7 Signs You’re an Anxious High-Achiever

anxious high achiever Wignall

As a psychologist, I’m not supposed to admit that I have favorite clients. But I do. And while I won’t divulge any names, I will share the common personality type they all fall into:

The Anxious High-Achiever

The anxious high-achiever is someone who’s smart, hard-working, and ambitious. They’re driven to succeed in life and usually do. They almost always did well in school and advanced quickly in their careers. They’re strivers and proud of it. But they run hot…

They’re constantly busy, frequently stressed, and seem to be chronically short on time. They almost always struggle with some form of anxiety—whether it’s performance anxiety speaking in public, sleep anxiety and insomnia, panic attacks on airplanes, or just a low-grade but unrelenting generalized anxiety. They’re overthinkers and under-relaxers. They deeply value relationships, but often struggle to slow down enough to be present for the ones they love.

And almost universally, these anxious high-achievers show up to work with me saying the same thing:

I want to keep my ambition and drive but with less stress and anxiety.

While I’m always quick to point out that there’s no free lunch—every decision and change demands trade-offs—it is very possible to become a less anxious high-achiever…

  • You can start your own company without resigning yourself to three hours of sleep per night.
  • You can give speeches, make presentations, and fly on planes without popping a Xanax or beta blockers.
  • And you can definitely pursue big ambitious goals with a lot more confidence and way less self-doubt.

If this resonates with you—or maybe sounds like someone you know—I invite you to read on and learn a little more about some of the most common patterns these anxious high-achievers fall into and some practical suggestions for avoiding them.

1. Overthinking

You’re a high-achiever in large part because you’re good at thinking…

  • You’re a problem-solver who’s good at thinking logically and analytically
  • You’re good at pattern matching and synthesizing large, diverse types of information and data
  • And you’re probably pretty creative—good at imagining novel solutions to sticky problems

But here’s the thing:

It’s because you’re so good at thinking that you’re also vulnerable to overthinking.

It’s like the old saying:

To a hammer everything looks like a nail.

To an expert thinker, every problem looks like a more thinking problem. And because you’re good at thinking—and enjoy it and have been rewarded for it for decades—it’s actually very hard to not apply more thinking to every problem you encounter…

  • Your spouse is upset and you immediately launch into a root cause analysis of their anxiety, which turns out to be not so helpful for them.
  • Or after a sharp criticism from your CEO during a meeting, you find yourself ruminating on your presentation, endlessly replaying the scene in your mind’s eye, which—unsurprisingly—doesn’t seem to change anything.
  • Your son tells you he’s dropping out of college and you can’t seem to stop worrying about the imagined consequences, which—shockingly!—doesn’t actually fix anything.

Because it’s one of those obvious but easy-to-forget truths of life that not every problem benefits from more thinking…

  • When your spouse is upset, there’s a good chance what they really need is patient listening and a little bit of validation.
  • When you’ve made a mistake, a little bit of self-reflection and then moving on is probably a lot more helpful than endless rumination.
  • And when you find yourself anxious and worried, being willing to simply tolerate your anxiety instead of trying to fix it is likely to be a lot more helpful long-term.

Analytical thinking is like a chainsaw: incredibly powerful and helpful in some situations and incredibly unhelpful in others.

Now, you may be reading this and thinking to yourself:

Intellectually that makes sense. But in the moment it’s hard to stop thinking!

Very true. But just like you learned to become good at thinking more, you can learn to become good at thinking less—or at least, thinking differently. And while there are lots of exercises and tools to stop overthinking (See my Schedule Worry resource below), it’s important to start with a mindset shift:

When it comes to thinking, sometimes less is more.

So when you’re faced with an emotionally challenging situation—anger at a colleague for getting defensive, or anxiety about the health of your spouse—try to remember to hit the pause button and ask yourself:

Is more thinking really what will be more helpful here? Or is that just the response I’m most comfortable with?

If you’re a high-achiever, there’s a very good chance analytical thinking is your safety blanket—your default reaction you go to anytime you’re stressed or anxious. And a big part of lowering your anxiety is being willing to question and resist that default impulse.

