3 Lessons I’ve Learned Helping High Achievers Manage Anxiety

Most people think anxiety keeps you stuck in inaction, hiding, avoiding, or freezing. But with high functioning anxiety, it often looks completely different. In this episode, I’m sharing three powerful lessons I’ve learned from helping hundreds of high achieving professionals manage their anxiety lessons.

That may just change the way that you see yourself if you relate with high functioning anxiety.

Welcome to Calmly Coping. My name is Tati Garcia. I’m a licensed therapist and speaker here to help high achievers stop overthinking everything and finally feel calm and confident from within. If that resonates, then hit subscribe. Let’s dive into the episode. Over the past seven-ish years, I’ve worked with so many ambitious, hardworking people who struggle internally, even though they look like they’ve got it all together on the outside, and I’ve noticed a few patterns and truths that show up again and again.

Today I wanna share three of the biggest lessons I’ve learned. Lessons that can help you start breaking free from the cycle of high functioning anxiety. And just to note, this is episode three of my three part series on high functioning anxiety. So if you missed the first two, then be sure to click on the link in the description to check them out.

Lesson number one is avoidance can actually look. Like doing more. Like I mentioned in the intro, when most people think of anxiety, they think of avoidance, not wanting to go into social situations, avoiding doing something out of their comfort zone or steering clear of things that feel risky or bring up feelings of anxiety.

But in high functioning anxiety, doing more is actually often avoidance. Not always, but avoidance can show up as doing more. And here’s what I mean. Instead of avoiding by holding back high achievers, avoid by hustling harder. You may not think that this is avoidance on the surface, but their fears are often about failure, disappointing others being perceived as incompetent, and the way that they cope is to take control to overthink, to over prepare to overwork.

The problem is these patterns of overdoing might feel protective in the moment. You’re putting on armor to protect yourself from negative consequences, but long term, they actually reinforce your anxiety. They teach your brain. I have to keep hustling, pushing, striving for impossibly high standards because if I don’t, then everything will fall apart.

This is what keeps high achievers stuck in that endless cycle of overdoing. It’s not laziness, procrastination, it’s overcompensation. And that can be just as damaging. So for example, maybe this looks like over preparing for a meeting by spending hours on tiny details that no one else will notice. Not because it’s actually needed, but because you’re trying to avoid even the slightest chance of failure being perceived as incompetent or this imposter syndrome that’s showing up.

Or making mistakes or any other negative consequences. This is your way of taking control when you fear negative outcomes. Lesson number two is that prioritizing work over yourself creates more suffering. This might seem obvious, but this is another pattern that I’ve seen over and over again. Is prioritizing career responsibility and achievement above everything else, especially above caring for yourself.

Even though this may go against some of the values that these individuals hold important, such as family relationships, personal hobbies, et cetera, et cetera. However, on the surface it might make sense to prioritize work and achievement. You don’t wanna drop the ball, you don’t wanna let anyone down, and you want to prove yourself and keep moving forward because one of your values is achievement.

But here’s the cost. You end up neglecting your own needs, rest, joy, downtime. Even your health can go to the back burner, and you might not realize it at first, but over time, this is not sustainable when you don’t take care of yourself. You are the one who suffers most. Seems obvious, right? But this is exactly what leads to burnout.

Exhaustion, negative self-talk and harsh self-criticism, and it reinforces the belief that your worth is tied to doing more. Which is just patently false. I’ve seen so many clients push themselves to the breaking point before realizing that the world doesn’t end when you take a break, but your world does start to unravel when you never give yourself permission to pause.

So for example, maybe you’re saying yes to extra projects at work, even when you’re exhausted because you feel like you can’t let anyone down. As a result, you end up skipping dinner with your family yet again. And lesson three builds on both of these, but it’s that overdoing makes anxiety worse. So this brings us to the practice of just enough.

So this third big lesson is that overdoing doesn’t actually solve or reduce anxiety. It actually makes it worse. So high functioning anxiety tricks you into thinking that if you just do more, prepare more, or push harder, you’ll finally feel safe and in control. And that’s what we are often seeking as humans, right?

