The answer isn't simple — and it matters more than most people realize.

What we call the inner critic is the internal voice that evaluates, judges, and narrates your experience — usually in real time, usually without permission. Most people are aware they have one. Fewer people realize that it doesn’t sound the same for everyone. And almost nobody realizes that the version running in your head was specifically built for you — by your history, your relationships, and where you are in your journey right now.

That’s what we’re unpacking today.

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Meet the Monger

Within the inner critic, there are actually three distinct voices. This framework comes from Nancy Jane Smith’s book The Happier Approach — and when I first encountered it, even as a licensed clinical therapist who had spent years studying this work, something clicked that hadn’t clicked before.

The three voices are the Monger, the BFF, and the Biggest Fan. In my work with clients, I refer to that third voice as the Advocate — because that’s the language that tends to land most clearly in a coaching and clinical context. Same concept, slightly different framing. Full credit to Smith for the foundation this work is built on.

Today I want to focus on the Monger — because it’s the one most of my clients are living inside of without realizing it.

The Monger’s entire job is to prevent failure. It is the loudest, most relentless voice in the room. It shames you. It replays your mistakes. It tells you what you should have done differently, what could still go wrong, and why resting is never really an option. It genuinely believes that if it lets up for even one second, everything will fall apart.

And here’s the part that makes it so hard to work with: it thinks it’s protecting you.

It’s not trying to destroy you. It’s trying to keep you safe — using the only strategy it ever learned. Which is why simply telling it to stop has never worked. You can’t logic your way out of a protection response.

What you can do is learn to recognize it. Name it. And start to hear it differently.

If you want to go deeper on all three voices — and understand how they’re keeping you stuck in real time — I broke this down in full in Episode 2 of the Breaking Perfectionism series.

(Click the above image or click here.)

The Two Styles of the Monger

Based on where you are in your journey, different versions of the Monger show up. I want to identify the two that are most present for the perfectionist versus the recovering perfectionist — because throughout my own journey, I’ve heard mine differently at different points.

Sometimes direct. Sometimes subtle.

The direct Monger shows up when you touch one of your core insecurities — one you have believed or still do. It doesn’t ask. It already has a verdict and delivers it cleanly. A lot of high achievers grew up with this style running internally because they learned early that pressure and criticism kept them performing. The Monger absorbed that lesson.

Be hard on yourself before someone else gets the chance.
Get ready for the criticism and objections.
Protect yourself and stay aware.

The subtle Monger is sneakier. Since doing my own work, I’ve had to stay more vigilant about this one — not because it’s louder, but because it’s quieter. It plants seeds of doubt rather than making declarations. It’s common in overthinkers. In ruminators. In the people who can’t quite put their finger on why they feel vaguely wrong about something, but the feeling won’t leave.

Direct: You failed. You messed up.
Subtle: Something bad is probably coming. You should probably brace.

The goal doesn’t change for either version — prevent you from experiencing rejection, failure, or criticism. But the delivery is completely different. And if you’ve been waiting for an inner critic that sounds a certain way, you might be missing the one that’s actually running your life.

What’s more important is understanding what’s driving it — and how you got here.

The Meet Your Monger guide is your starting point for understanding the loudest voice in your head — where it came from, what it's actually trying to do, and how to start hearing yourself underneath it. It's available as a PDF you can sit with and a ten-minute audio recording made for the moments in between. Because insight shouldn't have to wait for a quiet house and a free afternoon.

(Click the image for the link or click here.)

It Doesn't Start the Same Way for Everyone

The Monger’s style isn’t random. It’s shaped by your earliest caregivers, by what got praised and what got punished, by the environment you learned to navigate before you had any real choice in the matter.

We learn how to talk to ourselves by watching the people around us and the experiences we move through.

Sit with that for a second. Think about the adults who raised you. How did they speak to themselves when they made a mistake? What happened in your house when something went wrong? Was disappointment loud or quiet? Was love conditional on performance, or did it feel steady regardless?

The Monger absorbed all of it. It built itself from that data. And then it went to work — trying to protect you from ever experiencing the worst version of those early moments again.

This is why two people can walk into my practice with nearly identical presenting concerns — perfectionism, burnout, high-functioning anxiety — and their inner critics sound completely different. Because they didn’t come from the same place. They didn’t learn the same lessons. And they aren’t carrying the same wounds.

The Stage You're In Changes Everything

Here’s something I’ve noticed across years of clinical and coaching work: the Monger doesn’t just sound different based on your history. It shifts based on where you are in your life.

Not your age — your stage.

There’s the stage of early striving. Pushing hard to prove something. To earn worth, establish identity, demonstrate that you belong in the rooms you’re fighting to get into. The Monger in this stage is relentless and achievement-focused. More. Faster. Better. You’re not there yet.

There’s the stage of sustained high performance — where you’ve built the thing, and now the job is to keep it standing. Career, family, relationships, health, reputation — all of it, simultaneously. The Monger here sounds different. Less prove yourself, and more don’t let anything slip. The pressure isn’t about becoming. It’s about maintaining.

Then there’s the stage of questioning. Where the thing you built starts to feel heavy in ways you didn’t anticipate. Where you start asking what all of it was actually for. The Monger in this stage can be the most disorienting — because it’s no longer just pushing you forward. It’s fighting your attempts to slow down. You can’t stop now. What would that mean? Who are you if you’re not this?

And then the stages of reflection. Of physical change. Of shifting priorities. Of realizing that the goalpost has moved so many times that you’re no longer sure you ever chose it in the first place.

The Monger evolves with you. Which means the work of identifying it has to evolve too.

Your Type Shapes Your Critic

If you’ve taken the perfectionism type quiz — and if you haven’t, the link is below — you already have a framework for understanding which type of perfectionism you’re working with.

What I’ve started to notice is that your type doesn’t just describe your perfectionism patterns. It also shapes how your Monger tends to show up.

The Protector’s Monger is vigilant and anticipatory. Always scanning. Always preparing for the thing that hasn’t happened yet.

The Pursuer’s Monger is performance-focused and comparative. Watching the gap between where you are and where you think you should be.

The Fawn’s Monger is relational and approval-seeking. Deeply attuned to how others are responding, and ruthless in its interpretation of any signal that you’ve fallen short.

The Self-Controller’s Monger is internal and suffocating. Monitoring your own emotional responses, your impulses, your needs — and punishing any sign of losing grip.

The Over-Responsible One’s Monger is exhausting in a very specific way. It never lets you put something down. Because putting it down means something might break. And if something breaks, that’s on you.

The Seeker’s Monger is existential. It questions the foundation. Is this even the right thing? Is this even the right life?

None of these is worse than another. But each one requires a different kind of listening — because if you’re waiting for your critic to sound the way someone else described theirs, you might miss yours entirely.

Take The Quiz Here

When the Monger Was Trained by Chaos

There’s a thread I want to pull on carefully here, because it’s one I see constantly with my clients and rarely see addressed in perfectionism content.

I’ve been reading Stop Caretaking the Borderline or Narcissist by Margalis Fjelstad — recommended by a client, now being read alongside another — and what Fjelstad describes about the caretaker role maps almost perfectly onto what I see in high-achieving perfectionists who grew up in or have been in relationships with significant personality dysregulation.

When love is unpredictable, the nervous system learns to work overtime. When approval is inconsistent — sometimes warm, sometimes withholding, sometimes punishing — the child (and later the adult) learns to perform their way toward safety. To anticipate. To manage. To make themselves as useful and as unthreatening as possible.

The Monger that develops in this environment isn’t just a productivity coach gone rogue. It has become a survival system. And it is relentless in a way that standard perfectionism frameworks don’t fully account for.

My clients who come from these backgrounds — who are navigating new boundaries, learning to prioritize their own needs for what might be the first time, working to stop giving themselves away for the sake of keeping someone else regulated — they often have the hardest time identifying their Monger. Not because it’s subtle. But because it’s been the background noise for so long that it sounds like their own thoughts.

It doesn’t feel like a critic. It feels like reality.

Learning to hear it in that context isn’t just inner work. It’s a reclamation.

Start Here

If any of this landed — if you read something and thought that’s mine — I made something for you.

The Meet Your Monger guide walks you through how to start identifying your inner critic patterns. What it sounds like. Where it shows up. And how to begin creating just enough distance to hear yourself underneath it.

When you grab it, it will land directly in your inbox in two formats — because I get how life is:

A PDF for the person who wants to sit with it, annotate it, and come back to it.

And an audio recording — ten minutes — made for the drive, the walk, the folding laundry that needs to happen anyway. Because the busy overachiever who wants change but has a full schedule deserves a resource that meets them where they actually are.

Get the Guide & Audio Recording Here

Tomorrow we’re going into the high achiever’s trap. Burnout. Overfunctioning. And why willpower alone will never be enough to break the cycle.

If you’ve ever pushed through when you should have stopped, kept going when your body was asking you to rest, and then crashed in a way that confused even you — that one’s for you.

Or maybe that’s just me and what I am doing as I rewatch them.

But these characters are functioning from strategies they’ve learned, with a nervous system that’s doing the only thing it knows how to do to keep someone safe.

Here’s the thing about a survival strategy: it doesn’t ask permission. It just runs.

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I made you something

I built a quiz — What Type of Perfectionist Are You? — that maps to six types, each one tied to a character whose entire arc is built around the exact pattern they're carrying. If you haven't taken it yet, this post will make a lot more sense once you have.

Take The Quiz

Here's a closer look at each one — and the homework I'd like you to try based on the character you get.

The 6 Types of Perfectionism

The Protector — Marlin, Finding Nemo

Marlin doesn’t believe vigilance is anxiety. He believes it’s love.

Every overprotective decision he makes is in service of keeping Nemo safe — and from the inside, it doesn’t feel like fear. It feels like responsibility. Like the only sane response to a world that took someone from him once already.

If you’re a Protector, you plan three steps ahead of every possible disaster. You triple-check. You scan rooms, relationships, and outcomes for what could go wrong before anyone else even clocks it. People call you prepared. What they don’t see is how rarely your nervous system actually gets to rest, because there’s always something else to anticipate.

Somewhere along the way, staying vigilant felt like the only way to keep the people you love from getting hurt. That’s not a flaw. That was a system doing its job.

The work isn’t about lowering your guard. It’s learning the difference between vigilance and actual safety — and finding out what it feels like to trust uncertainty instead of trying to outmaneuver it.

Try this: Pick one thing this week you’d normally triple-check, and check it only once. Notice what happens in your body in the gap between “done” and “certain.” That gap — uncomfortable as it is — is where the work lives.

The Pursuer — Lightning McQueen, Cars

Lightning crosses the finish line and immediately starts thinking about the next race.

If you’re a Pursuer, you know this feeling intimately. You’re driven, focused, and you finish what you start — but the satisfaction never quite lands. You set the next goal before you’ve let yourself feel the last one.

Somewhere early on, achieving became the most reliable way to feel okay. Not ambition — a nervous system that found the one lever that reliably quieted the noise.

The work is learning to let a win actually land. To feel proud without the next finish line already in view.

Try this: The next time you finish something — a project, a task, a goal — set a timer for two minutes before you let yourself move to the next thing. Just sit in it. Let it be done. Notice how badly your brain wants to skip ahead.

The Fawn — Isabela, Encanto

Isabela is perfect. Flawless flowers, flawless posture, flawless everything — until the cracks show, and what’s underneath isn’t perfection at all. It’s exhaustion from performing it.

If you’re a Fawn, you read the room before you read yourself. You know what everyone else needs before you’ve checked in with what you want. Your empathy is real. So is the cost: your own needs got quieter and quieter, until you stopped noticing they were there at all.

Somewhere along the way, being agreeable became how you stayed loved, stayed safe, stayed in. That isn’t weakness. It is adaptation.

The work is learning that your needs aren’t an inconvenience — and that the people worth keeping won’t disappear the moment you stop shrinking.

Try this: Next time someone asks your opinion on something small — where to eat, what to watch — answer honestly before you check how it’ll land. Practice the muscle on low-stakes decisions before you need it for the big ones.

The Self-Controller — Elsa, Frozen

“Conceal, don’t feel.” Elsa’s entire arc is built on the belief that her feelings are dangerous — that if she lets them out, she’ll hurt the people she loves.

If you’re a Self-Controller, you’re composed under pressure in a way that makes other people lean on you. What they don’t see is what it costs you to stay that controlled, that consistently. Suppression isn’t the same as regulation. The feelings that don’t get expressed don’t disappear — they just go somewhere else in your body.

Somewhere along the way, big emotions became a problem to manage instead of information to listen to.

The work is reconnecting with what your body’s been trying to tell you — and discovering that feeling things fully doesn’t make you fall apart. It’s what keeps you from it.

Try this: Name one feeling out loud today — to yourself, or to someone you trust — before you’ve fully processed or “figured out” what to do with it. Practice letting it exist messy and unfinished, instead of waiting until it’s tidy enough to share.

The Over-Responsible One — Moana

Moana doesn’t get asked to save her people. She decides she has to, because she believes no one else will.

If you’re an Over-Responsible One, you’re the planner, the fixer, the one everyone calls when something goes wrong — and you show up every time, not because you were asked, but because it doesn’t feel like a choice. Your reliability is real. So is the resentment that quietly builds underneath it, confusing because you genuinely love the people you’re carrying it for.

Somewhere along the way, being needed became how you knew you belonged.

The work is learning that letting other people carry their own weight doesn’t make you less capable. It makes you human.

Try this: Find one thing this week that’s currently yours to carry, and hand it to someone else — fully, without managing how they do it. Let it be imperfect in their hands. Notice the urge to step back in.

The Seeker — Jack Skellington, The Nightmare Before Christmas

Jack has mastered Halloween. He’s the best at what he does, admired by everyone in his world — and he still feels empty. Still convinced that the next thing, the next reinvention, will finally be the one that satisfies him.

If you’re a Seeker, you’ve accomplished real things, and there’s still a quiet restlessness underneath all of it. The chase has become the point. No destination ever quite delivers what you hoped it would.

Somewhere along the way, meaning got tangled up in striving. Stillness started to feel dangerous — like if you stopped moving, you’d have to face who you are without the pursuit.

The work is learning to sit with enough. Not as settling. As the arrival.

Try this: The next time restlessness hits, and you feel the pull toward something new, pause for 24 hours before acting on it. Ask what you’re moving toward, versus what you’re moving away from. Let the answer be uncomfortable.

You’re turn. Which one did you get?

Most people see themselves in more than one of these. That’s normal — perfectionism is rarely one clean pattern. But there’s usually one that runs the show more than the others.

If you haven’t taken the quiz yet, now’s the time.

Take the Quiz

And when you do — come back and tell me which one you got. Drop it in the comments. I’d love to know which character resonated most, and whether the homework felt impossible or surprisingly doable.

If something in this piece landed differently than you expected, or you recognized yourself in a type you weren’t anticipating — I want to hear that too. Those are usually the most interesting ones.

You can also email me directly. I read every single one and personally reply.

This is the work. And it starts with just noticing.

Her favorite movie right now is The Nightmare Before Christmas. I’ve always been a huge Tim Burton fan, so watching her fall in love with it is genuinely one of my dreams coming true. She likes Cinderella fine. But she loves Jack Skellington — and, weirdly, the werewolf, who has maybe four lines in the entire film.

The other day she asked me to play the soundtrack on my phone while we played. I did. And when the song Jack’s Lament came on, I heard it completely differently than I ever had before.

Jack has everything he could want. He’s the best at what he does. He’s respected, admired, accomplished. And he still feels empty. Still feels like something’s missing. Still needs everything to be just right — like if he can just get it right, the feeling will finally go away.

I knew exactly what that felt like. I’d just never heard it set to music before.

What I Thought Would Save Me

I’ve spent my career around death and dying. I’ve sat with families in their worst moments more times than I can count.

Then, in a single stretch of time, I found myself on the other side of that — losing person after person I loved, faster than I could process any of it.

And I did what I’d always done with anything hard: I researched. I structured. I tried to find the right framework, the right next step — the version of grieving I could execute well.

It didn’t work. It couldn’t work. Grief doesn’t follow a structure. It doesn’t wrap in a bow. It doesn’t care how prepared you are or how many books you’ve read on the subject.

And perfectionism demands exactly the opposite of everything grief actually requires: order, control, a clear and correct next move.