My Favorite Exercise for Overthinkers

Scheduled worry is a simple but remarkably effective exercise that trains your brain out of its overthinking habit—whether that’s chronic worry, rumination, self-doubt, or any other form of overthinking. And it only takes about 10 minutes.

If you’re interested, grab a copy of my Scheduled Worry Quickstart Guide →

2. Conflict-Avoidance

Most anxious high-achievers aren’t completely conflict averse. In fact, most people who know them would say they generally do conflict pretty well.

But they almost always have a particular type of conflict they are either A) very good at avoiding altogether (which usually has serious long-term costs) or B) manage to do but at the cost of extreme stress or anxiety, even if others can’t see it.

Here’s an example from a former coaching client of mine we’ll call Greg:

  • Greg was a friendly and personable executive for a large financial firm. In fact, he was so good with people that he’d developed a reputation for being the most charming guy in the company—able to negotiate even the thorniest of deals and problems and still walk away friends with the person across the table. That’s what everyone else saw, anyway.
  • From Greg’s perspective, his skill with people came from an intense fear of being disliked or judged by others. And the way he channeled this anxious energy was to be hyper-charming and ingratiating to other people. In his own words: “I’m the best people-pleaser I’ve ever met.”
  • See, while Greg’s people-pleasing habits had pretty big upsides, especially in his work life, they came with some subtle but powerful costs too. As he told me during one of our coaching calls: “I’m actually terrified that people won’t like me. I still feel like the nerdy little kid on the playground that everyone made fun of. I’ve figured out how to get people to like me but if anything my fear and anxiety has only gotten worse.”

This wasn’t surprising because I’ve seen the same pattern over and over again:

Even the greatest strengths, if motivated by fear, will keep you anxious.

Greg’s skill of people-pleasing was actually a subtle avoidance strategy designed to keep his anxiety of being judged at bay. And like all avoidance strategies, it delivered short-term relief at the expense of long-term suffering.

The “better” Greg got at avoiding his fears with strategies like people-pleasing and being charming, the less confident he felt handle criticisms. So his anxiety only deepened.

Things only started to change when Greg shifted his entire mindset around anxiety from a coping mindset to a confidence mindset…

  • The coping mindset sees anxiety as a threat that needs to be avoided or eliminated. But the more you avoid anxiety, the more your brain learns to fear it, which leads to anxiety about anxiety and much more anxiety long-term.
  • The confidence mindset sees anxiety as a messenger that should be listened to but not necessarily acted on. And the more you practice tolerating your anxiety and being willing to have it, the less scary it becomes thereby reducing your long-term anxiety dramatically.

Confidence isn’t the absence of anxiety; it’s the belief that you can have anxiety and take meaningful action anyway.

For Greg, this looked like being willing to disappoint people and not taking responsibility for their happiness:

  • He stopped scheduling extra “check-up” meetings which he previously insisted on in order to alleviate his own anxiety about other people being unhappy with him.
  • He started saying no occasionally to other people’s requests of him—even if they were perfectly reasonable.
  • And he started making more assertive requests for what he actually wanted—like a more flexible hybrid work situation so he could be home more often during his kids’ final years of high school.

All of these changes required Greg to stop avoiding conflict and be willing to have some conflict when it was healthy or useful. And while it was very uncomfortable at first, like anything it slowly got less uncomfortable with practice.

Most importantly, Greg’s beliefs about conflict changed—he stopped viewing conflict as something bad and dangerous (a holdover from his boyhood days being bullied on the playground) and started seeing it as something uncomfortable and stressful but not dangerous or bad.

I remember checking back in with Greg a few months after we stopped working together and he had this to say:

I didn’t realize how much stress and anxiety I was putting on myself by being such a people-pleaser. Now that I’m not putting all my energy into avoiding conflict I feel not only calmer and less anxious but I have a lot more energy!

Like any other form of stress, conflict is uncomfortable but not necessarily bad. As an anxious high-achiever, one of the best ways to be a little less anxious is to practice getting a little more comfortable with conflict.

Learn More

If you struggle with conflict avoidance and people-pleasing, this guide on assertive communication is a good place to start making some changes.

3. Functional Perfectionism

Psychologists like me get themselves tied into all sorts of knots trying to define perfectionism precisely. But for our purposes here let’s just go with the very common sense definition of perfectionism which is something like having extremely high standards for yourself.

