Keep Busy No Matter What: The Cycle of High Functioning Anxiety

As an ambitious person looking to avoid negative feelings, you may use achievement as a way to “manage” your anxiety. After all, if you’re always busy, you won’t have time to sit with the feelings of worthlessness, worry, or hopelessness stirring beneath the surface. You hold hope that this next achievement will be the one that brings satisfaction. The one where you finally believe you’re worthy, capable and admired.

If you’re reading this, likely you know deep down that the satisfaction will never come and ignoring the root cause of your anxiety is not going to work in the long run.

As your achievement dependency deepens, your anxiety worsens. When the work day ends or your kids go to bed, project or other distraction ends, you’re left with the thoughts and feelings of emptiness you were trying so hard to avoid. So you take on more responsibilities, work overtime, volunteer at a nonprofit on weekends, and start training to run a marathon. Anything to keep busy and avoid that underlying anxiety.

Your friends and family may have told you to “slow down” and “take a break.” What they don’t understand is doing so would make you feel worse. They likely have no idea that you are suffering, because you work so hard to hide your pain and worry.

It doesn’t help that our society often praises behavior that contributes to high functioning anxiety, including people pleasing, work addiction, and always being busy. Social media doesn’t help, reflecting only the idealized versions of the perfect lives of those we know and admire, and using terms like “perfectionist” and “hard on myself” as perfect imperfections doesn’t help, either.

Over time, this distract-avoid-distract work-avoid-work cycle causes both mental and physical burnout. You may experience excessive fatigue and difficulty sleeping and shift to feelings of emptiness, irritability and depression.