It never mattered how much information I had. What mattered was that I was running a nervous system that had never been taught how to settle. How to be present in being imperfect. How to just be in something, instead of managing it.

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Why Knowing Better Didn't Make Me Do Better

Here’s the part that took me the longest to understand — and it’s the same part I now spend most of my time helping clients understand too:

People can know everything there is to know about perfectionism — the patterns, the root causes, the cognitive distortions — and still not shift. You can still feel the same harsh internal narrative. Still can’t regulate a nervous system that’s been running the same survival script for decades.

Concepts don’t regulate a nervous system. Rapport and action will.

That’s part of why coaching works in a way that information alone never can. You’re working with someone who understands — who doesn’t flinch or shame you for feeling rigid, for being stuck in fight or flight, for feeling embarrassed by your own humanness. You’re gaining the tools to actually connect your mind and body, so you can finally tell the difference between how you want to respond and how you were taught to react protectively.

You show up imperfectly. You lay it all out on the table. And you get reflection back — not judgment, not a fix-it list, just small, honest points of where the distortion lives, where the reaction could shift, so the way you feel — mentally and physically — actually starts to change.

Eventually, you look back and feel something unexpected: gratitude. Not despite how far you’ve had to come, but because of it. And you stop sacrificing more of yourself to prove your worth to other people.

The First Part of My Story

I built a six-part video series about everything I had to face and shift to get there. The realizations. The truth I didn’t want to look at. The bold, uncomfortable changes I had to get personal with to actually heal — not perform healing, actually do it.

The first episode is live now, and it starts exactly where this piece started: with the year my perfectionism and my grief could not share a room.

Watch Episode 1

Why I’m Telling You This

I’m sharing this because I believe we make real change when we can see ourselves in the reflection of someone else’s transformation. Not by identifying as a perfectionist. Not by reading all the books. But by actually changing the way you feel — from the inside out.

It isn’t always comfortable to lay this out the way I just did. But I hope that when you watch it, and you see yourself in any part of it, you come to recognize that change is real. That your life doesn’t have to be internally pressured by the same script that’s been running for years.

Whether it was trauma that brought you here, performance drive, burnout, high-functioning anxiety — or just a quiet curiosity about what it might feel like to live differently — I’m really glad you’re here.

And I deeply hope that sharing this story becomes part of the change you want to see in your own life.

A Present for You

I also made you something — and yes, it’s Jack’s fault.

More information was never going to stop the maladaptive perfectionist behaviors. But it can give you a starting point: a way to actually name what you’re looking at, and how it’s showing up in your life.

So I built a quiz. There are six types, each one tied to a different Disney character — including, of course, Jack.

Take the quiz to find out yours

One Last Thing

Perfectionism convinces you that you have to have it all figured out before you start. That you need the right framework, the right moment, the right version of yourself ready to do the work.

You don’t.

You just need a place to begin. The quiz is two minutes. The video is waiting in your inbox. And if something in this piece made you pause — even for a second — that pause is worth paying attention to.

That’s where it starts. Not with a perfect plan. Just with noticing.

And if you feel like it — drop a comment and tell me which type you got. Or email me directly. I read every single one and personally reply. I'd genuinely love to know which character you see yourself in, and what landed for you.

Also, keep an eye out for the second article.

In the next piece, I'm breaking down all six perfectionist types — the Disney characters behind them, what each pattern actually looks like in real life, and one thing to try if you recognize yourself in any of them.

A warm sensation of gratitude, validation, and feeling heard swept through my chest. The dishes were put away. My sourdough jar was soaking in a bowl of water — the way I always do it before attempting to scrape off the inevitable plague of dough buildup. The rest of the house was a hurricane of toys, clothing, random unused diapers, dog toys, and tumbleweeds of fur from our two huskies in full shedding season.

I gave my husband the biggest smile.

He immediately said: “I’m sorry the house is a mess.”

I laughed — because I’ve been on the other side of that comment far too many times. I hugged him and said: “I don’t think you realize how happy it made me that you separated the laundry and cleaned the sourdough jar. The rest of the house looks like you and our daughter had the best day.”

He didn’t know he’d done anything significant. He was apologizing for what he’d missed. He had no idea that what he’d actually done — the small, specific, almost invisible things — had landed in my chest like relief.

That’s what it’s like to love a recovering perfectionist. And that’s what it’s like to be one.

We notice everything. We feel everything. And we are often the worst at saying any of it out loud.

This is our attempt.

This isn’t a list of demands. It isn’t a diagnosis or an excuse. It’s the things we’ve been carrying quietly — in our relationships, in our bodies, in the gap between what we feel and what we know how to say — that we’ve never quite found the words for. Until now.

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If something has a home, please keep it there — and tell us if you move it.

This one sounds small. It isn’t.

For a recovering perfectionist, the physical environment isn’t just about tidiness or preference. It’s about nervous system regulation. When things are where they belong, there’s a low-level sense of order that the brain can rest against. When something is moved — without warning, without context — that order disappears, and the brain has to work to find it again. It sounds disproportionate. It feels disproportionate, even to us. But it’s real.

We’re not asking you to never touch anything. We’re asking for the two-second conversation: “Hey, I moved the —” That’s it. That’s the whole thing. Those two seconds are the difference between our nervous system staying regulated and spending the next twenty minutes retracing our steps, wondering if we’re losing our minds.

It’s not about control. It’s about the cost of chaos on a brain that is already working overtime to manage itself.

Please don’t reorganize our things.

This is the cousin of the one above, and it comes from the same place — but it carries a little more weight.

When you reorganize our things — even helpfully, even with the best intentions — what we often hear, even when we know that isn’t what you meant, is: the way you do this is wrong. And for someone who has spent a lifetime managing an inner critic that says exactly that on loop, that message lands harder than you know.

We also lose the thread. The system in our head that knew where everything was gets disrupted, and rebuilding it takes more energy than it probably should. Not because we’re rigid. Because the system was doing a job, and now it has to start over.

If something feels genuinely chaotic and you want to help, ask us first. “Would it be helpful if I organized this?” gives us the ability to say yes, or to say “I actually have a system, let me show you.” Either way, we feel like a partner instead of a project.

Sometimes the quiet isn’t about you.

This might be the most important one.

When we go quiet — when we pull inward, when we seem distant or unreachable — the instinct for the people who love us is to ask what’s wrong. To try to fix it. To take it personally when we can’t explain it.

But sometimes the quiet is regulation. Sometimes the internal landscape is loud enough that adding words to it is genuinely beyond what we can do in that moment. We’re not shutting you out. We’re managing something — a thought spiral, a sensory overload, an emotional weight that hasn’t found its shape yet — and we need to do that managing before we can come back to you.

We are not looking for a solution. Nothing is wrong between us. We are fighting a battle that is entirely internal, and the kindest thing you can do is let us fight it without making us manage your worry about it at the same time.

The most loving thing you can say in those moments isn’t “What’s wrong?” It’s “I’m here when you’re ready.”

And then actually be there. Without the follow-up questions. Without the timeline. Just there.

Sometimes we’re too honest. We’re working on it. We need grace.

This is the one we carry the most shame about.

The perfectionist brain is wired for precision. It notices the gap between what is and what could be, constantly, automatically, without being asked. And sometimes — more often than we’d like — that observation comes out of our mouths before we’ve had a chance to run it through any kind of filter.

We are not trying to criticize you. We are not keeping score. We are not saying you aren’t enough. We are saying what our brain noticed, in the unguarded moment before we could stop it, because the gap between thought and speech is something we are genuinely, actively working to close.

It doesn’t always feel like that on the receiving end. We know. And we’re sorry for the times it’s landed as something sharper than we meant.

What we’re asking for isn’t permission to be careless with your feelings. It’s the grace to be imperfect at the very thing we hold everyone — including ourselves — to the highest standard on. Which is, if you think about it, probably the most perfectionist struggle of all.

We are learning. Slowly, imperfectly, in the way that all real learning happens. We just need you to know that the learning is happening — even when it doesn’t look like it yet.

We need you to remind us that you love us for our imperfections.

Not for what we produce. Not for how well we manage things. Not for the laundry system or the sourdough jar or the way we remember every appointment for every person in the family.

For us. The underneath version. The one that is tired and uncertain and sometimes gets it wrong and is quietly terrified that getting it wrong will cost us something we can’t afford to lose.

Recovering perfectionists often grew up in environments where love felt conditional — where performance was the currency and approval was the reward. We learned early that being enough meant doing enough. And even when we intellectually know that isn’t how love works, the nervous system hasn’t always gotten the memo.

So when you tell us — unprompted, specifically, in the ordinary moments rather than only the big ones — that you love us as we are, not as we’re trying to be, it reaches a place that a lot of other things don’t reach.

The sourdough jar moment worked because it wasn’t about perfection. It was about being known. Being seen in the small specific details of how we move through our own life. That’s what we’re hungry for, more than any of us know how to say.

We need you to share the mental load. Not take it over. Share it.

The mental load — the running inventory of everything that needs to happen, the appointments and the meal plans and the social calendar and the things that are running low and the things that need to be scheduled before the other thing can happen — lives almost entirely in our heads.

And we have complicated feelings about that.

Part of us keeps it there because we don’t trust that it will be handled the way it needs to be handled. Part of us keeps it there because releasing it feels like losing control over the one thing we feel competent to manage. And part of us is absolutely exhausted by it and has no idea how to put it down without everything falling apart.

What sharing the mental load actually looks like isn’t taking over. It’s asking. It’s noticing. It’s saying “I’ll handle dinner this week” without being asked, and then actually handling it — not in a way that generates three follow-up questions that we have to answer to make it happen. It’s building a system together, one where the invisible work gets distributed not because we demanded it but because you saw it.

We don’t need you to be perfect at this. We need you to be in it with us. There’s a difference, and it’s everything.

My husband separated the laundry the way I do it. He soaked the sourdough jar. He didn’t do it perfectly — the house was a hurricane. But he was in it. He was paying attention. He knew, without being told, what mattered to me and he did those things.

That’s the whole thing. That’s what we’re asking for.

Not perfection. Just presence. Just the evidence, in the small, specific moments, that you see us — the real us, the one underneath the systems and the standards and the relentless forward motion — and you’re still here.

Closure

I wrote this for every recovering perfectionist who has sat across from me — in therapy, in coaching, in the space between where you are and where you’re trying to get to. This is a resource of love and compassion for both of you: the one still learning how to ask for what they need, and the partner still learning how to give it without being told exactly how.

I hope it feels like something you can share with your people. And I hope I did justice to the words you’ve trusted me with — the frustrations, the fears, the things you’ve never quite known how to say out loud.

You gave me the words. I just finally wrote them down.

If you’re a recovering perfectionist and this felt like finally being understood — or if you love one and this felt like finally having the translation — I’d love to hear from you. Message me. I read and respond to every single one personally.

And if you’re ready to do the deeper work — on the patterns, the nervous system piece, the relationships, the version of yourself that exists underneath the perfectionism — I work with both men and women on exactly this. I’m a recovering perfectionist married to one. I understand this from the inside out, professionally and personally.

A free strategy call is available if you want a real conversation. No pressure, no pitch. Just an honest conversation.

Book Here

She wasn’t asking a question. She wasn’t sharing her experience. She was here to be right.

“ALL perfectionism is related to trauma. End of story.”

I want to be honest with you about what happened when I read that.

I took it personally.

And I’m going to tell you exactly why — because it wasn’t ego. It wasn’t defensiveness. It was because that statement is incorrect. And I have over a decade, hundreds of client hours, and a significant portion of my own nervous system proving otherwise.

I have read the research. I have studied perfectionism from the clinical side, the coaching side, and the deeply personal side. I have sat across from hundreds of people — on a couch, on a screen — who have handed me their stories and said this thing is ruining my life. I have watched perfectionism quietly dismantle careers, relationships, and bodies.

Including my own.

My perfectionism — layered on top of burnout and grief — contributed to an autoimmune condition. My body eventually said what my mind refused to: this is not sustainable. There was, and is, trauma woven through my story. I won’t pretend otherwise.

But here’s what that commenter’s tidy little “end of story” erases:

The client who sits down across from me and says, “Nothing specifically happened. There was no event, no moment I can point to. But my brain is stuck in this loop where nothing feels good enough, and I don’t know how to get out.”

I’ve heard that story more times than I can count. And a TikTok I made about this exact topic received 334,000 views — which tells me I’m not the only one who needed to hear it said out loud.

Not all perfectionism stems from trauma. And collapsing the two does a real disservice to the people who are suffering without knowing why.

So What Are the Two Types?

Perfectionism, at its core, is a pattern of thinking and behaving organized around the belief that you are only acceptable under specific conditions. But how that belief forms — and what it's protecting — varies significantly.

Type One: The Control-Based Perfectionist

This is the one most people picture when they hear “perfectionism and trauma.”

This type develops when the nervous system learns, usually early, that control equals safety. The environment was unpredictable. The emotional climate was unstable. The rules kept changing. And somewhere in the middle of that, a younger version of you figured out that if you could just manage enough variables — keep the house quiet, get perfect grades, never cause a problem — you could stay safe.

The perfectionism wasn’t a personality quirk. It was a survival strategy.

These are the clients who describe a low-level hum of anxiety when things feel out of order. Who reorganize when they’re overwhelmed. Whose bodies tighten when plans change unexpectedly. Who cannot rest in a room that isn’t right, in a relationship that isn’t resolved, in a situation they can’t manage.

The control is the point. Because for them, at some point, it had to be.

Type Two: The Performance-Based Perfectionist

This one flies under the radar — and it’s the one that the commenter’s statement erases.

This type doesn’t necessarily come from a significant event or a destabilizing environment. It comes from a belief system, often absorbed gradually, that worth is contingent on output.

If I perform well, I have value. If I fail, I don’t.

There’s no identifiable wound. No clear origin story. Sometimes it came from a well-meaning environment that heavily praised achievement. Sometimes it came from a competitive atmosphere where excellence was simply the baseline. Sometimes it came from internal wiring that nobody fed — it just grew on its own.

These clients often struggle most with the diagnosis, so to speak. Because they look at the trauma-based narrative and think: that’s not me. Nothing happened. Nobody hurt me. I just... can’t stop.

And so they add shame to the pile. Not only is nothing ever good enough — there’s also no explanation for why.

That’s the cruelest part of performance-based perfectionism: the suffering feels unearned.

A Note on IFS — Because You've Probably Seen It on Your Feed

If you spend any time in therapy-adjacent corners of the internet, you’ve likely heard about Internal Family Systems — IFS. And you may have seen therapists talk about the perfectionist part.

Here’s the framework, briefly: IFS operates on the idea that we’re not one unified self but a collection of parts — each one developed for a reason, each one trying to protect us in the only way it knew how. The perfectionist part, in IFS language, is considered a manager — a protector that developed to keep you safe from criticism, failure, or shame, often long before you had any conscious say in the matter.

The important piece here — and the reason I bring it up — is this: IFS doesn’t ask you to destroy the perfectionist part. It asks you to get curious about what it’s protecting.

That question — what is this part guarding? — leads to very different answers depending on which type of perfectionism you’re dealing with.

For the control-based perfectionist, the part is often protecting a younger version of you that learned chaos was dangerous. For the performance-based perfectionist, it’s often protecting a core belief that without the output, there’s nothing worth keeping.

Same part. Different wound. Different work.

Which is exactly why this distinction isn’t academic. It’s clinical. It matters for how you heal.

Why This Isn't One-Stop Shopping

This is where I want to be direct with you — and a little shameless about it, because I think it actually serves you.

Perfectionism at the maladaptive level is not a mindset problem. It’s not something a good book, a journaling prompt, or a motivational reel can reach. And it’s not something that resolves on its own just because you’ve identified which type you are.

The reason I work at the intersection of licensed clinical therapy and coaching is because perfectionism requires both lanes.

The clinical piece matters because maladaptive perfectionism is frequently entangled with anxiety, depression, OCD patterns, disordered eating, burnout, and yes — trauma. A coach without clinical training may help you set better goals or improve your habits. But if they don’t know how to recognize what’s underneath those patterns — or how to navigate what comes up when you start pulling on them — they can inadvertently keep you stuck, or worse, destabilize something that needs more careful handling.

The coaching piece matters because insight alone doesn’t create change. You can understand your perfectionism completely and still not know how to live differently. The work of actually rewiring your day-to-day functioning — the boundaries, the inner critic, the self-talk, the relationships — that requires practical, supported, forward-moving work alongside the deeper processing.

