When your mind is oriented towards productivity and towards succeeding, towards achieving above average things, something happens that is normal for everybody else but takes you by surprise: at some point you get tired.
It happens to you later than it happens to the people around you, you can carry far more than most, but even so, it happens. Hence the surprise.
And when you get tired, like anyone else, you try to stop for a while and rest. Except that, again unlike other people, you cannot.
You cannot sit still. It is hard for you even to slow down.
Because the moment you decide to, your mind starts being flooded with thoughts, you start feeling tension in your body, and that voice in your head starts shouting: come on. Come on. Let us move, let us do things, push, pull, get forward, feel some progress. Come on.
And the harder you force yourself to sit, the more the pressure rises. You start feeling guilt, you start feeling you are falling behind, you feel the weight of everything that could have been done in the eight minutes since you decided to take a little time for yourself.
It is hard for most people to understand.
But for you it is a reality you have to manage every day.
Some people feel pressure from too much work. You feel pressure when you stop.
Have you ever asked yourself why this happens?
Let us look at how it works.
You set out to do more than is humanly possible. Unrealistic expectations and effort stretch the nervous system to its maximum. You start feeling tired. You do not stop. The tiredness accumulates and you start feeling anxiety, tension, pressure, worry, overthinking. Thoughts and spirals you can no longer keep under control. Emotions that start to frighten you.
And because you do not have enough skills to manage this pressure internally, and it really is a lot of pressure, not what an ordinary person feels, you reflexively try to do what you have been wired to do your whole life.
A highly effective strategy in the short term, catastrophic over the medium and long term
You regulate your emotional state by not looking at what you feel, and you push on with the work and the projects. You press the accelerator.
You try to use action as the remedy for negative states. It is an excellent strategy for most people, who have a tendency to stagnate. They do something and immediately feel better.
Except we both know you are not like most people. You are the exact opposite.
Your problem is that you do not give yourself space to breathe.
You jump straight in, too quickly: come on, come on.
You press the accelerator hoping that this way you will numb the pain. Or, who knows, maybe it will even fix itself.
That gives you the perception of high productivity for a while and moves your attention off the things that genuinely matter. But it does not solve the underlying problem. It solves other problems around it, not the emotions, the thoughts and the pressure you were feeling.
And engines run at maximum revs quickly start having problems.
Because in reality the pressure does not disappear, the underlying problem is not solved. You have only dissipated it a little, for the moment.
It is like sweeping dirt under the carpet. We cannot see it any more, we can pretend we cleaned the room, but in reality all we did was push the problem further out in time.
There is a line I repeat often to clients who try to avoid difficult conversations and conflict at any cost:
Conflict delayed is conflict amplified.
In this case, it is an internal conflict. Inside you.
There are two parts in you
One that wants a quiet life, that wants to be able to be satisfied and grateful for everything you have already achieved. To enjoy life.
And another that measures itself against potential, against what could be. Against all the expectations you still hold about how things could look and what you should have achieved by now. Against performance, against settling for less than you know you can get from life.
I am here to tell you that these two parts can coexist. That it does not have to be a conflict.
And the first step is to stop pretending the conflict does not exist and that everything is okay. Everything is not okay. Problems do not disappear just because we stop looking at them.
I have often asked myself why the things above, which are so obvious to someone like me from the outside, are so hard to see and internalise for many of my clients.
They are highly intelligent, deeply analytical, problem solvers, pragmatic, doers. You would think it would not be that hard for them to see it.
And I think I have understood what fools them:
The fact that in the past anxiety and pressure were part of their life and they still managed to achieve big things has made them believe they succeeded BECAUSE of the anxiety, because of the pressure.
Somehow they have come to believe they need that state in order to perform. And there is a part of them, unconscious most of the time, that holds on to that suffering with its teeth. Because they are under the impression that if they drop their guard and relax, the results will stop coming.
For many, it is the biggest deception of their life. It is a logical error, a bias. They are confusing correlation with causation.
Imagine the surprise and the elation of the moment when they realise that everything they had done until then was done in spite of the pressure, in spite of the extreme overthinking, in spite of the anxiety. Not because of them.
And that there is another way.
It is possible to be calm and happy and to perform at the same time.
About the author
Andrei Roșca is a change strategist working one to one with founders, C level executives and senior managers who perform well on the outside while carrying a constant internal load. The work is nervous system regulation under real pressure, not motivation and not mindset. 13+ years of practice, 510+ clients, 8120+ individual sessions, through Whisper, Center for Strategic Change. Sessions are online, in English or in Romanian.
If this described your situation, start here: Coaching for overthinking executives. Or read more about my background and method.