What Does High Functioning Anxiety Feel Like?
If you have high functioning anxiety, you’re someone who has accomplished a lot in your life but feeling good about yourself and feeling calm are both challenging. On the outside, you appear calm and confident. Inside, though, your mind is always filled with upsetting “what if” scenarios and self-critical thoughts. You rarely feel calm and able to focus, so you procrastinate – putting off tasks again and again. You have a lot of muscle tension, body aches, headaches and fatigue. You wonder if you’re even physically capable of relaxing. You feel stressed and overwhelmed all the time.
How Does High Functioning Anxiety Cause Task Avoidance?
You’d think that anxiety would make you want to get tasks done, right? Well, the problem isn’t so much that you don’t want to, it’s multiple types of feelings and fears that keep you paralyzed. Fears of a less-than-perfect product. Relentless negative self-talk that makes you lack the confidence to do the work.
When you’re quick to prioritize others’ needs, you push your own needs to the side, including your need to make progress on that personal goal or career-furthering project.
There are aspects of high-functioning anxiety that propel you forward and make you seem like you can do it all without breaking a sweat. However, it can also undermine your productivity due to:
- Impostor syndrome
- Perfectionism
- Fear of failure
- Fear of success
- Hidden feelings of self-doubt and a distracting, RELENTLESS inner critic
- Inability to relax enough to work calmly and productively
How Will I Know if High Functioning Anxiety is Severe Enough to Require Therapy?
Clues that it might be time to seek therapy for your anxiety:
- You feel constantly overwhelmed
- Procrastination of a life or career-enhancing project has reached a critical point
- You feel paralyzed even in the face of smaller tasks
- You feel terrible about yourself every day
I Can Help You to Break Free of Paralyzing Anxiety
The best way to address high functioning anxiety is to work with a therapist who is a specialist in this area. In our sessions together we’ll dig in and help you understand the roots of your anxiety and the reasons for the ways it shows up in your life every day.
In our sessions, I’ll put a lot of emphasis on the paralyzing effects of negative self-talk. Most of us have an inner critic, but if you have high-functioning anxiety, yours is extremely harsh and relentless. We’ll pull from cognitive-behavioral techniques to help you develop new habits of self-talk.
I’ll also help you to look at the role that past trauma or toxic relationships might play in your anxious thinking and behaviors. Through processing those experiences, we’ll help you ditch your avoidant tendencies and develop new ways to cope in your professional and personal life. You’ll find yourself feeling calmer, more confident, and better able to get things done.
Things That Might Hold You Back from Trying Therapy
The idea of taking time out to get help for yourself might make you feel self-indulgent or selfish. Also, if you’re used to doing it all without seeming to break a sweat, you might feel like asking for help from a therapist would feel embarrassing. Many high achievers with anxiety tell themselves that they should have figured out a way to push past their anxiety and function better by now on their own. Needing help feels like evidence of being a failure in some way.
If you’ve been having these thoughts about asking for help, let me say this: needing help doesn’t make you weak or incapable. I know how hard it can be to ask for help, but the truth is we all need help sometimes. Not being able to conquer chronic anxiety on your own isn’t a failing. It’s difficult to do without the help of a therapist who can help you understand it and manage it.
Benefits You Can Expect from Therapy for High Functioning Anxiety
Therapy for anxiety-rooted task avoidance will help you achieve:
- A calmer, more relaxed state of mind
- Progress on tasks and projects you’ve been avoiding
- Reduced feelings of impostor syndrome
- Greater ability to allow yourself time for self-care
- Increased self-understanding
- Improvements in your personal life and your career
- Improved self-esteem and self-confidence
So, if you want to stop anxiously avoiding tasks and start feeling better about yourself, I’d love to help. If you want to move forward on writing that grant or research paper, finishing that book draft, launching that new business, or reaching that personal life goal, I’d love to help you. If you’d like to feel relief from constant worry and self-criticism and get things done, I’d love to help. You deserve to achieve your goals and feel good about yourself.
Call me today and let’s get started on getting you out of the quicksand. You don’t have to keep sinking and feeling stuck. I can help.