You deserve someone who can hold both. Someone who knows when to go deeper and when to help you take the next concrete step. Someone who understands the difference between the two types of perfectionism you just read about — and knows that one path forward does not fit all.

That’s not me being self-promotional. That’s me telling you that the stakes of this work are real, and you shouldn’t have to figure out alone whether the person guiding you actually understands the landscape.

Here's What I Want You to Walk Away With

If you’ve been running on the belief that if I don’t perform well, I fail — and if I fail, I’m not enough — I want you to know that the absence of a traumatic event does not make your experience less valid.

Your suffering doesn’t need an origin story to be real.

And the pattern you’re living in — the one that makes rest feel wrong, good enough feel impossible, and failure feel like an identity — that pattern can be changed.

Not by finding the right diagnosis. Not by searching harder for the wound.

By doing the actual work of learning who you are when you stop performing for everyone, including yourself.

If you recognize yourself in either of these patterns — and you’re ready to understand which one is running your life and work with someone who knows the difference — I offer free strategy calls.

It’s not a pitch. It’s a real conversation. One where you get to be seen clearly, maybe for the first time in a long time.

Book your complimentary strategy call here.

Nichole Coyne is a licensed clinical therapist and coach for high achievers and perfectionists. Her work focuses on rewiring the thought patterns and nervous system responses that keep driven people stuck, exhausted, and running through their lives instead of living them.

Functional freeze. Dorsal vagal shutdown. Perfectionism paralysis. These are not fringe concepts. They are not rare clinical presentations that only show up in the most extreme cases. They are happening — right now, quietly, invisibly — inside some of the most high-functioning, high-achieving, externally successful people you know.

People who look completely fine.

People who are still showing up, still delivering, still being who everyone around them needs them to be.

And the reason we’re not talking about it enough is partly that the people experiencing it are the last ones to name it.

High achievers are, by nature and by training, relentlessly forward-facing.

They push.

They perform.

They optimize.

The pressure to keep going, keep succeeding, keep holding it all together isn’t just external — it’s internalized so deeply that it functions as a constant background hum. And that pressure, over time, doesn’t just create stress.

It becomes a catalyst. A physiological one. The pressure itself starts producing the very symptoms it’s trying to outrun.

There’s something else worth understanding about this population specifically: perfectionists and high achievers tend to live from the neck up. The mind is where they feel most at home — analyzing, planning, problem-solving, optimizing. The body is, at best, a vehicle. At worst, an inconvenience. They’ve spent years overriding physical signals in service of the next goal. Fatigue. Hunger. The tight chest before a hard conversation. The low hum of dread on Sunday nights. These signals get filed under ‘manageable’ and pushed through.

Until they aren’t.

Because the body keeps score whether you’re paying attention or not, and when the nervous system finally starts responding to years of accumulated pressure — when functional freeze or perfectionism paralysis moves in — the person experiencing it often has no framework for what’s happening. They just know that something is wrong. That they should be able to do the thing. They used to be able to do the thing. And that, somewhere between who they were and who they are right now, something got lost.

One of my clients described it this way, and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since:

“I can literally do it. But I can’t do it. Nothing is bringing me joy. I’m afraid of making a mistake or sounding like a burden for even needing help or not doing it correctly. I continuously find things that I will succeed at to avoid the difficult things — the things that will cause change that I have to sustain.”

That’s not a mood. That’s not a bad week. That is the fingerprint of two very specific, very real patterns operating simultaneously. And once you can see them clearly, everything changes.

So let’s talk about them like we’re starting from scratch. Because if you’ve never had these words before, you deserve to understand exactly what they are.

Perfectionism Paralysis: The Mind That Won’t Let You Start

Perfectionism paralysis is cognitive. It lives in the thought patterns, the internalized beliefs, the standard of performance that was almost certainly handed to you before you had any say in whether you wanted it.

It operates on a deceptively simple logic: if I can’t do it right, I won’t do it at all. Not as a conscious decision. As an automatic one. The goal post moves constantly — just far enough ahead that you can never quite reach it, which means you never actually have to risk falling short of it. And your brain, in its efficiency, finds a workaround: redirect your energy toward the tasks you can win. The ones with a clear finish line. The ones that can’t really be done wrong. The inbox. The routine. The comfortable and the known.

Meanwhile, the thing that actually matters — the goal, the decision, the conversation, the change — sits untouched. Accruing weight. Getting bigger in your mind the longer you don’t touch it, which makes it harder to touch, which makes it bigger. You know this cycle. You’ve probably been in it.

I worked with a client — someone who had been wanting to take a significant next step in his life for a long time. He knew what it was. He knew what it would require. He had the capability, the resources, and the genuine desire to move forward. And he could not make himself do a single piece of the work that would get him there. Not because he didn’t care. Because he cared so much that the possibility of getting it wrong had become more terrifying than staying exactly where he was.

He was keeping himself stuck, not out of laziness, but out of a protection strategy so well-developed that it had become invisible to him. He’d stopped seeing it as fear. He just thought this was who he was now.

Perfectionism paralysis doesn’t announce itself as fear. It announces itself as not being ready. As needing more time. As waiting for the right moment that never quite arrives.

And underneath almost all of it — in every client I’ve worked with who carries this pattern — is some version of the same belief: that needing help is a burden, that getting it wrong in front of someone who matters is catastrophic, that the right way to need things is not to need them at all. It’s a belief that was installed early. It runs quietly. And it is costing people their goals, their relationships, and their ability to be present in their own lives.

Functional Freeze: When the Body Says Enough

Functional freeze is different from perfectionism paralysis in a critical way: it doesn’t live in your thoughts. It lives in your nervous system. And it looks nothing like what most people picture when they imagine someone who’s struggling.

Most people are familiar with fight and/or flight — the activated, mobilized stress responses. Functional freeze is what happens at the other end of the spectrum. When the nervous system has been running under sustained, chronic pressure for long enough without adequate relief, it does what it was designed to do: it downregulates to protect you. Not a breakdown. Not a collapse. A flattening. A muting. A behind-glass quality to your own experience that is very difficult to explain to someone who hasn’t felt it.

You keep functioning. You answer emails, manage the schedule, show up to work, and make dinner. But you’re doing it from somewhere slightly outside yourself. Capable on paper. Not quite accessible to your own life.

I’ve been working with a client for a while now who has been living in a near-constant state of fight or flight for longer than either of us realized. The stress had been accumulating — layers of it, life responsibilities stacking on top of each other, decisions that needed to be made, things that needed processing — and her body started keeping score in a way she couldn’t ignore anymore. She got shingles. Her immune system, running on years of sustained stress, finally gave her what her mind wouldn’t allow: a forced stop.

She admitted to me: “I just don’t want to process right now. I don’t want to make another decision right this minute. Everything feels so pressuring.”

That word — pressuring — is one of the most accurate descriptions of sustained nervous system activation I’ve ever heard a client use. Not pressure as a noun. Pressure is something actively being done to you, from the inside, that won’t stop.

The body keeps score whether you’re paying attention or not. And eventually, it stops asking permission to make you slow down.

Another client has been a caretaker for a family member with a severe mental health diagnosis for years. The weight of that role — the hypervigilance, the constant emotional availability, the never quite being off-duty — had been accumulating somatically in ways she’d normalized so thoroughly she didn’t recognize them as symptoms. Until she started noticing: when her family member sends her a text message, or needs something from her, her body shuts down before her mind has even finished reading the words. She can’t respond. Something in her system goes offline. Not because she doesn’t love this person. Because her nervous system has learned, correctly, that a message from this person means more of something there is already not enough capacity for.

That’s functional freeze. Not chosen. Not a character flaw. A nervous system doing the only thing it knows how to do when the demand has exceeded the resource for too long.

And here’s what makes it particularly disorienting for high achievers: you still look fine. You sound fine. By every metric anyone around you is using, you are managing. Which means you have no external permission to stop, no visible evidence that something is wrong, and no framework for explaining — to yourself or anyone else — why the most capable version of you feels completely out of reach.

How They Feed Each Other — And What It Looks Like When Both Are Running at Once

These two patterns are not the same. But they are almost always in a relationship with each other, and the relationship between them is where things get genuinely cruel.

Perfectionism paralysis is usually the entry point. The relentless standard, the cognitive loop of never quite being enough, the chronic pressure of performing at a level that allows no margin for being human — it’s exhausting in a way that doesn’t look like exhaustion from the outside. You’re still performing. Still delivering. But internally, the system is running at a deficit. And run it long enough without relief, and the nervous system does what it was designed to do.

It protects you. It downregulates. Functional freeze moves in.

And then the cruelest thing happens: the freeze takes out the very things that would break the freeze.

I had a client, a man who had always been an avid fisherman. It was his coping mechanism. The water, the quiet, the rhythm of it. The way it turned his brain off in a way almost nothing else could. When the functional freeze moved into his life, he stopped going. Not because he decided to. Because he couldn’t make himself. Freeze has a way of making the shortest distance feel impossible. And for him, it did.

Within the first month of working together, we built in exposure techniques, grounding work, and started breaking the cognitive distortions that had locked him inside a harsh internal narrative. But truthfully — and I say this as someone who believes deeply in the clinical tools — what helped him show up was the connection. The consistency. The space to struggle without shame.

When he finally got the courage to plan a trip, he got his expensive, brand-new gear out and couldn’t rig his lines. Couldn’t remember the knots. Fishing knots he’d tied since he was a kid — something that lived in his hands, in his muscle memory, in the part of him that existed long before any of this started. Gone.

He was so frustrated that he was ready to quit. To take it as confirmation that something was permanently wrong with him.

That moment — an experienced fisherman, sitting in his living room, unable to tie a knot he’d tied a thousand times — is one of the most accurate illustrations of what functional freeze actually does to a person that I’ve ever witnessed. It doesn’t just take your motivation. It takes your access to yourself.

It’s like trying to learn to ride a bike again. Your body knew this. Your hands knew this. But the freeze interrupts the connection between who you are and what you know how to do, and getting it back requires patience with yourself that perfectionism makes almost impossible to extend.

This is why high achievers are so susceptible to both patterns simultaneously. The same drive that makes you exceptional is the thing that keeps the standard impossibly high. And the higher the standard, the longer the system runs on empty before anyone — including you — notices. And by the time you notice, the freeze has already taken out some of the things you used to rely on to cope. Which makes the perfectionism louder. Which deepens the freeze. And the cycle continues, quietly, in a person who looks, from the outside, completely fine.

What Recognition Actually Does

I’m not going to hand you a five-step plan at the end of this. Not because the tools don’t exist — they do, and we’ll get there — but because I’ve learned, over years of doing this work, that the plan is seldom what someone actually needs first.

What they need first is this.

Someone handing them the words and saying: Yes. That’s real. That has a name.

You are not broken.

You are not lazy.

You are not failing at being a person.

You are stuck in a pattern your nervous system built to protect you, in a world that has never once slowed down long enough to let it rest — and you have been trying to think your way out of something that lives below the level of thought.

Recognition is not a consolation prize. It is not the thing you do before the real work. For most of the people I work with, it’s the thing that makes the real work possible at all. Because you cannot shift a pattern you can’t see. You cannot interrupt a cycle you haven’t named. And you cannot extend yourself any compassion for something you’ve been calling laziness, or weakness, or a personal failing.

You are not living from a deficit of discipline. You are living from a deficit of safety. And those require completely different responses.

My client, who forgot how to tie his knots? He didn’t need to be told to try harder. He needed someone to sit with him in the frustration and say — this is what freeze does. This is not permanent. Your hands still know. We just have to help your nervous system remember that it’s safe enough to access what you already know.

My client with shingles didn’t need another decision on her plate. She needed permission to not process for a minute. To let the body lead for once instead of dragging it behind the relentless forward motion of her mind.

The caretaker who can’t respond to the text didn’t need to be told to try harder at communication. She needed someone to name what her body was already telling her: that the well is empty, and filling it is not selfish. It is survival.

And the client who can’t make himself take the first step toward the thing he actually wants? He doesn’t need more planning. He needs someone to help him see that the fear of getting it wrong has been so loud for so long that he stopped being able to hear the part of him that actually wants to move forward.

So if you’re reading this and you recognize yourself — in the paralysis, in the freeze, in the going through the motions, in the body that keeps interrupting, in the knots you’ve tied a thousand times that suddenly feel impossible — let that recognition land. Don’t immediately turn it into another optimization project. Don’t start building the plan before you’ve sat with what this actually is.

You’ve been living from the neck up for a long time. The body has been trying to get your attention. This is what it’s been saying.

You’re not behind. You’re not broken. You’re not failing. You are a high-achieving person who has been running under extraordinary pressure for a very long time — and your mind and body are finally in the same conversation. That’s not a crisis. That’s the beginning.

If you recognize yourself in any of the examples in this piece and you’re ready to talk about it, I work with both men and women on exactly this. I’ll be honest with you: I’m a recovering perfectionist married to one. I understand these patterns from the inside out, professionally and personally. If you want a real conversation about what’s actually happening and what’s possible on the other side of it, I’d love to offer you a free strategy call. No pressure. No pitch. Just an honest conversation.

Book your free strategy call

And if this article hit close to home — message me. I read and respond to every single one personally.

Working alongside both men and women has given me a dual vantage point I think about constantly: the struggle is far more similar than either side realizes. Two people who care almost too much, running completely different response systems, in a world that keeps asking for more than anyone was designed to give.

Across the board, I see the same thing — high emotional intelligence, a genuine desire to show up for the people they love, and an almost universal inability to put their own needs anywhere near the top of the list. They’re managing households, aging parents, kids, careers, and the invisible architecture of an entire life. Silently wondering if they’re doing enough. Or too much. Or doing it wrong entirely.

Where I see the most meaningful difference isn’t in the load — it’s in the response. Women often move toward fawning and people-pleasing: saying yes when they mean no, absorbing everyone else’s needs, keeping the peace at the expense of themselves. Men often move the other direction — into reactivity, avoidance, or a quietly crushing sense that nothing they do is right. So they stop trying in the places that feel most risky, and double down where they know they can perform.

These aren’t universal gender rules — depending on the person, the roles may very well be reversed.

Both responses are paralyzing. Both are lonely. And both trace back to the same place: the impossible standard that perfectionism sets — and that modern life keeps enthusiastically reinforcing.

This is what perfectionism paralysis looks like when it lives inside a relationship. Not one person falling apart — two people quietly holding it together, alone, side by side.

What perfectionism paralysis actually is

Perfectionism paralysis isn’t laziness. It isn’t burnout, though burnout is often nearby. It’s what happens when the standard you’ve set — consciously or not — becomes so high that starting anything feels riskier than not starting at all. So you default to the tasks you’re already good at. The ones with a clear finish line. The ones that can’t be done wrong. And everything that actually matters quietly moves to the back burner.

Perfectionism is incredibly good at this. It moves the goalposts constantly — just far enough ahead that you can never quite reach it, which means you never have to risk falling short. And it is very aware of how effective it is.

What makes it particularly brutal in relationships is that it rarely announces itself. It doesn’t show up as a breakdown. It shows up as distance. As someone going quiet. As someone getting busier. As two people under the same roof carrying their own version of the freeze — and neither one saying it out loud, because high achievers don’t always have a script for “I’m stuck.”

What modern life is actually asking of you

We are living in an era that has quietly doubled everyone's job description — and then told us to be grateful for the opportunity.

One partner often carries the financial weight while also being expected to be emotionally present, involved at home, self-aware, communicative — everything previous generations weren’t asked to be. The other manages the mental load: the appointments, the emotional temperature of the household, the things that never make it onto a to-do list because they live entirely in one person’s head. Or both. All of the above.

The number of hats we’re expected to wear — and wear well — is genuinely incomprehensible. And when you’ve been doing it long enough, you stop noticing how heavy it is. Until someone gets sick. Until something shifts at work. Until life moves the ground beneath you, and suddenly the whole thing is wobbling.

Why you keep missing each other

One of you goes quiet when overwhelmed. You stop bringing things up because you don’t want to add to the pile — or because you’ve tried before and it didn’t land. The list stays in your head. The resentment follows closely behind it.

The other gets busier. Handles more. Looks fine from the outside and uses that as evidence that everything is under control — even when internally, nothing feels like enough.

