belief!
Yes, it would make sense but the key question is, is this low self-belief justified, and is it different to those with lower levels of anxiety and depression?
Well, is it?
This is what Sucharit Katyal and colleagues at University College London set out to investigate.
They conducted two large studies with 230 and 278 participants in which they played a game in which they had to fulfil certain jobs and tasks requiring different skills and then were asked to rate their performance. This measured their metacognitive ability - i.e. ability to judge themselves on their performance. During the jobs they were occasionally given feedback from a supervisor.
And what did this show?
Well some interesting results:
Those with higher ratings of depression and anxiety performed just as well as those with lower levels of these.
Positive feedback boosted self belief and negative feedback disrupted self belief for all participants.
That is the baseline but the differences were:
Those with higher level of depression and anxiety had lower overall self-belief despite similar performance.
Those with higher depression and anxiety focused more on the negative feedback.
So, despite the same performance levels, those with depression and anxiety focused more on the negatives.
Isn’t this a negative loop?
Yes, depression leads to a focus on negative and it is indeed a negative loop. But the interesting fact is that this was not related to performance and hence self-belief should be higher - but also the positives were not processed as strongly.
How do we change this?
Well, this shows that when dealing with those with anxiety and depression there would need to be consistent strategy of focusing on positives and re-aligning self-belief and performance metrics. But this will need to be a persistent and consistent process.
This unfortunately may not happen in the workplace. or without a structured intervention.
I also reviewed imposter syndrome previously which is related this self-belief:
Reference
Katyal, S., Huys, Q.J., Dolan, R.J. et al.
Distorted learning from local metacognition supports transdiagnostic underconfidence.
Nat Commun 16, 1854 (2025).
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-025-57040-0