Living on the Edge...Is Exhausting

Daniel runs a forty-person team and hasn't missed a deadline in six years. He also hasn't slept past 4:30 on a weeknight in about as long, rereads every board email three times before he sends it, and spent the first four days of his last vacation drafting replies he never sent. When the subject of his anxiety finally came up, the first thing he wanted to know was what would happen to the work if he stopped worrying.

It's a fair question, and plenty of accomplished people ask some version of it. Worry made them prepare. Fear of a mistake made them check. Anticipating problems helped them sidestep a few, and the dread of falling behind kept them at the desk long after they were tired. When those habits have ridden along through twenty years of promotions, separating the achievement from the anxiety starts to feel like asking which ingredient made the cake rise.

So is the anxiety producing the performance, or has a capable, conscientious person learned to perform while anxious?

The answer matters because chronic anxiety is expensive. It eats hours, erodes sleep, turns ordinary decisions into deliberations, and leaves almost no room between one demand and the next.

Some Anxiety Helps

A deadline concentrates attention. A high-stakes presentation gets you to prepare. Concern about a consequential decision sends you back to the numbers one more time, and sometimes that's the pass where you catch the error.

You've probably heard of the Yerkes-Dodson law, the inverted U in which performance climbs with arousal up to a point and then falls off. The original 1908 study tested mice learning to tell two boxes apart under electric shock, and later reviewers have pointed out that the tidy curve in management seminars owes more to retelling than to the data (Teigen, 1994). What holds up is modest: some activation helps, too much hurts, and where the tipping point sits depends on the person and the task.

In practice, the difference is easier to see than to graph. Useful anxiety prompts preparation and then lets you act. You review the deck, anticipate the hard questions, fix what needs fixing, and present. The other kind can't tell when preparation is finished. You revise slides that were fine on Tuesday, rehearse answers to questions nobody in the room would think to ask, sleep badly, and spend the drive home replaying the one answer you'd like back. From the inside, both feel like conscientiousness.

Worry Feels Like Work

Part of why anxiety persists is that worrying feels like doing something. If an outcome matters and you can't control it, continuing to think about it can seem more responsible than stopping. The mind goes looking for one more variable, one more scenario, one more data point that might shrink the uncertainty.

People who worry chronically tend to hold positive beliefs about worry itself: that it helps them prepare, heads off bad outcomes, or proves they care (Wells, 1995). Those beliefs are especially persuasive for anyone whose career rewards spotting problems early, which makes the habit hard to question.

Edward Watkins's review of repetitive thought (2008) draws a useful line here. Concrete thinking about a problem (what exactly could go wrong, and what would I do then) tends to help. Abstract, evaluative loops (why does this keep happening, what does it say about me) tend to keep people stuck. Once you've weighed the available facts and planned for the reasonable contingencies, more thinking rarely improves the decision; it rearranges the same information.

Can you tell when you've thought enough? Did anyone ever teach you how?

What If I Stop Worrying and Get Sloppy?

People who've relied on anxiety for years often fear that losing it will make them careless.

If I stop worrying, will I still prepare as thoroughly?
If I stop checking everything myself, will the quality slip?
If I get comfortable with uncertainty, will I miss something?
If I'm not afraid of failing, will I still work this hard?

They're reasonable questions for someone whose anxiety has been paid in bonuses and titles. Reducing anxiety doesn't require indifference to outcomes. You can stay ambitious, careful and thoroughly prepared without the internal pressure you've used to produce those behaviors. The perfectionism research points the same direction: high standards on their own aren't what predicts burnout, while fear of mistakes and harsh self-evaluation, the concerns that often ride along with those standards, are (Hill & Curran, 2016).

Motivation that runs on interest, judgment and commitment can feel strange at first, less urgent than motivation that runs on fear. People sometimes mistake that unfamiliarity for losing their edge.

High-Functioning Anxiety Hides Well

Anxiety is easy to spot when it stops someone from functioning. It's much harder to see when the person keeps excelling.