Neither of you is wrong. Both of you are exhausted. The gap between you isn’t a communication problem — it’s a perfectionism problem. You’re both trying so hard to hold your end up that you’ve stopped asking for help carrying the weight together.

What actually helps

1. Get clear on what you actually need — before you say anything.

   If you’re struggling and not communicating it, the first step isn’t talking to your partner — it’s figuring out what you actually need. This sounds simple. For high achievers and perfectionists, it rarely is.

   Most of my clients grew up in homes where they learned to assess everyone else’s needs first. Their own got deprioritized so early and so consistently that identifying them now feels genuinely foreign. So start smaller than you think you need to. A calming technique, a walk, a shower — something that creates enough space to hear yourself.

   Then use it. Something like: “Hey, I’ve tapped out. I need 30 minutes to reset, and I’ll come back a better person — are you good with that?” That’s not a weakness. That’s self-awareness in action. Perfectionism will keep you spiraling in that funk and disrupting the whole household. Identify the need. Honor it. Come back.

2. Talk about how you manage tasks — not just who does them.

   I’m a firm believer in no permanent tasks. And I know — for perfectionists, this is painful. Because it’s not just about who does the laundry. It’s about the fact that there is a right way to load the dishwasher, and your partner is not doing it.

   But here’s the long game: if you want your partner to understand your logic, ask if they’re open to hearing it — then show them. Walk them through your system and why it works for you. It removes the guesswork, it removes the feeling of never doing it right, and it removes the worst outcome of all: nothing getting done, silent resentment building, and a petty argument three weeks from now about something that was never really about the dishwasher.

   You’re not trying to parent your partner. You’re trying to build a working system — one that actually fits your life, not a default one that nobody chose. What works for the two of you is what prevents the snapping, the scorekeeping, and the slow erosion of goodwill that happens when neither person feels like enough.

3. If communication is the sticking point, get support. Seriously.

   One of my favorite pieces of relationship advice: argue like a scientist who seeks to understand, not an attorney who seeks to win. But sometimes years of miscommunication, misreading each other, and doing it the same way because that’s just how it’s always been done — it builds up. And eventually, the partner who feels least heard stops trying to be heard at all. That’s when avoidance moves in.

   Communication is the root of any sustainable, secure relationship. If it’s struggling, that’s not a character flaw — it’s a skill gap, and skill gaps are fixable. Two or three sessions with a coach or therapist to learn how to actually hear each other can shift years of negative communication patterns. It’s not about fault. It’s about deciding that what you’re building together is worth investing in.

I work with both men and women on these exact areas — and I'll be honest with you, I'm a recovering perfectionist married to one.

I understand this dynamic from the inside out, professionally and personally. If any of this resonated and you're ready to actually talk about it, I'd love to offer you a free strategy call. No pressure, no pitch — just a real conversation.

Book your call here.

And if this article hit close to home — message me. I read and respond to every single one personally.

I get asked about this a lot. What do your coping mechanisms actually look like? What do you do when you feel the pull to keep working past the point of usefulness? What’s actually on your list? It’s an absolutely fair question. And it’s the right question, because the framework is only as useful as what you do with it. Plus, people want proof of the concept, and I’m all about following and working with people who walk the walk and talk the talk.

Here’s the honest answer: my dopamine menu didn’t arrive all at once. It evolved over years, by paying attention. I tried things. I noticed what settled my system and what didn’t. I kept what worked and let go of what didn’t, even when what didn’t work was the thing I was supposed to love. Over time, a real menu took shape — not a wellness aspiration, an actual operating manual for the brain I have.

I want to walk you through it, because seeing someone else’s menu is one of the fastest ways to give yourself permission to build your own — and to see what it actually looks like to use one.

A few things I’ll name upfront:

My menu doesn’t look like a wellness influencer’s. Some of it would barely register as self-care to most people. All of it is intentional, and all of it earns its place because I’ve watched it work in my own nervous system over time.

Your menu doesn’t have to mirror mine. The whole point of a dopamine menu is that it fits the brain you actually have, not the brain you’re supposed to want. What follows is a model — not a prescription.

And I’ll say this clearly: I’m not sharing this from the position that I figured it out and you can too. I’m sharing it because the work of building a menu is mostly the work of paying attention to yourself with curiosity instead of judgment. If walking through mine helps you start paying attention to yours, that’s the win.

Here's what's actually on my menu, and why each piece is there.

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She didn’t actually want to be on the call. Someone important in her life had told her to make it.

But she called, and she didn’t hang up on me.

And by the end, she was talking about the people she wasn’t sure she could really lean on. The friends who didn’t quite get her life. The future she hadn’t planned for. The version of herself, decades from now, that she didn’t know who would be there for her.

She didn’t say she was scared. She said she “wasn’t a deep person.”

This is what perfectionism does eventually. It runs out of problems to solve. The business gets built. The body gets disciplined. The relationships get optimized. Therapy gets “won.” And then — quietly at first, then louder — the system that has been running the show for years starts to sputter. Something shifts. The dopamine of solving and optimizing stops landing the way it used to. The wins feel flat. The ambition feels suspicious. And underneath all of it is something most high achievers were never taught to metabolize: the unsolvable.

This is the part nobody warned you about.

The part where the strategies that built your life can’t carry you through the rest of it.

Most coping skills aren’t built for brains like hers. Or like mine. Or, if you’re reading this, probably yours.

Bubble baths don’t work on brains like ours. And I want to talk about why.

Dopamine Is Not the Reward Chemical

Here’s what almost no one explains correctly:

Dopamine is not the reward chemical. It’s the pursuit chemical.

For decades, dopamine was marketed as the brain’s little hit of pleasure — the thing that fires when you eat the cookie, win the game, close the deal. That’s not quite right. Dopamine fires before the cookie. It fires when you smell it baking. It spikes in the chase, the anticipation, the solving. By the time you actually have the thing, dopamine has already done its job and moved on.

This is why the win never feels as good as you thought it would. The wedding. The promotion. The launch. The number on the scale. You spent months, sometimes years, chasing it, fueled by a brain that was lit up the entire time. And then you get there, and there’s a strange, hollow quiet. People call it the post-achievement slump. It’s not a slump. It’s withdrawal.

High achievers are, neurologically speaking, exquisitely tuned pursuit machines. The brain learns what gets it the hit and builds a life around delivering it on tap. Solve the problem. Optimize the system. Hit the goal. Find the next problem. Solve that one too. The pursuit is the drug. The achievement is just the receipt.

Which is why traditional coping skills feel like punishment to brains like ours.

Sit quietly. Breathe. Take a bubble bath. Meditate. Rest.

These are prescriptions written for nervous systems that need to come down. They assume the underlying problem is over-arousal — too much input, too much stress, a system that needs to be soothed back to baseline. And for a lot of people, that’s exactly right.

But the high-achiever brain isn’t over-aroused. It’s under-stimulated without a problem to solve. Take away the pursuit and what’s left isn’t peace — it’s a dopamine deficit that registers in the body as restlessness, irritability, low mood, a vague sense that something is wrong. Anhedonia, sometimes. Or a quiet, creeping suspicion that the life you built isn’t actually making you happy.

It’s not the life. It’s the absence of the chase.

And that’s where most coping skills fail us. They try to remove the very thing the brain is built to seek.

Lateral Regulation: A Different Way to Cope

If you can’t take the pursuit away, you have to redirect it.

This is the move almost no one teaches. Most coping advice operates on a subtraction model — remove the stress, remove the stimulation, remove the input, and the nervous system will settle. For a lot of brains, that works. For ours, it doesn’t. You can’t subtract your way to regulation when your baseline runs on pursuit.

What you can do is swap.

Lateral regulation is the practice of moving the dopamine-seeking from sources that deplete you to sources that don’t. You’re not trying to become a person who needs less. You’re building a menu of pursuits that satisfy the same neurological hunger without leaving you flatter than you started.

This is what the dopamine menu actually is, one that is built for high achievers. Not a Pinterest list of self-care rituals. A working document of activities that give your brain something to chase that isn’t the next email, the next launch, the next optimization of your own body.

The categories that tend to work:

Engaged stillness. Activities where the brain has a low-grade something to do, so the body can finally settle. Walking somewhere new. Hiking. Being outside with a camera. Reading nonfiction. Cooking something more complex. The brain is mildly occupied, and the nervous system gets to exhale. This is what most high achievers actually mean when they say “rest” — they just don’t have language for it yet.

Productive processing. Writing, journaling, voice memos, and long conversations with people who can actually keep up with you. The brain still gets to move. It just gets to move toward integration instead of output.

Skill acquisition. Learning something you’re bad at. A language. An instrument. A craft. The pursuit-brain loves a curve, and a beginner’s curve is the only one that will keep delivering hits without depleting you.

Sensory absorption. Anything that pulls you fully into the body and out of the planning brain. Cold water. Heat. Music loud enough to feel. Deep tissue work. Long drives with the windows down.

Connection that requires presence. Not networking. Not optimizing relationships. The kind of conversation where you can’t be performing and listening at the same time.

The point is not to stop being a high achiever. The point is to stop using your life as the only place your brain gets to chase something.

Because when your career is the only pursuit on the menu, every season that asks you to slow down — illness, hormones, grief, aging, a quiet stretch you didn’t plan for — feels like withdrawal. And withdrawal, untreated, looks a lot like depression.

I Can't Sit Still. But I Can Actively Slow.

I’ll tell you what this looks like for me, because I think the abstract version of this advice is part of why it never lands.

I am a high achiever. I run two practices — one for therapy, one for coaching — and I write, and I build things, and I have, more than once in my life, used productivity as a way to avoid sitting with something I didn’t want to feel. I am not writing this from the other side of the mountain. I’m writing it from somewhere on the trail.

Here’s what I’ve figured out: I can’t sit still. But I can actively slow down if I’m doing something intentional.

That distinction changed everything for me.

Wellness culture kept handing me prescriptions for stillness. Get your nails done. Sit. Let someone take care of you for an hour. My brain treats it like a hostage situation. Within four minutes, I am drafting emails in my head, resenting the polish, calculating how many things I could be getting done if I weren’t trapped in this chair pretending to enjoy myself. I would genuinely rather have a root canal (at least I’d be getting something solved/fixed/corrected). And I know I’m not alone in this, because almost every high achiever I’ve ever worked with has admitted some version of the same thing — usually with a flicker of shame, like there’s something wrong with them for not finding it relaxing.

There isn’t. Their brain is just doing exactly what it was built to do.

What works for me is being outside. Not in a precious way — I live in Florida, the woods here are not a prestigious destination. I just go. I take a camera, or I don’t. I walk. I notice things. The way the light moves through the trees. A bird I’ve never seen before. The sound of my own footsteps. My brain gets to do what it always wants to do, which is look for something. But the something is small, and slow, and it doesn’t require me to optimize anything. By the time I come back, my nervous system has done what no manicure has ever managed to do for me. It exhaled.

That’s lateral regulation. That’s the dopamine menu in practice. It’s not me becoming a person who needs less. It’s me giving my brain a different kind of pursuit so that the rest of me can actually rest.

The other things on my menu look unremarkable from the outside. Writing essays like this one. Long walks where I’m half-listening to a podcast or an audiobook. Cooking something that takes more than one pan. Conversations with the handful of people who enjoy keeping up with me. None of it looks like the traditional “self-care.” But all of it works.

If you’ve been trying to cope like a normal person and wondering why you keep failing, I want to gently suggest that you’re not failing. You’re using the wrong menu.

The Dopamine Game Has an Expiration Date

I want to come back to the woman from the beginning of this essay. The one who had “won therapy.”

When she becomes my client, here’s what the work would actually look like.

We wouldn’t start with her feelings. She’s already told me she isn’t a deep person, and pushing against that on day one would just confirm that I’m one more person trying to make her into something she’s not. We’d start where her brain already lives: with the problem. We’d name what’s actually happening. The dopamine system that built her life is starting to deliver diminishing returns. Her body is changing. The strategies that have worked for over two decades aren’t working anymore. That’s not a feelings problem. That’s a systems problem. And she’s very good at systems.

From there, the work fans out.

She would learn to feel things without letting feelings take over her entire operating system. This is the piece high achievers most often resist and most desperately need. They believe — because they’ve watched other people do it — that feeling something means being consumed by it. So they don’t feel anything, and then they wonder why joy doesn’t land either. You can’t selectively numb. The same wall that keeps grief out keeps everything else out, too. Including the good parts. Including the part of her that used to feel alive.

She would learn to process the anxiety she has about the future before the future arrives, instead of white-knuckling toward it and hoping she figures it out when it gets here. The fear of being alone, of aging, of a body that won’t perform — these are not problems to solve. They’re realities to integrate. There’s a difference, and learning the difference is most of the work.

She would learn to build a real community. Not networking. Not curated friendships with people who reflect her success to her. The kind of relationships that require her to be a person and not a performance. This is where her perfectionism has cost her the most, and she doesn’t know it yet. She thinks her standards are protecting her. They’re isolating her.

She would learn to soften her polarized thinking — the winning therapy, the not a deep person, the I’m fine / I’m falling apart binary that has organized her entire inner life. Most high achievers don’t realize how much black-and-white thinking is running their show until someone helps them see it. Once they do, the whole world gets bigger. She’d start to see herself in colors she didn’t know she had.

And she would build her own dopamine menu — but not the one her younger self would have built. Not one was organized around success, optimization, or proving anything. One built for the sacred window she is actually standing in right now. Because the truth is, she is in a sacred window, and her high-functioning anxiety is stealing it from her in real time. Every minute spent managing the future is a minute she doesn’t get to spend inside the life she actually has. The new menu isn’t about chasing. It’s about being present for the things that won’t be here forever — including, eventually, her. Mindful presence, for a brain like hers, is not a vague spiritual concept. It’s the most radical possible reallocation of dopamine she could make.

Underneath all of it, she would learn what her perfectionism is actually doing. Not protecting her. Preventing her. Preventing her from changing, from connecting, from feeling, from grieving, from softening. From being present in the window she’s in. From building the version of her life that could carry her through the second half.

Because here is the thing nobody told her: the dopamine game she has been winning her whole life is a game with a built-in expiration date. The body changes. The hormones shift. The pursuit-reward cycle starts to flatten. And the high achiever who built her entire identity on winning that game is the most vulnerable person in the room when it stops paying out.

The work is learning to stop playing it before it stops playing you.

You Are Not Failing at Rest

Here’s what I want you to take from this, if nothing else:

The reason your coping skills aren’t working is not that you’re broken, or shallow, or “not a deep person.” It’s that you’ve been handed a toolkit built for a different kind of nervous system, and you’ve been blaming yourself every time it fails to fit.

You are not failing at rest. You’re failing at someone else’s version of rest.

The work — the real work — is building a life that meets your brain where it actually is. A life where the pursuit is still allowed, but it’s not the only thing on the menu. A life where you have somewhere to put the part of you that needs to chase, so it stops chasing the things that quietly cost you. Your peace. Your relationships. Your tolerance for slow seasons. Your ability to let a Tuesday afternoon just be a Tuesday afternoon.

This is the work I do with my clients. Some of you need a therapist. Some of you need a coach. Some of you have spent a decade trying to figure out which one and used that very question as a way to avoid starting. I am both. But behind all of those titles, I am also a recovering perfectionist. I get this.

If you’ve read this far, your brain already knows. The question isn’t whether you need a different menu. The question is whether you’re ready to build one.

If something in this essay landed, I’d love to keep going with you. Book a free strategy call with me here.

Later this week, paid subscribers will get The High Achiever’s Dopamine Menu — a guide to building your own. Five categories, real prompts, and a worksheet for the brain that doesn’t rest the way it’s “supposed to.” It’s the tool I use with my clients, and it’s coming soon.

If you want it the moment it drops, subscribe this week, because the drops are just going to keep getting better.

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And - “when was the last time you truly felt at ease?” Not tired enough to stop. Not distracted enough to forget. Actually, at ease.

Stop and truly think about it.

Most of the time, the reply I get is “I don’t know” or “what does ‘being alive’ mean?”

It’s subjective. It’s your personal feeling.

But high achievers don’t shut off; they often don’t slow down enough to even realize that they have been going 100mph and that their 30% is someone else’s 100%.

They have gotten so used to this speed that they either:

• Don’t know how to slow down, relax, or refuel

• Have fear around slowing down - what will happen?