We want to feel a sense of safety. We want to feel a sense of certainty. We want to protect ourselves from bad things that could happen in life, but the opposite. Often happens when you engage in these behaviors that high functioning anxiety want you to do. And the more you do these things from a place of fear, the more your nervous system stays on high alert.

So you’re actually accomplishing the opposite. You stay stuck in fight or flight, your body gets tense, your thoughts get more sensitive, and your sense of peace becomes further and further away. And the mindset shift here to address that. Is learning to practice just enough, basically a form of exposure therapy of exposing yourself to this feared outcome of I cannot have control.

So let me just let go of trying to overwork and overanalyze everything and just notice that it’s okay to stop before I feel like I’ve reached that point or before my brain and body. Naturally want me to, because this is a behavior that I have repeated and ingrained again and again. So maybe this looks like instead of automatically saying yes to more, or pushing yourself past the point of exhaustion, pausing and asking yourself, have I already done enough for now?

And this can be a muscle that needs to be built if you’re questioning if your expectations for yourself are realistic or not. I do have an episode on that, so you can click on the link in the corner. If you’re watching on YouTube, click on the link in the description or the show notes to check it out.

So sometimes that pause is, like I mentioned in the last episode, just three deep breaths before sending the email or stopping yourself from rewriting the report yet again. Other times it’s reminding yourself, I can handle this. I don’t need to push beyond enough and I will be okay. This isn’t about lowering your standards.

It’s about learning and teaching yourself through experience that your worth is not tied to constant overdoing, and that you can trust yourself even without the endless hamster wheel and hustle. So for example, maybe it’s noticing the urge to stay an extra hour at the office and instead telling yourself.

I’ve done enough for today. I can handle the rest tomorrow. That’s an example of practicing just enough, setting a boundary, acknowledging and noticing it and sticking to it. You are teaching your brain through experience that you can tolerate the uncertainty and that the consequences. Are often not as bad as we imagine them to be as our brain creates.

The thing with anxiety is that our brains are often especially good at imagining all of these terrible outcomes, right? We’re good at predicting the worst case scenarios. For me, it can look like actual videos in my head. Of what this might play out to be if something terrible happens. But the reality is that these are just things coming from our imagination.

It’s our brain trying to protect us and keep us safe. And so actually pausing when those urges come is essentially doing the opposite of what these high functioning anxiety urges want you to do. So instead of continuing to push and do more, because of that fear, you were pausing and saying. I don’t need to listen to these urges because they’re not based on fact, because it’s based on the exaggeration of the worst case scenario or whatever it is.

If any of these lessons hit home for you, I want you to know that you’re not alone. High functioning anxiety often shows up in these patterns, avoidance through doing more, neglecting yourself for your responsibilities and reinforcing anxiety through overdoing. These are not flaws. They’re learned patterns and once you can recognize them, you can start to shift them.

So if this episode resonated for you, I created the common ambitious vault exactly for you. It’s a curated library of calming practices, mini trainings and challenges designed for high achievers like you, so you can break these patterns and build calm, balance and confidence. On your own schedule. So think of this as your on-demand toolkit for those moments when anxiety takes over and you need support right away.

The vault is officially open this week, and for a limited time, you can get it at a special launch price. You can find the link in the show notes or go to calmlycoping.com/vault for more information. So remember, as I have repeated over and over again in this series, awareness is the first step. But it doesn’t stop there.

By practicing just enough, prioritizing yourself alongside your responsibilities and understanding how avoidance can actually look like doing more, you can start to shift this cycle of high functioning anxiety because you deserve more than just surviving and getting through the day. You deserve to feel calm, balanced, and confident while still being the ambitious and successful person you already are, and I know that you can do this.

While you wait for next week’s episode, I have other episodes about calming your mind, improving work-life balance, and feeling more confident from within. So be sure to check out these episodes here. Thank you so much for tuning in today, and until next time, be calm.