“My anxiety is my superpower.”
I read that in a comment thread under a post about high-functioning anxiety. The post had hundreds of comments. Most of them agreed.
I understand the appeal completely. And I want to make an argument that does not take anything away from you.
Is anxiety what makes high achievers good?
No. Your ability makes you good. Your drive makes you good.
Anxiety is the tax you pay on both.
This is the part I say gently and directly to clients who arrive certain that the fear is the engine: you would still be brilliant without the three-in-the-morning ceiling-staring. You would still be thorough without the dread. The vigilance is not producing the excellence. It is riding on top of it, taking a cut.
And I have watched it proven, repeatedly. Clients drop the fear — through nervous system work and addressing the root — and keep their performance. Often they improve it. They become sharper, more creative and far more sustainable.
The proof is in the before and after: the same results, sometimes better results, at dramatically less personal cost.
We have taken a threat response, noticed that it correlates with success and concluded that it caused the success. It is one of the most expensive category errors a high performer can make.
What does the research actually say?
It separates two things that look identical from the outside.
A meta-analysis split perfectionism into excellence-seeking — the drive to do outstanding work — and failure-avoiding, which is the fear of making mistakes and harsh self-criticism about performance. Then it measured each against burnout.
Excellence-seeking came out at σ = 0.08. Non-generalizable. Essentially nothing.
Failure-avoiding came out at σ = 0.34.
Only the fear predicted burnout. The standards did not.
And the effect was strongest in the workplace, not in sport or education — researchers suspect because at work there is less social support and murkier agreement about what “good” even means.
So two lawyers can bill identical hours. One is building something. One is outrunning something. Only one of them ends up in my clinic.
There is a second finding that ought to end the debate. Researchers once modelled burnout and engagement as opposite ends of a single line. NIOSH now calls that an oversimplification: plenty of heavily engaged workers are at high risk of burnout or already inside it.
Loving your work is not protection. Your passion is not the evidence of health you think it is. It is the fuel.
What is the anxiety costing while I’m still performing?
This is what I find when I examine someone who insists nothing is wrong yet — someone still closing deals, still winning, still at the top of their game.
- A jaw that will not fully release and shoulders held in low-grade elevation
- Shallow breathing, even lying down, even when they tell me they are relaxed
- A thin Kidney pulse — the root already running low
- Sleep that happens but does not restore
- The afternoon crash, followed by wired-but-tired evenings
- An exaggerated startle response
- A subtle emotional flatness they have not connected to anything
Many of them have a cold lower back and wake to urinate at night while closing the biggest deals of their careers.
They are paying for their performance with Jing and Shen — their deep reserve and their spirit. Both are finite. Both are quiet about it until they are not.
This is the same picture that shows up further downstream as hamstrings that never let go no matter how much you stretch. The body braces what it is afraid to lose control of and it starts bracing long before you notice.
When does the superpower stop working?
There is a warning sign and it is catchable.
The wired-but-tired phase turns into flatness and disconnection. You stop feeling the wins. A deal closes and there is nothing there — you notice the absence of the feeling you expected.
Then creativity narrows. You can still execute but the ideas stop arriving. Recovery between efforts takes longer than it used to.
And the body starts speaking more clearly: the voice changes, the muscle guarding stops releasing, the hormones shift.
If you catch it here, the collapse can usually be avoided entirely. This is the window. Almost nobody uses it, because the performance is still there and the performance is what they are watching.
If you want to know which pattern is running underneath yours, the assessment takes four minutes.
Why does success make it worse instead of better?
Every promotion raises the stakes and the visibility. The fear of now I have more to lose intensifies.
I see clients become more anxious after big wins, not less. The identity has grown. The lifestyle has grown. And the underlying fear of “what if I can’t keep this up” has grown right alongside them.
This is the cruelty of the mechanism. The thing you believed would finally settle the fear — the promotion, the exit, the recognition — feeds it. Praise strengthens the pattern rather than easing it, because now there is more to protect.
Success without addressing the fear does not resolve burnout. It accelerates it.
That is why the crash so often arrives after the best year of someone’s life and why nobody sees it coming, including them. The fear grows in proportion to what you build. Unless you address the fear itself, the ceiling keeps rising and so does the fall.
What does high performance without fear feel like?
Most people reading this have never experienced it and cannot imagine wanting it. So let me be precise, because the imagination gap is the real obstacle.
It feels calm, clear and deeply satisfying.
The drive is still there. The excellence is still there. But it comes from a steady inner want to rather than a desperate must or else. That difference is not philosophical. You feel it in your chest.
Decisions come faster and they are better, because they are not being made by a threat response. Creativity flows more easily, because a system in survival mode narrows and a system in safety expands.
You recover properly between efforts, which means the next effort starts from full rather than from debt.
And this is the part clients tell me they did not anticipate: you get to enjoy the success while you are living it, instead of only fearing its loss.
One client described it as finally playing the game instead of running from losing.
Nobody is coming to take your edge. I want you to keep every bit of your ambition, every high standard, every ounce of the drive that got you here. That is yours and it always was.
I would just like you to stop paying for it in Jing.
The excellence was never the anxiety. It was you the whole time, working with a tax on top. Take the tax off and see what you are actually capable of — most people are startled by the answer and it is usually the fear underneath that has never been named out loud.
If you would like me to look at what yours is costing, you can book a discovery call here: https://tidycal.com/energyangel8
Sources
- NIOSH — What burnout is and is not — https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/learning/publichealthburnoutprevention/module-2/outline.html
- Maslach C, Leiter MP — Understanding the burnout experience, World Psychiatry 2016 — https://doi.org/10.1002/wps.20311
- Brandstätter V, Job V, Schulze B — Motivational incongruence and well-being at the workplace, Frontiers in Psychology 2016 — https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01153
- Gallup — Employee burnout, Part 1: The 5 main causes — https://www.gallup.com/workplace/237059/employee-burnout-part-main-causes.aspx