• Struggle with feeling or ever experience mindfulness

• Have never experienced a quiet mind

If you’re struggling to remember, you’re not alone. And more importantly, you’re not broken. But something is running in the background of your nervous system that has been working against you for a very long time. And until you understand what it is and why it’s there, no amount of productivity hacks, morning routines, or weekend getaways is going to touch it.

This is the science behind why high achievers can’t switch off. And why that’s not a discipline problem — it’s a biology problem.

Your Nervous System Was Not Designed For Your Life

The human nervous system was built for a world that no longer exists.

It was designed to detect threat, mobilize a response — fight, flee, freeze, or fawn — and then return to baseline once the threat had passed. The whole system assumes a recovery period. A moment of genuine safety after the danger.

The problem is your life doesn’t have that moment.

Your threats are not predators or physical danger. They are back-to-back meetings, an inbox that never reaches zero, a team that needs you, a business that depends on you, a family that comes home to whoever is left after all of that. The threats are constant, low-grade, and never fully resolved — which means your nervous system never gets the signal that it’s safe to stand down.

So it doesn’t.

Instead, it stays in what researchers call chronic sympathetic activation — a state of sustained, low-level alert that was never meant to be a permanent address. And over time, living there starts to feel normal. Expected. Like just the way things are.

It isn’t. But by the time most high achievers realize that, they’ve been operating this way for years.

What Chronic Activation Actually Does To You

This is where it gets specific — and where I want you to pay close attention, because this is not about stress management. This is about what sustained nervous system activation is doing to your biology right now.

It impairs the part of your brain you rely on most.

The prefrontal cortex — responsible for decision-making, creative thinking, impulse control, and emotional regulation — is directly compromised by chronic cortisol elevation. The research is unambiguous on this. Sustained stress doesn’t just make you feel worse. It measurably reduces the quality of your thinking. The sharpness you pride yourself on? Chronic activation is quietly eroding it.

It keeps your body in a state it was never meant to sustain.

Elevated cortisol over time disrupts sleep architecture — meaning even when you sleep, you’re not recovering the way you should be. It suppresses immune function. It drives inflammation. It disrupts the gut microbiome, which has a direct line to your mood and cognitive function through the vagus nerve. High achievers often come to me describing a constellation of symptoms — fatigue that sleep doesn’t fix, gut issues, brain fog, a flatness where their drive used to be — that on the surface seem unrelated. They’re not. They’re the same system speaking the same language.

It makes calm feel dangerous.

This is the part that surprises people most. When you’ve been in sympathetic activation long enough, your nervous system starts to interpret the parasympathetic state — actual rest, actual stillness — as a threat. The quiet feels wrong. The downtime feels wasteful or risky. You find yourself manufacturing urgency in its absence because at least urgency feels familiar.

High achievers describe this as an inability to be present. An inexplicable restlessness on vacation. The compulsion to check the phone, not because anything needs attention, but because not checking feels worse than the checking.

That’s not a character flaw. That’s a nervous system that has forgotten what safe feels like.

Why You've Been Calling It Something Else

Here’s the part I want to sit with for a moment — because it matters enormously for what comes next.

You have probably not been calling this anxiety.

You’ve been calling it drive. Conscientiousness. High standards. The reason you’re successful. And you have evidence for that — because the hypervigilance that comes with chronic activation does, in fact, produce results. You catch the things others miss. You prepare for scenarios that don’t materialize but occasionally do. You stay ahead of the curve because your nervous system is running constant threat assessment, whether you ask it to or not.

The problem is not the output. The problem is the cost.

Anxiety that looks like productivity is still anxiety. A nervous system stuck in survival mode is still stuck — regardless of what it’s producing while it’s there. And the research is clear that the performance gains from chronic activation are short-term, narrowing, and ultimately self-defeating. You’re not performing at your ceiling. You’re performing at the ceiling chronic stress allows, which is meaningfully lower than what a regulated nervous system would make available to you.

The most precise reframe I have for this is one I use with clients regularly:

You are not performing because of the anxiety. You are performing despite it — and paying an enormous, largely invisible tax for the privilege.

The Four Things That Keep High Achievers Stuck In The On Position

Understanding why this pattern is so persistent is part of what makes it possible to change. These are the four factors I see most consistently with high-achieving clients.

Identity fusion. When being productive, capable, and always-on becomes who you are rather than what you do — slowing down feels like an existential threat, not a practical choice. The nervous system isn’t just responding to workload. It’s protecting identity.

Evidence of success. The anxiety has worked. Not optimally, not sustainably — but it’s produced results you’re proud of. That makes it very hard to argue against, even when the cost is becoming undeniable. You don’t discard a strategy that’s been winning, even when it’s slowly destroying the player.

The recovery deficit. Every time you push through without adequate recovery, you accrue what researchers call allostatic load — the cumulative wear on your body and brain from sustained stress. The higher the load, the harder genuine recovery becomes. High achievers often reach a point where they want to switch off and genuinely cannot — not because they lack discipline, but because the system has lost its capacity to downregulate on command.

The cultural reward structure. High-functioning anxiety is the most celebrated mental health pattern in professional culture. Busyness is status. Always-on is ambition. The system rewards exactly the behavior that’s driving the dysregulation — which means the feedback loops that would normally signal “this isn’t working” get muted by external validation.

What Switching Off Actually Requires

This is not about meditation apps or digital detox weekends. Those things are not useless — but they are surface-level interventions for a system-level problem.

Genuine nervous system regulation for high achievers requires a few things that are less comfortable than a guided breathing exercise.

It requires tolerating the discomfort of stillness. The initial experience of downregulation for a chronically activated nervous system is often not peaceful. It can feel like withdrawal — restlessness, irritability, a sense that something is wrong. That discomfort is not a sign that rest isn’t working. It’s the sound of a system that has been running at full speed, beginning to shift gears. It has to be moved through, not medicated away.

It requires building actual evidence of safety. The nervous system doesn’t respond to logic. Telling yourself to relax doesn’t work — you already know that. What works is the accumulated somatic experience of being still and having nothing catastrophic happen. Repeated. Over time. Until the body has its own evidence that stopping is safe.

It requires addressing what’s underneath the activation. For most high achievers, chronic sympathetic activation isn’t just about workload. It’s about the belief systems underneath the workload — about worth, about what happens if you slow down, about who you are when you’re not performing. Those beliefs live in the body as much as the mind. And they respond to body-based work, not just intellectual reframes.

It requires support. Not because you’re not capable. Because the nervous system is a relational organ, it co-regulates with other nervous systems. It learns safety in the presence of another regulated system. This is not a metaphor. It’s neuroscience. And it’s part of why the work moves faster and further in a coaching relationship than in a solo self-improvement project.

The Thread From This Week

If you read Monday’s post — High-Functioning Anxiety: When Your Nervous System Has Been in Survival Mode So Long You Think It’s Normal — you felt the emotional recognition piece.

This is the science underneath it.

Both posts are pointing at the same thing: a nervous system that learned to run hot because, at some point, running hot was necessary. And a high achiever who has been so good at adapting to that state that they’ve stopped questioning whether it’s the only way to live.

It isn’t.

The nervous system that got you here — driven, vigilant, always prepared — is not the nervous system that will take you where you actually want to go. Not because the drive is wrong. Because drive running on top of chronic fear has a ceiling. And you were not built to live at a ceiling.

A Tool You Can Use Today

Before I close — something practical, because you’re a high achiever and you need something to do with this.

For the next 48 hours, try this one thing:

When you feel the pull to add something to your mental load — pause and ask: is this 100% mine to carry right now?

Not eventually. Not in theory. Right now, in this moment.

If it’s not 100% yours, or not 100% now, write it down somewhere safe and close the tab on it. Literally and mentally. Your nervous system has been running tabs that don’t belong to it, in time frames that don’t exist yet. Every tab you close is a small act of regulation. They compound.

This is where it starts. Not with a complete overhaul — with one tab at a time.

If This Is Landing Somewhere Specific

The people who tend to reach out after posts like this are not people in crisis. They’re people who are functioning exceptionally well on the outside — and who have a quiet, persistent sense that the cost of that functioning is becoming unsustainable.

If that’s you, I have a small number of strategy call spots open this April.

It’s a conversation. Not a pitch, not a program overview, not a sales process. An honest look at what’s running your nervous system and whether there’s a different way forward.

You’ve been switching yourself back on for years. This is the call where we figure out how to finally let you switch off.

→ Book your complimentary strategy call here

You wake up — sometimes before the alarm — and within seconds, your brain is already running. The meeting. The email you didn’t respond to. The project that isn’t where it should be. The thing you said yesterday that landed wrong.

You reach for your phone before you’ve fully opened your eyes.

You’d call this being on top of things. Responsible. Prepared. You’ve always been this way. It’s part of why you’re successful.

But here’s the question nobody has asked you:

When was the last time you felt genuinely at ease?

Not medicated. Not distracted. Not numbed out with a glass of wine or a Netflix spiral. Actually, quietly, in your body — at ease.

If you’re struggling to remember — that’s not a personality trait. That’s a nervous system that hasn’t known how to rest in a very long time.

What High-Functioning Anxiety Actually Is

High-functioning anxiety doesn’t look like what most people picture when they hear the word anxiety. It doesn’t necessarily look like panic attacks, avoidance, or inability to function. In fact, it often looks like the opposite.

It looks like:

→ Exceptional productivity — driven not by passion but by the fear of what happens if you slow down

→ Meticulous preparation — for every scenario, especially the bad ones

→ Difficulty delegating — because if you don’t control it, it might not be done right, and if it’s not done right, something might fall apart

→ An inability to fully enjoy your own success — because the next thing is already looming

→ Relationships where you’re present physically but emotionally elsewhere, still running the mental tabs

The Cruel Irony: High-functioning anxiety is one of the most celebrated patterns in professional culture. We reward people who are always on, always prepared, always two steps ahead. We don't ask them what it costs.

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The Nervous System Science (Why This Isn't Just Mindset)

When we talk about anxiety in the nervous system, we’re talking about a physiological state — not just a thought pattern.

Your autonomic nervous system has two primary modes:

the sympathetic state (fight or flight — mobilized, on alert, ready for threat)

and the parasympathetic state (rest and digest — safe, settled, able to recover).

In a healthy nervous system, these states shift fluidly in response to actual circumstances.

Threat appears → sympathetic activates.

Threat passes → parasympathetic restores.

But in a chronically anxious nervous system, the threat never fully passes. The system becomes stuck in low-grade activation — not a full alarm, but a constant, humming readiness for things to go wrong.

The Research: Studies on chronic stress show that sustained sympathetic activation elevates cortisol, impairs prefrontal cortex function — the decision-making, impulse-control, creative-thinking part of your brain — disrupts sleep architecture, suppresses immune function, and becomes self-reinforcing. The longer you spend in activation, the harder it becomes to access the parasympathetic state.

Translation: the longer you've been running on anxiety, the more your nervous system interprets calm as suspicious. Rest starts to feel wrong. Stillness becomes uncomfortable. You keep moving — not because you want to, but because stopping feels dangerous.

What Your Nervous System Learned Before You Had Words for It

One of the first questions I ask new clients is this: What were your weekends like growing up?

It tells me almost everything.

I grew up with two high-achieving parents who couldn’t have been more different from each other. My mother was a corporate saleswoman — the number one rep in the country for the first decade of my life. My father was self-employed, a contractor who could build or fix anything, and who spent his weekends taking me along to job estimates, completing house projects, and finding time for fishing trips.

What they had in common: neither of them knew how to stop.

Every weekend, every hour, every minute had something going on. We were always moving. And the room next to mine growing up was my mother’s home office — where, as a child with horrible insomnia, I would hear her working at 3am, 4am, the quiet hum of someone who didn’t know how to be still.

I didn’t think of this as anxiety. I thought of it as just... how life worked.

Years later, I was riding in the truck with my father — I’d just finished my bachelor’s degree in Psychology at this point — and he was doing something I’d watched him do my entire childhood: mumbling under his breath, mentally running through every variable of whatever project was ahead. The planner of planners, stress-testing every scenario before it arrived.

And something clicked.

“Dad,” I said. “You have high-functioning anxiety.”

He looked at me. “What’s that?”

He had no idea. Because it had never been a problem — it had just been him. It had just been life. And without realizing it, it had become me too.

Here’s what I learned when I asked both of my parents the same question separately: When have you seen me the most relaxed?

They both answered the same way, without hesitation.

When you were reading. You always looked so peaceful.

As a child surrounded by constant motion, I had found the one thing that slowed my nervous system down — not as a strategy, not as an achievement, just because I loved it. I wasn’t reading to gain anything. I wasn’t performing. I was just... there.

I didn’t know then that I was regulating. I just knew it felt like relief.

This is how high-functioning anxiety works. It doesn’t arrive with a label. It arrives as the family atmosphere, the unspoken rules about what productivity looks like, the modeling of parents who loved you deeply, and also never quite learned to rest. You absorb it before you have language for it. You build an identity around it. And eventually, you call it your personality.

Until someone asks you what your weekends looked like growing up — and you start to see the blueprint.

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How High Achievers Learn to Call It Something Else

One of the most important conversations I have with clients is about the stories they’ve built around their anxiety.

“It keeps me sharp.”

“I work best under pressure.”

“I’ve always been this way — it’s just how I’m wired.”

These aren’t lies. They’re adaptations. At some point, the anxiety was actually useful — it kept you ahead of the curve, prepared for things others missed, protective against failure. And your success became evidence that the anxiety was working.

So you kept it. You named it “drive,” “discipline,” and “high standards.” And nobody questioned you, because the results were there.

The Hidden Cost: The problem isn't the anxiety when it's useful — it's that the nervous system doesn't know how to turn it off. What started as a performance tool became a baseline state. And now you're paying for sustained activation in the currency of your health, your relationships, and your capacity for joy.

This Week's Thread: The Connection to Fawning

If you read last week’s posts about the fawn response, you’ll see something important here.

Both fawning and high-functioning anxiety are the nervous system’s response to a perceived threat.

In fawning, the threat is relational — disapproval, abandonment, conflict.

In high-functioning anxiety, the threat is performance-based — failure, inadequacy, things falling apart.

Different expressions. Same root.

A nervous system that never learned to feel safe.

This is the through-line of everything I work on with clients. Not the behaviors at the surface — the saying yes when you mean no, the inability to rest, the 2am rumination, the perfectionism — but the underlying nervous system state that’s generating all of it.

When the root changes, the symptoms change. Not through willpower. Through something deeper.

What Regulation Actually Feels Like

I want to be clear about something: the goal of nervous system work is not to eliminate drive, ambition, or high standards. It’s not to make you slow, passive, or unbothered.

The goal is to shift from reactive to responsive.

A regulated nervous system doesn’t perform out of fear of consequences. It performs from clarity about what it actually wants. It rests without guilt, because rest is understood as part of the performance strategy. It holds boundaries without apology, because safety is no longer contingent on everyone’s approval.

High achievers who do this work don’t become less successful. They become more sustainably, authentically successful. And for the first time in a long time, they actually feel it.

The Distinction: Regulated doesn't mean calm all the time. It means having access to calm — even when things are hard, or the stakes are high. It means your nervous system is working for you, instead of running you.

If your nervous system has been running the show, this is exactly what I work on inside my VIP program. I have a small number of strategy call spots open this April. It's a genuine conversation — no pitch, no pressure—just clarity about what's underneath the patterns, and whether working together makes sense. Book your free call here and let’s chat.

Not a gentle “hm, interesting.” Something more uncomfortable than that.

Maybe you recognized the phrases before you finished reading them. Maybe you forwarded it without explanation — just here — to someone who you knew would feel it too. Maybe you sat with the particular discomfort of realizing that the thing you’ve built your identity around — being capable, being reliable, being the one who handles it — has a shadow side you’ve never had a name for until now.

High achievers are not supposed to be the ones who need help.

You’re the one who gives it. You’re the one with the answers, the plan, the capacity to hold it together when everyone else falls apart. That identity is real. It’s earned. And it is also a cage.

So if Part 1 cracked something open — this is Part 2. (If you haven’t read Part 1 yet, start there first.)

Not more evidence of the pattern. Let’s talk about what comes next.

First: What Healing Is Not (Especially For You)

Before we go anywhere, I need to address something — because high achievers have a particular relationship with self-improvement that can actually get in the way here.

