"Passion Anxiety"...is it a thing?

Passion Anxiety: Defined as the feeling of unease or urgency that one has not found their passion and is worried about doing so.

I ended up blurting this out recently whilst facilitating a course to help people start out on a self-directed career path. I was trying to say something that had been in my head for a while and then suddenly the term came to me - passion anxiety.

We've all heard the advice 'find your passion' or 'do what you love'. Social media, self-help books and even commencement speeches are filled with the old adage. Yet as a phrase, its simplicity and binary nature can create more angst with people trying to overthink what their passion is. It can imply things that aren’t always the most helpful.

Could it now be a source of modern-day anxiety worthy of its own term?

In 2018 psychological scientists Paul O’Keefe at Yale, along with Carol Dweck and Gregory Walton of Stanford University, examined the effects of mindsets on how people consider their interests in the context of their career choices and satisfaction.

Building on Carol Dweck's research around growth mindset, the studies unearthed three high-level concepts from this work that this article will expand on. So to help combat 'passion anxiety'... if it even exists.

1) The idea that passions are found fully formed implies that a person has a set number of interests. Even worse, we think there's just one that has to be found. When in reality we can always develop new interests.

The definition of passion is to have an intense desire or enthusiasm for something. The statement ‘find your passion’ implies a fixed mindset.

It’s helpful to consider that an intense desire or enthusiasm for something could be just around the corner at any point in time. Hidden in a new role, watching a documentary, or stumbled upon by accident in some way. It can even come from a difficult life experience that shapes our thinking and gives rise to strong feelings.

If someone doesn’t feel like they are strongly passionate about something now, it may just mean they need to experience more to discover things. We’ve got lots of time to develop many interests over the course of our lives. 

The pressure to define our passions early comes from the pressure to make the ‘right’ career choices with the expectation that there’s one path, when really there’s an abundance.

Working in an industry for a period of time can lead someone to develop a passion for it. Spending time with a group of people can bring out interests you didn’t think about before. Experimenting can lead to discovery.

It’s why I feel the passion mantra is most counterproductive to younger people who are yet to have the time to explore but are bombarded by passion messages across social channels. Are they a group most at risk of this ‘passion anxiety’?

2) Being overly fixed on what you know you're currently interested in, may stop you from discovering other areas.

If we identify ourselves strongly as something and decide this is what we are passionate about, we can shut our thinking off to other areas.

I feel like I experienced this when I started my health blogging many years ago. I was passionate about health and so had decided this was 'my thing' - my passion. I didn't realise that I was in the process of developing interests in marketing, coaching, facilitation and writing. Thankfully I've now cultivated these and found great fulfillment from doing so, but I can see I had quite a narrow vision for a while.

Keep open-minded that with time and effort you could develop interests and passions in unlikely areas.

3) We might believe that once we 'find our passion' it will always feel easy and never hard. Thus when challenges do strike, it's easier for people to give up saying 'I don't feel passionate about it anymore'.

There is this expectation that once you start working in an area you're passionate about, the motivation continues to flow like a never-ending source of energy and everything is a rainbow. That it feels easy and effortless 24/7.

Yet in reality, challenges are a part of anything we do. It's important not to confuse things getting hard with concluding we're not passionate about it anymore. The deeper feeling of passion can come from developing a skill or capability over time and using it. The learning process to develop such a skill is likely messy and uncomfortable at times.

Instead of finding or following your passions, cultivate them.

Professor and writer Cal Newport, someone who has been anti-follow-your-passion advice for years suggests that we cultivate our passions rather than follow them.

He advocates putting in the work to master skills, learn and gain knowledge, with the trust that passions will find you during that process. Essentially enjoy the process, trust and let the passion anxiety evaporate.

"Don’t subscribe to ‘find your passion’ advice. Seek to discover the different forms of it." Cal Newport

So if you're feeling the need to discover your one true path in some form, consider if you're feeling a form of passion anxiety. And if you hear someone else talking about it from a disempowering or even distressed place, maybe we start to change the narratives around this so that the pressure is released and a simple statement is recognised as having more behind it.

Do you think this 'passion anxiety' a thing? I would love to hear any thoughts or contributions... 🙂