Reverse the sign

Redesign the response so it opposes the harmful state instead of accidentally feeding it.

Career doubt hits, and your response is to withdraw: cancel the coffee chat, skip the meetup, spend the evening ruminating instead. But withdrawal produces exactly zero new evidence about what you want, so the doubt deepens, which triggers more withdrawal. Your coping response is feeding the very state it is trying to relieve.

Reverse the sign redesigns the response so it opposes the harmful state instead of accidentally feeding it. The cue: the more you do your coping move, the worse the underlying condition gets, a tell that the response has the wrong polarity. Steps: trace the response's actual effect on the state honestly (isolation deepens doubt); design an opposite-polarity response to the same trigger, so doubt now fires one small real-world experiment, a conversation with someone doing work you might want, or a tiny project shipped; wire the new response to the old cue so doubt itself becomes the starting gun; then watch the state's trajectory over weeks, not days. The visible change: the spiral inverts, and each episode of doubt starts generating evidence that shrinks it. Don't force reversal when withdrawal serves a real need like genuine rest, or when the state carries true information; sometimes doubt is accurate signal to heed, not a dynamic to defeat.