Living on the Edge...Is Exhausting
For many successful people, anxiety isn't just an unpleasant feeling—it's a tool. It's the engine that fuels late nights, the meticulous attention to detail, and the drive to anticipate and neutralize every potential pitfall. A common, unspoken belief takes root: that this constant state of high alert is the very architecture of achievement. To let it go, you fear, would be to let go of your edge.
This perspective is understandable, but it's based on a false premise. It conflates productive, performance-enhancing stress with the corrosive, unproductive anxiety that drains cognitive resources and degrades well-being. The reality is that chronic anxiety doesn't sharpen your edge; it dulls your ability to think clearly, rest deeply, and connect authentically. It's a model of success built on a foundation of burnout.
Why We Have Anxiety: An Ancient System in a Modern World
Anxiety is a feature, not a bug, of the human nervous system. It's a survival mechanism designed for a world of immediate, physical threats. When our ancestors faced a predator, the sympathetic nervous system would trigger the "fight-or-flight" response, flooding the body with adrenaline and cortisol. This physiological surge was essential for survival, enabling a rapid, powerful response to acute danger.
The problem is that our brains haven't evolved as quickly as our environment. Today, the "threats" we perceive are often abstract and chronic: market volatility, project deadlines, or social dynamics. This is a classic example of what evolutionary psychologists call an ‘evolutionary mismatch’—where a survival trait from our ancestral past becomes maladaptive in our modern context. Our nervous system still reacts with a primitive, life-or-death alarm, leaving us in a sustained state of activation for threats that we can't fight or run from.
Productive Stress vs. Unproductive Anxiety
Distinguishing between what helps and what hurts is critical. The goal is not to eliminate stress but to harness its productive forms and mitigate the toxic ones.
This relationship between pressure and performance is well-documented and described by the Yerkes-Dodson Law. This foundational principle of psychology suggests that performance increases with arousal (stress) but only up to a certain point. Past this peak, performance declines sharply as the stress becomes overwhelming and impairs cognitive function. Productive stress keeps you at the peak of this curve; unproductive anxiety pushes you over the edge into the decline.
Productive Stress (Eustress): This is the state at the top of the curve—being challenged, focused, and engaged. It's a temporary state of heightened arousal that enhances cognitive function.
Example: The pressure of an impending deadline that sharpens your focus and allows you to complete a high-quality project efficiently. Your system is activated to meet a specific demand, and once the demand is met, it returns to equilibrium. The feeling is one of challenge, not dread.
Unproductive Anxiety (Distress): This is the state on the downward slope of the curve, where high arousal leads to disorganization and impairment. It's a chronic state of apprehension disproportionate to the actual threat.
Example: Lying awake at 3 a.m. replaying a minor mistake from a meeting, your heart racing. Or spending hours over-researching a simple decision until you're paralyzed. This mental activity doesn't lead to better outcomes; it leads to decision fatigue, avoidance, and physical exhaustion.
The Many Forms of Anxiety
Unproductive anxiety is not monolithic. It manifests in various ways, often overlapping:
Generalized Worry: A persistent feeling of free-floating dread and catastrophic thinking about various aspects of life (health, finances, career).
Social Anxiety: An intense fear of scrutiny or negative judgment that can make networking events or presentations feel like high-stakes performances.
Panic Attacks: Overwhelming, sudden episodes of terror with intense physical symptoms (shortness of breath, chest pain, dizziness) that can feel like a medical emergency.
Rumination & Obsessive Thinking: Anxiety often fuels rumination, a cognitive loop where the mind gets stuck on a problem or past event without resolution. This is the engine behind obsessive-compulsive (OCD) patterns, where intrusive, anxiety-provoking thoughts (obsessions) are neutralized by repetitive behaviors (compulsions). For many high-achievers, the "compulsion" can look like workaholism or an obsessive need for control.
Why Anxiety Is So Difficult to Address
Anxiety maintains its grip through deceptive cognitive feedback loops, but this is also rooted in our neurobiology. Groundbreaking research by neuroscientists like Joseph LeDoux has shown that threat information is processed by the amygdala, our brain’s emotional alarm center, before it even reaches the more rational prefrontal cortex. This can lead to what author Daniel Goleman termed an ‘amygdala hijack,’ where an emotional response is triggered before our logical mind has a chance to fully assess the situation.
This is why anxiety can feel so immediate and difficult to reason with. When you worry intensely about an outcome and it doesn't materialize, the relief that follows reinforces the preceding worry. Your brain's primitive survival system creates a powerful, albeit erroneous, superstition: the worry itself must have been protective. This cycle creates the illusion of control while consuming the mental bandwidth needed for creativity, strategic thinking, and genuine presence.
What To Do Instead
The goal isn't to eliminate anxiety—an impossible and ultimately unhelpful task. The goal is to shift your relationship with it, to learn how to distinguish the signal from the noise. True effectiveness doesn't come from living on the edge of burnout; it comes from a place of focused calm, psychological flexibility, and the ability to rest and recover.
Therapeutic work involves a careful examination of your unique relationship with anxiety. We explore its function in your life, identify its triggers, and unpack the beliefs that give it power. The process is about developing new cognitive and behavioral tools to step out of unproductive loops, allowing you to build a more sustainable, and ultimately more successful, way of thinking and being.