Now, for a lot of people, perfectionism can become a serious problem—to the point of clinical disorders like OCD or OCPD. And even in less extreme instances, often perfectionism is simply a coping mechanism for uncertainty anxiety or some other fear. And like all coping mechanisms, the long-term downsides always end up outweighing the short-term benefits.

But there’s another type of person who is undoubtedly a perfectionist but their perfectionism mostly works. Many of my anxious high-achievers are like this:

  • They have incredibly high standards for themselves, their work, and occasionally other people.
  • They tend to get pretty upset and critical with themselves when they don’t meet those standards.
  • And they’re aware that those high standards are a big part of why they’re generally pretty successful in life. As one of my clients put it: I’ve never met someone impressive who wasn’t a perfectionist in one way or another.

I call this flavor of perfectionism functional perfectionism.

Functional perfectionism is perfectionism that mostly works for you—it helps you achieve, compete, create, and pursue big ambitious goals.

Of course, there are always tradeoffs. And when I say even this functional perfectionism mostly works, what I mean is that it has a lot of upside and the downsides aren’t totally crippling. But there are downsides. And left unchecked, even a very functional perfectionism can create a lot of unnecessary stress and anxiety.

So when I work with an anxious high-achiever and perfectionism comes up, I try to re-frame the discussion. Instead of either Perfectionism is ruining my life and I need to get rid of it!, or Perfectionism is my superpower and it’s off-limits!, I like to frame things lies this:

What’s the optimal balance between the benefits of perfectionism and its downsides?

Because almost always, the anxious high-achiever can afford to take their foot off the perfectionism pedal a little bit. And as a result, they can pretty significantly reduce their stress and anxiety without taking much of it to their performance. In fact, for a lot of my clients I’ve seen a slight reduction in the intensity of their perfectionism actually improve performance at the same time that it lowers stress and anxiety.

So how exactly do you be, say, 10% less of a perfectionist?

At first, I used to recommend that people try to have slightly lower standards for their goals. But this mostly flopped as a strategy for a whole set of interesting reasons that I don’t want to get into here. Instead, I’ll just cut to the chase and share an approach to slightly lower standards that has worked much better:

Be more selective in the objects of your perfectionism.

Because functional perfectionism works pretty well in certain areas of life—school, work, exercise, etc., a lot of high-achiever types end up unthinkingly generalizing it as an overall mindset to every domain of life from fashion and parenting to social media and meal prep.

But what I found working with a lot of these clients is that the downsides of perfectionism are a quantity rather than quality issue. In other words, perfectionism is exhausting because you’ve developed perfectionism creep and it’s infiltrated every aspect of your life. But having even very strong functional perfectionism in just a couple areas of life is much more manageable and less stressful.

So try this:

  • Take an inventory of all the areas in your life where you tend to get perfectionistic or have very high standards.
  • Then ask yourself: If I’m being honest, which are the areas where it really matters to me that I have exceptionally high standards?
  • Then give yourself permission to maintain those standards while releasing yourself from them in all the other areas of life that don’t matter as much to you.

Like any change, it will come with an adjustment period so be patient. Also, keep in mind that what makes this process hard—letting go of extremely high standards—is almost always a lack of clarity about your values and an unwillingness to prioritize some values over others. But if you’ve struggled to let go of perfectionism without success, this approach is worth a shot.

4. Free-Floating Anxiety

The best description of free-floating anxiety I’ve heard comes from one of my clients who described it like this:

It’s like a constant background hum of anxiety that never goes away completely.