Someone can sleep five hours a night, rehearse conversations in the shower, recheck work that was right the first time, struggle to delegate, worry through every vacation, and clench their jaw hard enough to worry their dentist, all while collecting promotions and turning in excellent work. From the outside, nothing looks wrong.

High performers can get well into anxiety or burnout before their output drops enough for anyone to notice. The cost usually shows up somewhere else first: sleep, health, patience, the marriage, sex, concentration, or the ability to enjoy an afternoon that isn't organized around getting something done.

The Limits of Control

Anxiety tends to spike when something important can't be fully controlled. You can prepare for a board meeting and still not control how every director reacts. You can make a careful investment and lose money, do excellent work and lose the client, prepare your kid for college and have very little say in what happens once the dorm room is unpacked and you've driven away.

More analysis helps when more information can improve the decision. It helps far less when what's left is uncertainty itself, and no spreadsheet resolves that.

For people who've solved most of their problems through sustained effort, this is a hard distinction to accept. Some situations ask you to make the best available decision and then tolerate not knowing how it turns out. In my experience, high achievers have practiced diligence for decades and practiced tolerating uncertainty almost not at all.

The Analysis That Starts After the Decision

For some people, deciding doesn't end the deliberation. They revisit whether they chose correctly, replay conversations and draft better lines, and scan for early signs that things are going wrong. A small setback becomes evidence that an earlier worry deserved more attention.

Occasionally that review turns up something useful. Repeated review of a decision you can no longer change mostly produces more anxiety.

Here's a test: is this thinking likely to change anything I do next? If it isn't, what is it doing for you? Often it buys a few minutes of relief from uncertainty, or protection against the feeling of having missed something, and the relief rarely lasts long enough to justify the hours.

Your Body Is Involved Too

Chronic anxiety is physical. Muscle tension, stomach trouble, headaches, broken sleep, a racing heart, restlessness and fatigue commonly travel with it. Some people live at such a high level of activation that they only notice it when it drops, which helps explain why the first days of a vacation can feel worse than the week before it.

It's also why "just stop worrying" is such poor advice. Anxiety is a loop of attention, interpretation, behavior and physiology, each reinforcing the others, and deciding that the worry is excessive rarely interrupts it. Borkovec's research suggests worry can briefly dampen physiological arousal, which may be part of why the mind keeps reaching for it (Borkovec, Alcaine & Behar, 2004).

When Anxiety Becomes the Default

Has anxiety ever helped you? Probably. Do you still need as much of it as you're carrying?

A strategy can work and cost too much at the same time. Hypervigilance can prevent mistakes while making delegation nearly impossible. Perfectionism can produce excellent work while eating hours that add nothing to the final product. Worry can drive preparation and then keep running long after preparation has stopped helping.

Over time, functioning under pressure can become so familiar that calm feels wrong. A free Saturday produces restlessness. Finishing one project sends attention straight to the next. Vacation takes four days to settle into, if it settles at all.

At that point the anxiety isn't only responding to demands. It's become part of how you organize your days.

Therapy for Anxiety

Therapy can help sort the parts of your anxiety that still earn their keep from the habits that consume time and energy without improving anything. That usually means looking at what you believe anxiety does for you, catching the situations where worry turns repetitive, building tolerance for uncertainty, cutting back on checking and reassurance-seeking, and understanding why rest or lowered vigilance feels so uncomfortable.

For some people, the anxiety also traces back to earlier experiences where mistakes carried heavy consequences, approval depended on performance, or staying alert was necessary. Knowing that history can explain why the pattern took hold and why deciding to worry less hasn't worked.

The aim is to keep your judgment, ambition, preparation and conscientiousness while dropping the anxiety you don't need to sustain them. How long can you keep running the way you're running now?

Regina Abayev, JD, LMFT, provides individual therapy in Hermosa Beach and online throughout California, working with anxiety, perfectionism, overthinking, professional pressure, burnout and the difficulty of slowing down. Request an appointment.