When you identify a problem, your instinct is to solve it. Efficiently. Immediately. With a plan, a timeline, and measurable outcomes.

That instinct is one of your greatest strengths. It is also exactly what will not work here.

Healing the fawn response is not:

Deciding to be different and executing on that decision. You cannot optimize your way out of a nervous system pattern. If discipline and determination could have fixed this, it would already be fixed — because nobody applies discipline and determination more relentlessly than you do. This requires something different.

Adding “say no more” to your self-improvement list. Behavioral change without nervous system work is willpower disguised as healing. You will white-knuckle new boundaries, feel the familiar spike of guilt and anxiety when you try to hold them, and eventually conclude that you’re not built for this — when the truth is you were trying to change the output without changing the system generating it.

Becoming someone who cares less. This is the version of “healing” that high achievers fear most — that the work will dull their edge, make them softer, less driven, less exceptional. Let me be clear: the goal is not indifference. The goal is performance without self-destruction. Ambition without self-abandonment. Caring deeply about your work and your people without disappearing yourself in the process.

Doing it alone. I know this one is uncomfortable. You are the person other people come to. Needing support doesn’t fit the identity. But the fawn response — which often developed in environments where your needs were not safe to have — heals in relational environments where they are. The solo project approach is, in this particular case, part of the pattern you’re trying to heal.

What The Other Side Actually Looks Like — For Someone Like You

I want to be specific here, because “healing” can sound vague and soft, and you need to know what you’re actually working toward. So let me tell you what I see in high-achieving clients who have done this work.

Your output becomes sustainable instead of compulsive.

Right now, a significant portion of your productivity is driven not by genuine desire but by the low-grade fear of what happens if you slow down. What people think. What falls apart. Who needs you. When that fear quiets — not disappears, quiets — what remains is real drive. The kind that doesn’t require you to override your body to maintain it. The kind that doesn’t produce resentment as a byproduct. High achievers who regulate their nervous system don’t become less productive. They become more intentionally, sustainably productive — and for the first time, they actually feel their own results instead of immediately moving the goalposts.

A place to start: Compassionately — slow down. This is the very first shift I support high achievers through, and it’s one you can begin on your own today. When you feel that intense pressure building, the overwhelm, the drive to push through — your instinct is to recaffeinate and keep going. I’m asking you to do something you may not have done in years: pause. Acknowledge your basic needs. Get comfortable with just five minutes of stillness. Not as a reward. As a practice. Old you would have pushed through. This is the beginning of something different.

The mental tabs close.

You know the ones. The background processing that runs constantly — did I handle that right, do they seem off with me, should I have said something different, what do they need, what did I miss. The hypervigilance that masquerades as conscientiousness. When the nervous system is no longer scanning for relational threat constantly, the cognitive load that frees up is significant. Clients describe it as suddenly having bandwidth they didn’t know they’d lost.

A tool that helps: I created a control wheel for my clients that breaks life down into three zones (see below)— 100% your control (putting your shoes on, getting out of bed), 50% your control (checking the weather and dressing for the rain — you can prepare, but you cannot control the rain), and 0% your control (other people’s perceptions, the comment someone is inevitably going to make, the outcome you’ve already done everything you can about).

Here’s the practice: if you don’t have 100% control of something right now, close the browser tab on it. It is consuming capacity and space you cannot afford while you’re working on something else. Your nervous system has been running too many tabs for too long. This is a direct, practical way to begin changing that.

You notice the fawn impulse before it runs.

The “I’ll just—” starts forming and something catches. A moment of awareness before the automatic response executes. That gap — between impulse and action — is where your actual agency lives. Where your actual choice is. For perfectionists especially, this is profound: you have spent years believing you were choosing to over-function, to over-deliver, to over-accommodate. When you start to see the automaticity of it — how much of it was nervous system, not character — it changes the way you hold yourself. With considerably more compassion. And considerably less blame.

Two responses that actually work: When someone asks something of you and you feel your throat tighten, your shoulders go heavy, your stomach hollow out — that’s your body telling you something important. My two go-to responses in that moment: “Let me get back to you” buys you space to respond from choice instead of fear. “I don’t have capacity for that right now, but ask me again another time” is harder to say — and far more honest. It keeps the relationship intact while honoring what’s true. You’re not closing the door. You’re just being real about the threshold.

Your yes means something.

Perfectionists and high achievers often have a complicated relationship with their own word — because you commit to things you don’t fully mean, then carry the resentment of them, then feel guilty for the resentment. When you start saying no to what you don’t mean and yes to what you genuinely do — your yes becomes something you can trust. You build internal evidence of your own integrity. And that evidence compounds into something high achievers rarely experience: actual self-trust.

Rest stops being something you earn.

This one lands differently for perfectionists. The internal calculus that decides whether you’ve done enough to deserve stopping — the productivity threshold that’s always just slightly out of reach — begins to loosen. Not all at once. Gradually. Rest stops being a reward for sufficient output and starts being understood as part of how exceptional output is sustained. When the nervous system regulates, the body understands rest as safe. Not something to justify. Just allowed.

What this actually looks like in practice: When you get good at nervous system regulation, something unexpected starts to happen — the advocate part of your inner critic begins to speak up. Not the critical voice. The protective one. The one that says “hey, slow down” and actually means it kindly.

A week ago, I was pushing hard — packing, working, managing 250 things in my head at once, trying to get us out of town. And my brain said, clearly: slow down. So I did. Thirty minutes, audiobook on, lying in bed. I fell asleep for a bit. When I got up, showered, and reset, the question that came was: Why were you rushing?

Old me wouldn’t have stopped. The fact that I did — that I heard it and honored it — that’s the work showing up in real life. Old habits die hard. But old versions of ourselves don’t have to run the show forever.

The Resentment Thread — And Why It's Actually Your Compass

Let me come back to resentment.

For high achievers, resentment carries particular shame. Because you chose this. Nobody forced you to take on the extra project, plan the event, handle the logistics, and carry the emotional load of the room. You are not a victim. You know that. And so the resentment — when it shows up — feels like ingratitude. Like weakness. Like a character failing in someone who prides themselves on not having character failings.

Here’s what I want you to hear:

The resentment is not a flaw in your character. It is a feature of your nervous system trying to get your attention.

Resentment is what happens when a high achiever’s needs go unmet for long enough that the polite requests have stopped and the alerts have started. It is precise, accurate information pointing directly at where your limits have been violated — most often by your own hand, from a nervous system that decided your needs were not safe to have.

The perfectionists and Type A clients I work with carry a specific version of this shame: I should be able to manage this. I should be grateful. I chose this life. The resentment becomes one more thing to navigate your way around. One more feeling to override with discipline.

When we start treating the resentment as a compass instead of a character flaw — what is this telling me about what I actually need, where did I abandon myself here — everything shifts. Not immediately. But in the direction of something real.

How The Work Actually Moves — For High Achievers Specifically

There is no optimization framework for this. I know that’s uncomfortable. But there is a direction — and it moves through recognizable terrain for people wired the way you are.

Body first. High achievers live from the neck up. The body has been a vehicle for executing on mental decisions — managed, overridden, pushed through. The first task is learning to read it again. The tightening before the yes, you don’t mean. The drop in your shoulders when you finally close the door. The exhaustion that doesn’t match your calendar. Your body has been keeping score. We start by learning the language.

The pause before the pattern. Creating space between stimulus and automatic response. For perfectionists, this is particularly uncomfortable — because the pause means sitting in uncertainty, in the not-yet-decided, in the moment before you’ve figured out the right answer. That discomfort is exactly the work.

Boundaries as experiments, not performances. The perfectionist’s approach to boundaries is to research them, script them, and execute them flawlessly — or not attempt them at all. Real boundary work is messier than that. It’s repetitive. It’s uncomfortable. It doesn’t always go the way you planned. And every imperfect attempt builds more nervous system evidence than any perfectly worded script ever could.

Identity, last. The deepest layer — and the one that matters most for high achievers — is the belief that your value is contingent on what you produce, manage, and provide for others. When that belief loosens, even slightly, everything built on top of it shifts. Not your drive. Not your standards. But the fear underneath them. And losing the fear changes the quality of everything you build from it.

Something I Made For You

Because of the responses to Part 1, I put together a free guide to go alongside both articles:

When Helping Others Hurts You: Understanding Fawning As A High Achiever

It covers the core concepts from both parts, the key distinctions between fawning and genuine generosity, and a set of reflection questions specifically designed for high achievers, perfectionists, and Type A personalities — the people most likely to have spent years not recognizing this pattern in themselves.

→ Download it free here.

This one is free for everyone. No catch.

More Is Coming — And Subscribers Get It First

The fawn response guide is the first in a series I’m building for high achievers who are ready to move beyond awareness and into actual, lasting change.

Next up: a series of guides specifically for breaking the grip of maladaptive perfectionism — the patterns that keep capable, driven people paralyzed, over-preparing, over-delivering, and never quite finishing the things they were built to build.

These guides will be available for purchase. But Substack subscribers get them free — because this is where I do my most honest, most specific, most in-depth work. The people who show up here consistently deserve access to everything that comes from it.

Subscribe now

More is coming. Stay close.

Before You Go

Part 1 asked you to see the pattern.

Part 2 is asking something that requires more.

It’s asking you to consider — even just for a moment — that the version of you who exists without the constant over-functioning, without the resentment quietly building underneath, without the exhaustion that no vacation seems to touch — that version is not a fantasy. They're not the version of you that exists after you’ve finally achieved enough to relax. They’re available now. With the right work. In the right direction.

The people I work with in my VIP coaching program are not broken. They are extraordinarily capable people who have been running an outdated program — one written for survival and never updated for the life they’ve actually built. The work is not about fixing what’s wrong with you. It’s about finally building a life that works as hard for you as you have always worked for everything else.

If you’ve read this far and something is moving — not certainty, not a fully formed plan, just the quiet recognition that something has to change — I have a small number of free strategy call spots open this April.

It’s not a pitch. It’s not a performance. It’s an honest conversation between two people looking at what’s running your life and whether there’s a different way forward.

You’ve spent your whole life showing up for everyone else. This one’s for you.

→ Book your complimentary strategy call

Sending you so much self-compassion,

Nichole

You knew the moment the words left your mouth that you didn’t want to. You were already overwhelmed. That your own list hadn’t been touched in days. But the words came out anyway — smooth, reassuring, already figuring out how to fit in one more thing.

And now you’re sitting with that low hum of resentment you’ve learned not to name. The one that shows up after you’ve abandoned yourself — again — to keep someone else comfortable.

This isn’t a time management problem. It’s not a lack of discipline or an excess of kindness.

It’s a nervous system response. And it has a name.

What Fawning Actually Is

Most people are familiar with three stress responses: fight, flight, and freeze. But there’s a fourth — one that rarely gets talked about, especially in high-achieving spaces.

The fawn response.

First described by trauma therapist Pete Walker, fawning is when the nervous system learns that the safest way to navigate threat is to appease the person causing it.

To agree.

To accommodate.

To make yourself as unthreatening and useful as possible — because at some point, that’s what kept you safe.

Key Definition: Fawning is not generosity. It’s self-abandonment dressed up as kindness. The distinction matters enormously.

Generous people give from fullness. Fawners give from fear.

Generous people can say no. Fawners feel physically unsafe when they try.

The difference isn’t in the behavior — it’s in what’s driving it.

How It Develops in High Achievers

Fawning doesn’t develop in a vacuum. It’s almost always rooted in early environments where keeping the peace was necessary for emotional (or physical) safety.

Maybe you grew up in a household where someone’s mood was unpredictable, and staying agreeable meant staying out of harm’s way. Maybe you were praised for being “so easy” and “never causing trouble.” Maybe the cost of disappointing the adults around you felt too high to risk.

So your nervous system built a solution: become whoever the room needs you to be. Anticipate needs. Smooth conflict before it starts. Shrink yourself to protect the relationship.

That strategy worked. It kept you safe. And your nervous system learned it so well that it became automatic — a background program running underneath everything, long after the original threat was gone.

Here’s the part nobody talks about in high-achieving spaces:

The Pattern: Many high-achieving people were fawners first. The drive, the over-delivery, the inability to disappoint — these traits are celebrated professionally. They look like ambition. They feel like discipline. But underneath, they’re often a nervous system still trying to earn safety through performance.

What It’s Costing You

In your professional life, fawning shows up as:

→ Taking on more than your capacity because you can’t say no to leadership

→ Over-explaining your boundaries — or avoiding setting them at all

→ Absorbing your team’s stress rather than holding appropriate authority

→ Resentment that builds quietly until it comes out sideways

→ Exhaustion that doesn’t make sense on paper — your hours look manageable, but your depletion is total

In your personal life:

→ Friendships where you’re always the one who adjusts

→ Difficulty knowing what you actually want, separate from what others expect

→ A creeping sense that you don’t really know who you are when no one needs anything from you

The Nervous System Piece (This Is Why Willpower Doesn’t Work)

If you’ve ever tried to “just say no more” and found yourself saying yes before you’d even finished the thought, this is why.

Fawning is a survival response. It operates below the level of conscious thought. By the time your prefrontal cortex has registered what’s happening, your nervous system has already responded, your mouth has already moved, and you’re already managing someone else’s comfort at the expense of your own.

This is why affirmations don’t fix it. Why reading boundary-setting books doesn’t fix it. Why knowing better doesn’t make you do better.

The nervous system has to be shown — repeatedly, in embodied ways — that it is safe to disappoint someone. Safe to take up space. Safe to disagree with and still be okay.

The Core Truth: Until the nervous system learns a new definition of safety, the fawn response will keep running — because it’s not a bad habit. It’s a protection strategy. And strategies don’t stop just because you tell them to.

Here’s What Most People Get Wrong

When people first hear about the fawn response, something interesting happens.

They immediately think of someone else.

The friend who plans every group trip, coordinates every birthday dinner, and somehow always ends up apologizing when things go sideways. The parent who gives and gives until there’s nothing left — and then gives a little more. The colleague who stays late, takes on the extra project, covers for everyone else, and never once asks for anything in return.

That’s fawning, they think. That’s not me.

But here’s what makes fawning so difficult to recognize in high achievers, Type A personalities, and perfectionists specifically: it doesn’t announce itself. It doesn’t look like weakness or passivity. It’s repetitive, subtle, and dressed up in the language of capability.

I see and hear it in my sessions every day.

“I’ll just plan it.” “I’ll just do it.” “They don’t get it.” “He wouldn’t understand.” “If I don’t do it, no one will.”

These aren’t the words of someone who feels powerless. They sound like someone taking charge, being responsible, holding it all together. And in the moment, that’s exactly what it feels like.

But watch what happens next.

After the words spill out, I can almost visualize the weight. I see it move across my clients’ faces — the quiet wash of resentment, frustration, and defeat. The exhaustion of being the person who always figures it out. The isolation of believing no one else is capable of doing it the way it needs to be done. The sadness of realizing, again, that their needs came last.

They know they’re capable. They’ve always been capable. That’s never been the question.

The question is why capability became a reason to carry everything alone.

And the answer, when we sit with it long enough, is almost always the same: because somewhere along the way, being the one who handles it felt safer than asking for help. More predictable than depending on someone who might disappoint them. More controllable than being vulnerable.

Over time, this pattern compounds. What started as a coping strategy becomes a way of life. And what a way of life built on over-functioning always produces — quietly, reliably, over years — is resentment.

Not the loud, explosive kind. The kind that accumulates in small deposits. The sigh that nobody hears. The favor you agreed to that you’re still thinking about three weeks later. The version of yourself that shows up for everyone else and then has nothing left over.

Some of the people I work with have been living inside this resentment for years. And what makes it even heavier is the shame they carry about feeling it at all. I should be grateful. I chose this. I’m the one who said yes. The resentment itself becomes something else to manage, something else to hide, something else to push through.

Here’s what I want you to hear: the resentment is not a character flaw. It’s information. It’s your nervous system sending up a signal that your needs have been unmet for a very long time.

These are often the most extraordinary people I know. In a crisis, they’re the ones you call. They can set aside their own needs, show up fully, and hold space for everyone around them — with a steadiness that looks effortless from the outside.

And they are exhausted in a way that no amount of sleep seems to touch.