Now, I’d probably dispute the claim that the anxiety literally never goes away. But the basic idea is that it’s a low-intensity form of anxiety that’s remarkably persistent and sticky. And even if it rarely spikes into overwhelmingly intense anxiety, it still causes quite a bit of trouble:

  • Exhaustion and Burnout. Anxiety is physiologically expensive. And while the body is pretty good at “paying for” intense but short bursts of anxiety, it’s less well adapted to chronic low-grade anxiety. It’s a little like having dozens of apps and browser tabs open all the time on your computer—you can do it, but eventually the system gets slow, sluggish, and occasionally just locks up altogether.
  • Insomnia. During our active day-to-day life, it’s not too hard to suppress or ignore this constant low-grade free-floating anxiety. But it becomes much more prominent and hard to handle at night in bed because there are fewer things to distract us and keep our minds occupied. So many, if not most, people with free-floating anxiety also struggle with insomnia and difficulty sleeping—either initial insomnia and trouble falling asleep, or middle insomnia and trouble with waking up and not being able to fall back asleep. In fact, in my experience working with anxious high-achievers, nearly all of them have some struggles with insomnia, most of which are caused by sleep anxiety. And this sleep anxiety is very often simply a holdover from free-floating day-time anxiety.
  • Distractibility. One of the more subtle but impactful effects of free-floating anxiety is that it makes you more distractible. It’s harder to focus deeply for long stretches of time on one thing, which often gets in the way of especially challenging and creative work. It also takes its toll on relationships since it’s harder to be truly present with other people if 10% of your brain is constantly anxious and flitting around from one worry to another.

Part of the reason people have such a hard time shaking this free-floating anxiety is precisely because it’s relatively low-intensity, which means it’s not that hard to ignore or distract yourself from throughout the day. But when you constantly avoid and ignore something, two not-so-good things tend to follow:

  1. You lose insight into it. It’s hard to be self-aware about something you’re always shoving out of your consciousness. And if you don’t understand something—especially what’s causing something—it’s often difficult to address it.
  2. You start to fear it. When your brain sees you habitually avoiding something, it interprets that as a sign of danger. So if you’re habitually avoiding your anxiety you’re going to develop anxiety about anxiety, which is going to make your overall anxiety much more intense and sticky.

So in both the short and long-term, you need to stop avoiding (or coping with) your free-floating anxiety, and instead, get curious about it.

I’ve written a whole article on 4 potential causes of free-floating anxiety, but I’ll save you the suspense and just come out and tell you the one that’s by far the most common: chronic worry

Ultimately, worry is the only direct cause of anxiety. Because while lots of things from child trauma and genetics to how you slept last night can make you more or less vulnerable to anxiety, it’s the mental act of worry—and especially, the habit of worrying—that actually generates anxiety.

The implication is that if you have free-floating anxiety you also have free-floating worry. And you need to address that worry if you want to take care of the anxiety.

So regardless of whether or not you tend to think of yourself as a worrier, it’s critical to start developing more awareness around your habit of chronic worry. This is tough because like other invisible habits, worry is a mental habit; and because it happens in your head in the form of thoughts rather than physical behaviors, it’s very fast and subtle.

Learn More

If you want to get better at noticing and letting go of chronic worry, here are the two best exercises I know of:

  • Scheduled Worry. I mentioned this one earlier in the section on overthinking, so I won’t go into more detail here. I’ll just note that over my history of helping hundreds of clients with chronic worry, I have never NOT seen this exercise be extremely helpful when applied consistently.
  • Mindfulness Training. My own approach to mindfulness meditation that’s specifically focused on developing two key skills: mental self-awareness (i.e. getting better at noticing those subtle patterns of chronic worry) and cognitive flexibility (detaching from unhelpful thought patterns like worry that generate unnecessary levels of difficult emotion like anxiety).

5. Revenge Bedtime Procrastination

Revenge bedtime procrastination is a tendency to stay up later than you should despite knowing you’ll be worse off for it.

For example:

  • Despite knowing that 10:30-11:00 is a good bedtime for you because it means you can get up by six and still get at least seven hours of sleep, you find yourself routinely staying up past midnight scrolling social media and shopping online. Then each morning you wake up groggy and exhausted wondering why you keep doing this to yourself.
  • Or maybe your ideal bedtime is earlier—9:30-ish—but you find yourself staying up until 11:00 or 12:00 binge-watching Netflix shows. And while you feel okay first thing in the morning, by the time late afternoon and evening rolls around you’re “a zombie” and can’t seem to do any of things you’d planned for later in the day—going to the gym, meal-prepping, working on that creative project or side hustle you keep putting off, etc.

Now, because it involves bedtime and sleep (or lack of sleep), revenge bedtime procrastination typically gets lumped into sleep and insomnia-related problems. But in my experience it really has nothing to do with sleep. Instead, it’s really an agency problem.

