You've been at the new job four days and you've already reread that Slack message from your manager six times, hunting for a tone you might have missed. You know it's probably fine. You still open it again on your lunch break. By Friday you've started drafting a message to a colleague you barely know, asking if everything's okay between you, then deleting it, then wondering if not asking is worse.
This isn't a character flaw and it isn't unprofessional in the way it feels. It's a nervous system doing exactly what it learned to do somewhere else, in an environment where checking in kept you safe. The trouble is that a new team has no history with you yet, so they can't read the checking as care — they read it as a request they don't understand.
What's actually happening when you can't stop checking
Anxious attachment, in the shorthand psychologists use, describes a pattern where closeness feels precarious and distance feels like danger. It was mapped first in parent-child bonds by researchers like Mary Ainsworth, then extended into adult relationships by Cindy Hazan and Phillip Shaver, and it doesn't switch off when you walk into an office. What changes is the target. Instead of a partner, it's a manager's Slack status. Instead of "do you still love me," it's "did that come across wrong in the meeting."
The mechanism is reassurance-seeking under uncertainty. When you don't yet know how a person reads silence, or what a short reply means from them specifically, your brain fills the gap with the worst plausible story and then goes looking for proof it's wrong. This is adaptive when you're four years old and your caregiver's mood determines your day. It's expensive when you're an adult trying to build a working relationship with twelve strangers who each have their own default tone and none of them are thinking about you nearly as much as you're thinking about them.
The tell is usually speed and repetition rather than the content of what you're doing. Asking a clarifying question once is normal onboarding behaviour. Rereading, rephrasing, and sending a version of the same check-in three times in a week — that's the anxious system, not the job requiring it.
Why colleagues read it as neediness
A new colleague has almost no data on you. They don't know your checking is about anxiety rather than incompetence, so they interpret the most visible thing: frequency. Someone who asks "was that okay?" after every task, or who apologises pre-emptively before feedback has even been given, reads as unsure of themselves in a way that gets quietly filed under needs managing, which is a different category from needs onboarding.
The behaviour that feels like care to you can look like uncertainty to them — and uncertainty is what people manage away from, not towards.
This is the cruel irony of anxious attachment at work: the more reassurance you seek, the less secure you appear, and the less secure you appear, the less spontaneous warmth you get back — which then confirms the fear that started the whole loop. Colleagues aren't rejecting you as a person. They're responding to a signal that reads as "requires more input than the role should," which in a first week is the opposite of the impression anyone wants to make.
It also costs you information. When you're busy managing your own anxiety about whether someone likes you, you're not actually watching how they work, what they value, or what "good" looks like on this particular team. You spend the reconnaissance budget of week one on your own reassurance instead of on the team's actual culture, which is the thing you needed to learn.
What to do differently in the first week
The most useful shift isn't suppressing the urge to check — that rarely works and it makes the anxiety louder. It's changing what you do with it before it turns into a message. Try a twenty-minute rule: when you feel the pull to ask "are we okay" or to reread something for the fourth time, set a timer and do something else first. Most reassurance urges are sharpest in the first few minutes and noticeably duller twenty minutes later, once you're mid-task.
- Before you send a check-in message, ask yourself what specific information you're missing — not what feeling you want soothed.
- Replace open-ended reassurance questions ("is this okay?") with concrete ones ("should this go to the whole team or just you?"). Concrete questions read as competence, not anxiety.
- Notice silence and default to neutral, not negative. No reply in two hours from someone new is usually about their calendar, not your standing.
Structure also does a lot of the work anxiety wants to do manually. If you don't know when you'll next hear from your manager, ask for a standing check-in — a fifteen-minute weekly slot — in your first few days. This isn't neediness; it's normal onboarding, and it gives your nervous system a scheduled, guaranteed dose of the contact it's hunting for constantly, which quietens the hunting in between.
Building your own evidence base
Anxious attachment runs on a shortage of internal evidence — you don't yet trust that things are fine unless someone tells you, so you keep asking to be told. The fix isn't more telling from other people; it's building a small, private log of what actually happened, separate from what you feared. At the end of each day in week one, write one line: what you were anxious about that morning, and what actually occurred by the evening. Read it back at the end of the week.
Most people doing this for the first time are startled by the gap. The fear was rarely "they seemed a bit brief in a message"; it was "they're annoyed with me, this is going wrong." The evidence, almost always, is smaller and more boring than the fear. This doesn't cure anxious attachment in a week, but it starts training the part of you that currently treats every gap in information as bad news.
If this pattern feels familiar well beyond work — in friendships, in your closest relationship, in how you handle a partner going quiet for an evening — it's worth looking at properly rather than managing it piecemeal in each new context. The attachment style test is a reasonable place to see the shape of it laid out plainly, so you're not guessing at the pattern from inside it.
What to try this week
Pick one specific reassurance habit — the reread, the pre-emptive apology, the "just checking this is fine" message — and give it the twenty-minute delay every time it shows up for the next five working days. Keep the evidence log alongside it. You're not trying to feel calm by Friday. You're trying to collect a week's worth of proof that the gap between "I don't know how this landed" and "something is actually wrong" is bigger than your nervous system currently believes, and that proof is the only thing that reliably shrinks it.