They keep going until they can’t. Until the body starts speaking louder than the will — through chronic illness, anxiety that won’t quiet, emotional numbness, or a sudden, inexplicable inability to do the things that used to come naturally. Until the repression that worked for so long stops working.

The fear I hear most often at this point is: This is just how it’s always been. There’s no changing it.

But that fear misunderstands the problem entirely.

The fawn response isn’t a fixed personality trait. It isn’t who you are. It’s a learned survival strategy — and what was learned can, with the right support, be unlearned. The work isn’t about changing the people around you. It’s about changing your relationship to your own needs. Learning that having needs isn’t selfish. Expressing them isn’t dangerous. And that your worth was never contingent on how much you were willing to sacrifice to prove it.

What Healing Actually Looks Like

This is where I want to be honest with you: healing the fawn response is not a mindset shift. It’s not a boundary-setting script. It’s not reading this post and deciding to be different.

It’s nervous system work. It’s learning to tolerate the discomfort of disappointing someone without your body interpreting that as danger. It’s building the internal evidence that you are safe, even when someone is unhappy with you.

In practice, that looks like:

1. Somatic regulation: learning to recognize and interrupt the fawn response in real time, before it runs automatically.

2. Boundary practice: not as a script, but as embodied repetitions that teach the nervous system a new normal.

3. Identity-level work: getting clear on who you are when you’re not performing for anyone — and building a relationship with that person.

4. Reparenting: giving yourself the internal experience of being safe, even when you take up space.

None of this is fast. None of it is comfortable. But all of it is possible.

And the life on the other side — where you can say no without your heart rate spiking, where you give from fullness instead of fear, where relationships feel reciprocal instead of one-directional — that life is worth the discomfort of getting there.

If you’ve spent years being the person everyone else counts on — and you’re finally ready to count on yourself — this is the work I do with VIP clients.

I have a small number of strategy call spots open this April. It’s not a sales call. It’s an honest, no-pressure conversation about what’s been running your life, what it’s costing you, and whether there’s a different way forward.

You’ve already proven you can do hard things. This is just the first hard thing you do for yourself.

Book your complimentary strategy call

One of my top-performing TikTok videos asks this exact question.
(You can watch it here.)

But there’s more to the story.

Years ago, someone left a comment on my video saying, “ALL perfectionism is due to trauma.”

I replied, as kindly and directly as I could:
“It does seem like perfectionism shows up a lot in people with trauma histories, but the research actually tells us something different.”

I’ve read the books, combed through the data, and sat with dozens of clients who have zero significant trauma history — and still wrestle with perfectionism.
My own conclusion, which aligns with the research, is this:

A lot of perfectionism is about control and fear.
So are trauma responses.
But they are not always the same thing.

Needing control can shape us in ways we don’t notice until much later. And sometimes it has nothing to do with trauma — just the way we’re wired.

Let’s walk through what this looks like in real life.

Two Examples That Show the Difference

(Details changed to protect confidentiality.)

Client Allison

A well-liked, social woman in her 40s. Supportive family. No trauma she identifies with.
She’s a classic high achiever — Enneagram 3, middle child, lifelong doer.

Then one day, she notices her anxiety creeping in.
She’s more stressed. More on edge. More worried about how things will play out.

Her family worries that her upcoming early retirement will destabilize her.
I floated possibilities: Perimenopause? Identity shifts? Fear of slowing down?
She shut down every angle.

What’s left is this:
Her drive for control isn’t coming from trauma.
It’s her temperament under stress.

Client Samuel

Also in his 40s. Divorced. Highly successful professionally, Enneagram 5.
But he grew up with chaos, criticism, and emotional instability.

He’s dealing with the fallout of a narcissistic marriage, a traumatic childhood, and the kind of grief that rewires how you see the world.

He struggles to attach, to feel motivated, to trust himself.
His perfectionism isn’t about wanting to excel — it’s about avoiding danger.

This is survival mode.
C-PTSD is absolutely part of the picture.

Same Symptoms, Different Roots

Both clients struggle with:

• Confidence

• Anxiety about how things will unfold

• Fear around future decisions

But the engine behind those symptoms is different.

Allison’s trait perfectionism says:
“I want to do well.”

Samuel’s trauma-driven perfectionism says:
“I can’t afford to mess up.”

One is about excellence.
The other is about fear.

How Perfectionism Actually Forms

As a mom, one of the things I’m most grateful for is that I worked on my own perfectionism before my daughter was born.
I have both types — the temperament-based drive and the trauma-based fear — and I’ve spent years learning how to manage them with self-awareness and compassion.

Now, I watch my almost 2-year-old organize toys or line things up by color.
She’s sharp and detail-oriented, and she genuinely enjoys order.

My therapist brain fires off alarms (a mix of curiosity, fear, and every child development class or lecture I’ve ever sat through).

But the truth is:

She isn’t organizing to avoid punishment.
She’s doing it because it feels good.

That’s temperamental perfectionism — healthy striving for mastery.

It’s very different from the version that grows out of fear.

Trait-Driven Perfectionism

This is temperament and wiring.

These people usually have:

• A naturally high drive

• Strong attention to detail

• A desire to master skills

• An internal push toward excellence

This form stays healthy until stress, identity shifts, or pressure distort it.

Think Allison.

Trauma-Shaped or Survival-Based Perfectionism

This develops when someone learns:

• Mistakes aren’t safe

• Acceptance is tied to performance

• “If I don’t hold everything together, everything falls apart.”

• Love feels conditional

• Being perfect protects them from shame or rejection

This form is powered by fear.
It shows up in people who were parentified, chronically criticized, emotionally neglected, or forced into being the responsible one for too long.

It’s not about wanting to excel — it’s about needing safety.

Think Samuel.

You Can’t Change What You Don’t See

Understanding the difference between trait-driven perfectionism and trauma-shaped perfectionism matters for one simple reason:

You can’t change a pattern you don’t understand.

If you’ve spent years calling yourself “broken,” “too much,” or “overly sensitive,” this is the moment where things start to make sense. Your perfectionism didn’t come out of nowhere—and it doesn’t mean the same thing to everyone.

Some of us chase excellence because it feels good.
Some of us chase perfection because fear won’t let us stop.
Most of us live somewhere in the middle.

And here’s the part that surprises people when I talk about clients like Allison and Samuel: even though their perfectionism came from very different places, the path forward wasn’t as different as you’d expect.

Their work involved the same core pieces that help most high achievers:

• learning self-compassion

• practicing authenticity instead of performing

• building tolerance for discomfort

• loosening the grip of control

But how we approached those pieces — and what each of them needed first — was completely individual.

In the next article, I’m going to walk you through what this actually looks like in real life: the tools that help someone wired like Allison, and the tools that help someone carrying what Samuel has carried.

Not every perfectionist starts in the same place.
But the work that leads to freedom shares the same foundations.

Stay tuned for Part Two:
Why Generic Advice Doesn’t Work for Perfectionists — and What Actually Creates Change

“I’m resting, but it’s not helping me.”

Or:

“I sit down and can’t turn my mind off.”

Or my personal favorite:

“I rested. I didn’t feel better, and I couldn’t turn my mind off. So I got back up.”

Here’s the truth no one teaches us:

There are multiple types of rest, and most people only use one.
Physical rest.
That’s it.
Collapse → recover → get back to work.

But physical rest is only one piece of the equation.
If it’s the only rest you’re getting, of course, you still feel burned out.
Of course, you still feel tired.
Of course, your brain is still running.

So let’s break down the full picture.

And more importantly, how to amplify each one in a way that doesn’t wreck your schedule or trigger guilt.

1. Physical Rest

What your body actually needs so it stops running on fumes.

This is the type of rest everyone thinks of first: sleep, stillness, slowing down.

But here’s what most high achievers miss:

Physical rest isn’t only sleep.
It’s anything that tells your body: we’re safe — you can unclench now.

Ways to Amplify Physical Rest

• Stretch for 30 seconds between tasks

• Lay on the floor for one minute (it’s grounding without feeling like “doing nothing”)

• Swap one “power through” moment with “pause for a breath.”

• Shift your position when you’re uncomfortable instead of overriding it

How I Practice Physical Rest (as a Therapist, Coach & Mom)

This is the easiest rest for me to recognize, because I can feel it physically:
the heaviness, the fog, the “my bed looks like the safest place on earth” feeling.

When I notice those cues, here’s what I do to actually honor them:

• I lighten my load.
  I stop saying yes to everything — even the things I technically could do.

• I consolidate my time.
  As a mom, this looks like lying on the ground with my daughter instead of trying to multitask.
  It gives both of us the physical slowdown we need.

• My phone goes on airplane mode at night or stays in another room so my brain can downshift.

• I prioritize a real bedtime and — the harder part — going back to sleep if I wake up early.

• I stretch and sit under my red light.
  This is newer for me, but the forced 10–15 minutes under the warmth actually resets me and helps me sleep more deeply.
  (I bought an affordable one — you don’t need the fancy $600 version.)

Physical rest isn’t glamorous.
It’s not complicated.
Most of the time, it’s just giving your body what it asked for ten signals ago.

Remember:

You don’t need more hours.
You need more signals of safety.

02 — Mental Rest

Giving your brain a break from scanning, planning, and problem-solving.

High achievers rarely get mental rest.
Even when your body is still, your mind is busy — calculating the next move, anticipating the next problem, planning the entire week in 30 seconds.

Mental rest does not mean having an empty mind.
It means: having a moment without demand.

Ways to Amplify Mental Rest

• Do one task without multitasking

• Turn off one notification category

• Leave one problem unsolved until tomorrow

Permit yourself not to plan every detail

How I Practice Mental Rest (as a Therapist, Coach & Mom)

I recently started a system that’s been wildly helpful for ending the nonstop mental list-making and keeping me focused on one thing at a time.

At the beginning of each month, I create sticky notes for every task I need to complete.
On each one, I write the task and the estimated time it’ll take.
Then I group them by category — work, home, admin, etc.
(Here’s December’s wall, for reference.)

On days when I have margin outside of sessions or parenting, I pull a sticky, complete the task, and take it off the wall.
It’s simple, but it gives me two big things: a clear structure and a quieter mind.

Daily life still has its quick to-do lists, but this system protects me from the mental clutter of the bigger projects.
It creates a container for them so they’re not floating around in my head all day, or turning into a list after list that I continuously misplace.

Another powerful shift: turning off notifications and letting myself respond when I have actual capacity.

Sometimes that means telling someone, “Let me get back to you when I can answer this fully.”

Instead of giving half-answers out of urgency.

And with my close friends, we have a routine now — we ask each other about our capacity level before venting, unloading, or problem-solving.

These techniques have been some of the most healing forms of mental rest I’ve ever practiced because they also reinforce my temporal boundaries: when I start my day, when I finish it, and what belongs in the middle, and how I spend my time and energy (the two things that you cannot get back).

Mental rest isn’t silence.
It’s freedom from constant responsibility.

03 — Emotional Rest

Letting your feelings exist without pressure to perform.

If you grew up as the strong one, the responsible one, or the emotionally steady one, emotional rest might feel like weakness.

It’s not.

Emotional rest means:
“I don’t have to hold myself together right now.”

Ways to Amplify Emotional Rest

• Say “I’m overwhelmed” instead of pretending you’re fine

• Schedule one check-in with a safe person

• Let yourself cry instead of cleaning it away

• Admit when something actually hurts.

How I Practice Emotional Rest (as a Therapist, Coach & Mom)

There’s an episode of Everybody Loves Raymond that I watched as a kid because my parents loved the show.
Ray walks in on his wife crying, and he spends the whole episode panicking — assuming something significant is wrong.
When he finally asks her about it, she says something simple and honest:

She was just having an emotional day.
She needed to cry.
And she felt better afterward.

I remembered that scene for decades — not her name, not the plot, just that moment.

Because for so many high achievers, crying or expressing emotion doesn’t feel productive.
It feels inefficient.
Messy.
Weak.
Like something that should only happen once everything else is done.

And if emotional expression leaves you feeling tired or drained, you might avoid it even more — because there are “more important things to do.”

This is why so many perfectionists clean when they’re overwhelmed.
It gives them the illusion of control.
It keeps them busy enough to avoid feeling anything real.

Perfectionism hates feelings.
They’re not linear.
They don’t follow rules.
There’s no checklist.
And the question in your head becomes: Why are you crying?

But here’s the problem:

The longer you suppress your emotional experience, the louder your body becomes.
The body keeps score — and eventually, it shows up physically.
Longer illnesses.
Burnout.
Psychosomatic symptoms.
Sometimes, even autoimmune flare-ups.
Depending on who you talk to, a lot of it comes from unresolved emotional buildup.

I notice the need for emotional rest, especially during my luteal and menstrual phases.
My “safe” emotion has always been anger — because anger was acceptable growing up. Crying wasn’t.

As an adult, I’ve learned I can self-soothe so well that I overcorrect.
I can rationalize away sadness because I’ve been trained — professionally and personally — to think my way through anything.

So now, I schedule time for emotional rest.

I slow down and let myself feel.
I remind myself that crying releases dopamine.
I go to my own therapy, so there’s a trusted place to process.
Sometimes I play a playlist that helps the tears come out.
Sometimes I ask my husband, “Can you hold the weight of this without trying to fix it?”

Emotional rest isn’t about dramatics or spiraling.
It’s about taking the weight off your chest instead of piling more on your to-do list.

04 — Sensory Rest

Your nervous system’s quiet place.

Screens, noise, lights, crowds, notifications, clutter—your system never shuts up because the world never shuts up.

High achievers ignore sensory overload until they’re snappy, fatigued, overstimulated, or wondering why everything suddenly feels like “too much.”

Ways to Amplify Sensory Rest

• Sit in a dim room for 2 minutes

• Slip into soft clothes after a long day

• Silence in the car instead of a podcast

• Low lights in the evening

• Phone on grayscale for an hour

How I Practice Sensory Rest (as a Therapist, Coach & Mom)

I used to be proud of being a master multitasker.
But after having my daughter?
The way I multitask now is… different. And honestly? I don’t like doing it the way I used to.

I’m also incredibly sensitive to sensory input — sounds, smells, lighting, fabrics, clutter — and super self-aware about it.

And that’s the biggest part of getting better at sensory rest:

You have to get honest about what actually overstimulates you.

Sometimes it’s something tiny:

• a shirt that smells off

• a candle scent that suddenly feels nauseating

• lighting that feels too sharp

• the smell of cooked fish that refuses to leave your house

It all matters more than you think.

Sometimes I need the world to quiet down so I can quiet down too.
Here’s how I actually do that:

• Silence instead of stimulation

When I get in the car, I don’t call anyone.
Sometimes I sit in silence.
Sometimes I talk out loud to myself.
(And sometimes I pretend I’m talking to someone who’s passed — it’s grounding, not weird.)

• I make my home my sanctuary

My youngest brother-in-law once said, “You really try to make things convenient for yourself. The touch-less sink, the trash can that opens with a wave, and everything has a home.”
He still doesn’t know how much that compliment meant to me.

Your home should support your nervous system — not drain it.

• Clothing is part of my regulation

I change clothes when I start work, when I finish work, and when I go to bed.
If you ever see me in the same hoodie for 3–4 days straight… something is wrong.

• I keep routines that calm my body

Changing my sheets weekly.
Running my diffuser in whatever room I’m settling into.
Choosing scents I genuinely love.
Setting small rituals that give micro-hits of comfort throughout the day.

It’s not about aesthetics — it’s about regulation.

• Lighting matters more than people think

I use rechargeable lights all over my house to avoid harsh overhead lighting.
Warm, soft lighting tells my system it’s okay to slow down.

Sensory rest doesn’t take time.
It takes intention.

05 — Social Rest

Not performing. Not caretaking. Not being “on.”

If you’re the go-to person for everyone, you rarely experience social rest.

Social rest isn’t isolation.
It’s being with people you don’t have to manage.

Ways to Amplify Social Rest

• One conversation where you don’t hide how you feel

• Choosing company that doesn’t drain you

• Saying no to “just one more thing”

• Not responding immediately to every text

How I Practice Social Rest (as a Therapist, Coach & Mom)

This one is all about boundaries — clean, honest boundaries.
It’s about deciding how people get to access you and remembering that you have control over who you give your time, energy, and emotional availability to.

I practice every bullet above, but the bigger work for me has been dropping the guilt around not always being “on.”

For years, my inner script was:
“They aren’t going to love you less because you couldn’t do more.”