Agency is the belief in your ability to positively influence yourself and the world around you. And while you might assume that high-achieving types all have a strong sense of agency, that isn’t always the case.

See, many anxious high-achievers are primarily externally motivated: They’re driven to succeed because—deep down—they crave approval from others…

  • That might look like “proving” themselves professionally in order to live up to their parent’s expectations.
  • It might look like accumulating more and more markers of success—house, car, job title, etc—to keep up with their friends and peer group and prove that they belong.
  • It might even look like holding on to a career and profession you hate because it’s a form of virtue signaling—projecting a certain set of values and beliefs in order to impress others.

But even if you’re extremely successful externally, if your core motivation is to collect the approval of others, you’re eventually going to feel pretty empty and lost because you’re not dedicating any time and energy to pursuing the things that matter to you—the things that are internally motivated.

When everything you do is motivated by other people’s values, it becomes very difficult to even know what your values are, much less pursue them.

In short, many anxious high-achievers are starved for agency and one of the symptoms of this lack of agency is the tendency to steal time from sleep.

So, looking at the problem of revenge bedtime procrastination from this perspective, it’s less about needing better sleep hygiene or kicking your social media addiction; instead, it should prompt you to reflect deeply on your lack of agency in your own life:

If you’re so starved for agency that you’re stealing time from sleep, you probably need to seriously rethink how you spend your days—and very often this has some scary but important implications for our work and careers.

Learn More

If you’re interested in learning more about revenge bedtime procrastination and its relationships to agency, try these two essays from me:

6. Emotional Self-Criticism

Unsurprisingly, anxious high-achievers tend to be pretty tough on themselves:

  • They set high standards and expectations for themselves
  • When things go wrong, they analyze and critique their failures intensely
  • And when things go well—which is actually pretty often—they tend to be dismissive of their successes and move right on to the next problem to solve or fix

Now, contrary to a lot of advice out there, I don’t necessarily think being tough on yourself is a problem. High standards, for example, motivate us to achieve great things that benefit ourselves and others. And even intense self-criticism can lead to new learning and fewer mistakes in the future when done well.

So, as is so often the case, the devil’s in the details when it comes to being hard on yourself. And while there are many ways to distinguish healthy vs unhealthy forms of being hard on yourself, here’s one that’s frequently overlooked and tends to cause a lot of problems: emotional self-criticism

Emotional self-criticism is the habit of criticizing yourself for how you feel emotionally.

For example:

  • After waking up in a bad mood and being more crabby than usual with your wife and kids, you find yourself saying things in your head like: It’s ridiculous that I still get moody like this for no reason. Or: I shouldn’t feel resentful of my kids… I’m an adult. Get it together!
  • Or suppose you have to have a difficult conversation at work with one of your direct reports about their poor performance recently. But you find yourself increasingly anxious about the conversation and avoiding it. In your head, you’re saying things like: Come on! I’ve been doing this for years. It’s silly that I’m getting anxious about giving a little negative feedback.

While there’s a lot of utility in criticizing your behavior, emotional criticism is both unhelpful and counterproductive.

Here’s why:

  • Your behavior is something you can control. So when you criticize your behavior, there’s a good chance of it leading to new insights or learning so that you could do something differently next time.
  • But because we don’t have direct control over our emotions, criticizing them is both unfair and unhelpful. Think about it: You wouldn’t criticize someone else for having brown eyes because your eye color isn’t something you can control. Similarly, you probably wouldn’t criticize someone else for feeling sad or anxious, because instinctively you realize emotions aren’t under our direct control. And it’s wrong to criticize people—ourselves included—for things we can’t control.
  • Aside from being ethically questionable, emotional criticism is also unhelpful—and frequently counterproductive because it leads to emotional fear learning. When you criticize your emotions, your brain’s fear center interprets that as a sign of danger. Do it enough and you develop a fear of your own emotions—that is, you start getting anxious about feeling sad. Or maybe guilty about feeling angry.
  • If this process becomes pervasive, it dramatically lowers your emotional resilience and makes you increasingly fearful and insecure in the face of difficult emotions like anxiety, anger, or shame.

So here’s my advice to all you anxious high-achievers:

Go ahead and continue to criticize your actions and behaviors but resist the urge to criticize yourself for your emotions.

Because not only is it unproductive, but it’s actively making you more anxious and less resilient over time.

Learn More

The best way to break the habit of emotional self-criticism is to substitute the habit of emotional validation in for it. You can learn more about emotional validation here: The AVA Method: How to Process Emotions in a Healthy Way

7. Mirror Values

Most anxious high-achievers did well in school. As a consequence, they got very good at identifying what the goal of any new situation was (how to write good essays for professor Frank, how to study well for microbiology tests, etc.) and achieving that goal in a satisfactory way.

And while there are many upsides to the skill set this pattern develops, it comes with one subtle but powerful downside that I call mirror values.

Mirror values are values you’ve internalized for yourself because they were important to someone else.

And in the process of trying to please or be in good standing with someone else—usually some kind of authority figure like a parent or teacher—you end up adopting their values and pursuing their goals without much conscious deliberation. Put another way: The more you mirror someone else’s values, the more likely you are to end up adopting them yourself.

Now, internalizing other peoples’ values isn’t necessarily a bad thing. In fact, we all do this as kids. And while we’re used to thinking about the values we adopted from our family or friends that didn’t turn out so well for us, upon reflection I think you’ll find that there were a lot of these values that actually did serve you well.

Still, values are powerful things. And if you’re not careful what values you’re adopting and why, they can end up impacting your behavior and emotional life in really unhelpful ways.

Here’s an example from a client of mine name Lisa:

  • Lisa was in many ways a prototypical anxious high-achiever: straight-A student through college, did management consulting for two years, then an MBA, then worked for another five years at a private equity firm and quickly rose in the ranks. She also struggled with bursts of self-doubt and imposter syndrome, a nagging case of middle insomnia, and she had a hard time romantically because she found it difficult to let her guard down and be vulnerable.
  • She started working with me after taking a job with a small but high-growth startup that had a “messy and chaotic” culture. People just did things, and quickly, without a lot of “checks and balances.” And this “chaotic” culture was leading to a lot of anxiety for Lisa around decision making and confidence.
  • After meeting a couple times, it became pretty clear to me that Lisa had a strong value around order. But interestingly, she hadn’t always been like that—she described being a pretty carefree kid. But as she started “getting serious” about school, and later, her career, she learned that being orderly led to very good results: her high-school teachers were always impressed with how tidy her binders were, her college roommates were in awe of how efficiently she could study, and her managers in consulting and PE seemed to really value her orderliness too. In other words, she started mirroring this value of orderliness all the way back in high school. And because it had “worked” so well for her, she had internalized it to the extent that, until we reflected on it, it seemed to just be a part of her personality.
  • As we continued working together, Lisa and I did a lot of work uncovering how this process came about and then examining how—if she wanted to thrive in this new start-up environment—she might need to update her value around order. And as she did, not only did her stress and anxiety decrease, but her relationships at work improved dramatically. And perhaps most importantly, she became more self-aware of her values—where they came from, how they impacted her, and a sense of agency over her values and confidence that she wasn’t tied to a certain way of being.

Now, values work is a huge topic with lots of different approaches depending on the person and the situation. But for most of you anxious high-achievers reading this, the key thing to realize is this:

Because you’re so good at identifying and moving toward other people’s values, you probably lack insight into your own.

And there’s a good chance much of the excess stress and anxiety you feel is your body’s way of telling you this—that you need to get back in touch with what really matters to you and start pursuing it.

Learn More

If you want to learn more about values work, here are two good places to start:

Next Steps

I hope this essay has been clarifying. If you want to learn more about anxiety and similar concepts, here are a few good places to start:

Work with Nick

If you’re interested in working with me, here are two ways I can help:

  • Mood Mastery. Twice a year, I lead a small cohort of curious and motivated students through a four-week emotional resilience program designed to help thoughtful and ambitious people overcome inner obstacles to success and happiness. You can learn more here →
  • Individual Coaching. I maintain a small private coaching practice where I work 1:1 with anxious high-achievers who want to do their best work with less stress and anxiety. You can learn more here →

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