Now it sounds more like:
“I’d love to try this again with you, but my capacity, time, and energy aren’t aligned right now.”
It’s honest. It’s regulated. And it keeps me grounded.

If you’ve been following this series, you know the whole backstory:
Our family has been drowning in daycare illnesses this year.
One virus ends, and another enters the chat.

And one of my goals for 2026 is actually more socializing — but I refuse to do it while we’re sick.
(It’s a huge part of why we’re talking so much about rest — because ignoring it has consequences.)

Even today, I was debating driving to see my best friend and staying overnight.
But my daughter has a cough, so everything is a “we’ll see.”
I’m not bringing another illness into someone else’s home.

This year, that’s meant missing:

• a close friend’s baby shower

• extended family gatherings

• outings I genuinely wanted to attend

And yes — I felt like I was letting people down.

But here’s the truth: our health has to take priority.

I choose rest so I can work, parent, and function — instead of prolonging sickness for the sake of being social.
And let’s be honest: taking a sick, almost two-year-old anywhere is not actually “fun.”

Social rest starts with this kind of honesty:

• Notice how often you say “yes” while your whole body is saying “no.”

• Notice when you show up out of fear of disappointing someone.

• Notice the people who take more from you than they give back.
  (This one changes everything.)

Social rest isn’t about avoiding people.
It’s the safety of being yourself — fully, without performance.

06 — Creative Rest

(Optional, but powerful)
Recharging your sense of curiosity and inspiration.

When you’re burned out, even your hobbies start to feel like chores.
Creative rest is what brings your spark back — not through productivity, but through play.

Creative rest is simply:
letting your mind wander again.

Ways to Amplify Creative Rest

• Look at something beautiful

• Go outside

• Doodle without purpose

• Cook without a recipe

• Spend 5 minutes doing something with zero outcome attached

How I Practice Creative Rest (as a Therapist, Coach & Mom)

This is one of my favorite types of rest — and one that perfectionists and high achievers tend to struggle with the most.

When the left brain is overloaded and burnout is setting in, activating the right brain can be incredibly grounding.
For me, it looks like:

• Watercolor painting

It forces me to let go of control — the water moves how it wants.
It softens my perfectionistic wiring in a way nothing else does.

• Painting my nails

This one hits both sides of me.
It’s controlled enough to feel satisfying, but creative enough to feel playful.
Plus, I genuinely cannot sit in a nail salon for an hour anymore — this is my personal self-care reset.

• Creating things — content, art, home projects

Anything that lets me build something new.
My husband and I love doing small projects around the house, and it’s always grounding and energizing for me.

• Finding new music & making playlists

This is one of my biggest mood regulators.
Music helps me shift emotional states, process things, and feel more like myself again.

• Being around beauty

Art museums.
Parks.
Aquariums.
Spaces where I don’t have to be anything — where I can just be and breathe in the experience.

Creative rest isn’t about output.
It’s about letting something inside you wake up again.

This rest brings your spark back.

So Why Does This Matter?

Because when high achievers say,
“I rested and still don’t feel better.”

What they really mean is:

“I only used one type of rest… to heal a system that’s exhausted in six.”

You don’t need a vacation.
You don’t need a sabbatical.
You don’t need to stop your life.

You need to give your system the right kind of rest at the right moments.

One small shift at a time.
One signal of safety at a time.
One unlearning at a time.

This is how you rebuild the parts of yourself that over-functioning shut down.

Shameless Plug

If you saw yourself in this — the constant pressure, the guilt, the burnout hiding under your “I’m fine” — here’s the truth:

You don’t have to keep living like that.

High Achiever Rewire is where I help you unlearn the patterns that are running you into the ground.
We rebuild your capacity, set boundaries that actually hold, reset your rest, and teach your nervous system how to function without fear or urgency being the default.

If you’re ready to feel like a human again — not a machine — HAR is the next step.

I offer a free strategy call so we can talk through where you are, what you need, and whether this is the right fit.

You can book yours here.

If this resonated, this is Part Three of my series on rest and over-functioning.

Check out the first two parts here:

Part One:
Why You Can’t Relax Even When Nothing Is Wrong
(A story about exhaustion, guilt, and learning to let myself stop.)

Part Two:
When Rest Feels Like Punishment: The Real Reason High Achievers Avoid Slowing Down

Next Up: Is Perfectionism Always a Trauma Response — or Can You Be a Perfectionist Without a Big Trauma Story?

A lot of people assume perfectionism only comes from “something bad happening.”
That’s not always true.
Some perfectionists are shaped by trauma, and some are shaped by temperament — and the two look very different on the inside.

Next week, I’m breaking down the difference in a way that actually makes sense:
Why do some people use perfectionism for safety? And why others use it for structure, identity, or pride — and how to tell which one belongs to you.

If you’ve ever wondered, “Why am I like this?” Don’t miss it.

She shrugged.
“I mean… I’m doing it. But I don’t like it.”

I asked clarifying questions about how she is resting and why she doesn’t like it.

She said, “When my pain flares, I move to a comfortable spot, I slow down, I shift my pace. But I don’t like doing it. I don’t like forcing myself to slow down.”

Another ‘ah ha’ moment:

Perfectionists and high achievers don’t struggle with rest because they’re incapable.
They struggle with rest because it feels like punishment or pure discomfort.

And once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

The Story Most High Achievers Don’t Notice They’re Telling

For so many high achievers,

Worth = output
Stillness = laziness
Rest = unproductive
Basic needs = annoying interruption

Rest becomes the lowest priority on the list (if it even makes the list at all).

I once had a high school teacher say:

“Eating is such a mundane survival action. We spend so much time eating that we don’t accomplish as much as we could.”

Eating, like resting, is a primary need.
It keeps us alive.

But that comment stuck with me because it reflects a much larger truth:

High achievers are taught from a young age that basic needs are optional.

Tasks are not.

So as adults, they become experts at bypassing their bodies.

Why This Happens: The Dopamine Loop No One Talks About

There’s a pattern I see constantly as a therapist and a coach for high achievers and perfectionists:

When high achievers avoid rest, they reach for dopamine instead.

Not because they’re “addicted,” but because dopamine helps them keep going.

Negative coping can look like:

• smoking

• overeating or undereating

• scrolling

• shopping

• over-caffeinating

• chaos-cleaning

• overworking

• micromanaging themselves or others

These behaviors become functional tools — ways to keep performing when their body is running on fumes.

Tough day at work? Sweet treat.
Need a break? Nicotine.

Uncertainty? What’s on sale?
Disconnected? Scroll.

It works… until it doesn’t.

This is the overlap between perfectionism and addiction (in this case, Dopamine addiction) that no one really names: the body learns to survive on stimulation, not rest.

Their bodies adapt to functioning with very little.

But functioning is not the same thing as being okay.

The Childhood Connection We Don’t Want to Admit

Recently, I watched a TikTok of a woman cleaning to the caption:
“The top reasons why the oldest daughter cleans instead of cries.”

That stuck with me because it’s a fantastic hook for individuals who truly understand hyper independence and high functioning anxiety (aka - myself and the clients I work with).

Many high achievers grew up in homes where:

• Parents never sat down

• Productivity was constant

• Tasks were always waiting

• Rest was rare or considered laziness

• Emotions were inconvenient

• Food routines were chaotic or skipped

• Stillness meant you’d get judged or punished

So what does a child learn?

Movement = safety
Rest = risk

Ask yourself:
What were your weekends like as a kid?
How does that compare to now?

I personally grew up watching parents who never stopped.
Weekends were chores, errands, tasks, projects.

No wonder rest has felt foreign as an adult.
I never saw it modeled.
Most perfectionists didn’t either.

This Is Why Rest Doesn’t Feel Safe — Even When Nothing Is Wrong

If you were shamed for resting…
If you were praised for achieving…
If your home ran on “get things done” instead of “take care of yourself”…
If your emotional needs weren’t met…
If food, sleep, or downtime were inconsistent…

Your nervous system learned something very specific:

Stillness = danger
Movement = protection

And I need you to hear this clearly:
I’m not blaming anyone here. Most parents — and the generations before them — were operating under a stoic model of “push through it, don’t complain, handle your business.”
They did the best they could with the tools they had.

But the truth is this:
Your earliest interactions, your earliest memories, and the way your household managed tasks all shaped your relationship with rest.

And the opposite can also be true:

If you grew up with a parent who lived with chronic pain, depression, or instability, you may have become the emotional caretaker… long before you should have.
You learned that being the responsible one kept the household running.
So now, as an adult, slowing down feels unsafe because you’ve never actually had the chance to experience what real rest looks like.

If you grew up in a home where nobody participated, nobody planned, and nobody followed through, you may have swung the other direction —
doing everything, being in everything, and feeling a constant internal drive to hold it all together.

This is why high achievers:

• get anxious when they slow down

• feel lazy when they rest

• treat rest like a waste of time

• only stop when they crash

• rely on dopamine to cope

• confuse rest with failure

• feel guilty doing anything that isn’t “productive.”

Rest doesn’t feel comforting — it feels unsafe.
Rest doesn’t feel restorative — it feels wrong.
Rest doesn’t feel earned — it feels like a threat to your identity.

This isn’t a flaw.
This isn’t a personality trait.
This isn’t you “not knowing how to relax.”

It’s conditioning.

And conditioning can be unlearned — gently, slowly, and without shame.

So What Do We Do With This?

The truth is simple:

You can’t change your relationship with rest until you understand the types of rest your body actually needs.

Most high achievers only use one type:
physical rest — collapsing after they burn out.

But there are multiple types of rest, and each one repairs a different part of your functioning.

Understanding them gives your nervous system a new language.
A new sense of safety.
A new way to come undone without falling apart.

And it’s one of the most underrated forms of self-care we have.

Because rest isn’t the reward.
It’s the requirement.

Part Three: The Types of Rest (and Why You Need All of Them)

Coming next as part of the “Why Rest Doesn’t Feel Safe” series.

If this hits something in you — the guilt, the over-functioning, the way your body fights slowing down — you’re not alone, and you’re not doing anything wrong.

This is what I wrote about in my main Substack piece:
Why You Can’t Relax Even When Nothing Is Wrong.
A story about exhaustion, guilt, and learning to let myself stop.

This isn’t about motivation.
It’s nervous system conditioning.
And you can absolutely unlearn it.

Read the full article here.
Then come back for the next part that will be released on Monday, December 8th:
The Types of Rest (and How to Actually Amplify Them When You’re a High Achiever).

I recently had to have a very real conversation with myself about rest — and the guilt that comes with it.

This season of life has stretched me in every direction: therapist, coach, content creator, business owner, wife, toddler mom, house manager, friend, daughter… all while trying to still feel like a person with needs of her own.

And yes, I have support.
An amazing husband.
People around me who help.
Assistants who take a ton off my plate.

But this season is teaching me something I didn’t understand until recently: even with help, high achievers struggle to relax because our bodies don’t trust rest.

And I didn’t fully see that pattern until life forced me to slow down.

The Backstory: The Warning I Ignored

A decade ago, I worked at a large group practice with a psychiatrist who became a mentor.
He was brilliant, intuitive, and oddly fascinated by the way my brain worked.

One day, he said, “You remind me of my wife. If she sees I’m wearing a cashmere sweater in August, she gets physically uncomfortable because she deeply feels others.”

I laughed, because… same.
But he was building toward something.

Later, he asked me, “What do you think about sleep?”

As a light sleeper who could survive on a trucker’s sleep schedule, I deeply questioned where this was going and how this related to our patients.
Why are we talking about sleep when we are treating people with psychosis, trauma, and debilitating depression?

He told me, “Sleep is one of the core pillars of mental health. Without it, most people can’t process trauma or manage stress.”

He encouraged me to start a sleep group.
I was young.
Eager.
Obsessed with rare diagnoses and complicated cases.

I dismissed this idea, but still kept this conversation as a core memory.

Years later, I’d realize it was one of the most important conversations we ever had.

The Breakdown: When My Nervous System Finally Protested

When I got pregnant, sleep started slipping away.
Insomnia.
Discomfort.
The kind of exhaustion that steals your ability to think.

After my daughter arrived, my brain felt like someone had pulled the plug on my working memory.
I couldn’t even put a grocery list together.

I remember telling a friend, “The hardest part of postpartum is grieving how my brain used to work.”

And my mentor’s voice kept replaying in my head.

He was right: we don’t take sleep seriously until it’s gone.
And high achievers push through exhaustion so long that the body stops sending early warnings.
It goes straight from “I’m fine” to “You’re done.”

Most of my clients are the same.
They brag about how little sleep they need.
They wake up and immediately start fixing, planning, and scanning.
They think the rest will happen after everything is done.

They don’t realize their nervous system has been running in emergency mode for years.

The Crash: Forced Rest and the Guilt That Followed

In May, my daughter started daycare.
In June, we entered the initiation phase every parent warns you about: the never-ending cycle of illnesses.

Strep.
Ear infections.
Allergies.
Hand-foot-and-mouth.
Random fevers.
Every virus imaginable.

It forced me to slow all the way down.

My daughter is also a velcro child — she wants to be attached to me at all times.
So when she’s sick, I’m not doing much outside of holding and caring for her.

Because this went on for a month, I’d show up to sessions looking like hell.
Coughing.
Wiping my nose.
Sometimes rescheduling clients because I genuinely did not have the capacity to show up as the therapist or coach I wanted to be.

I felt guilty.
Behind.
Foggy.
Unproductive.

But then something shifted.

I started noticing the signs of burnout and sickness earlier.
Instead of pushing through, I stopped.
I let myself rest on purpose — not as punishment, not as surrender, but as maintenance.

Because sitting with my daughter, doing nothing, reminded me: this is a season. And if I don’t honor it, I’ll miss it.

And what I realized is this:

High achievers can’t relax because we only rest when we’re forced to.

We ignore early signs.
We override discomfort.
We believe productivity equals safety.
And as a result, our nervous system doesn’t recognize “nothing is wrong.”

The Lesson I Wish I Learned Sooner

Rest is not the reward.
It’s the requirement.

My body isn’t a machine.
It doesn’t care about my to-do list, branding, deadlines, or income goals.

And if I don’t choose rest intentionally, my body will choose it for me — usually at the worst possible time.

This season with my daughter reminded me of something simple but profound:

There will always be periods of intense action and periods of forced slowing. But I get to choose how I respond. I get to choose whether I rest proactively or reactively.

And maybe that’s the real answer to the question:

Why can’t you relax even when nothing is wrong?

Because your nervous system doesn’t believe it.

But it can relearn.
One quiet moment at a time.
One intentional pause at a time.
One season of forced slowing that becomes a season of choosing yourself.

Conclusion

If this hit something in you, pause before you move on.
Take one small moment of rest today on purpose — even if it’s just a deep breath with your shoulders lowered.
Your nervous system learns safety through repetition, not perfection.

If you want support while you’re unlearning the “always on” wiring, you can join my newsletter community or explore my coaching work.
You don’t have to figure this out alone.

Over the past week, two of my VIP coaching spots filled - and it’s looking like a third might be as well.
That’s not luck.
That’s alignment.

Because the truth is, nothing changes until your mindset does.

I see it every single day with my clients - and I’ve lived it myself.
We want the outcome: less stress, more peace, better balance.
But we try to get there with the same mindset that caused the burnout in the first place.

Your Brain Believes What You Feed It

When your inner dialogue (the Monger) is primarily focusing on self-doubt, shame, and pressure, your brain starts to believe that’s what keeps you safe.

It becomes a defense mechanism - similar to how perfectionism operates.

When you constantly tell yourself:

• “I’m behind.”

• “I should be doing more.”

• “I don’t deserve to rest.”

Your nervous system listens. It doesn’t question whether those statements are true - it simply adapts to survive them.

And that’s how perfectionists and high achievers end up living in a constant state of internal war: the push to do more colliding with the exhaustion of never feeling like enough.

The reality is:
The thoughts you repeat become the results you experience.

We have around 60,000 thoughts per day. Research has found that 80% of our thoughts are repetitive and negative.

And when we become used to this type of thinking, it can be incredibly difficult to shift it.

Mentality Is the Missing Link

High achievers love strategy - we want the plan, the checklist, the next step.
But here’s the problem: strategy doesn’t work when the mindset behind it is rooted in fear, comparison, or unworthiness.

You can have the perfect morning routine, the best productivity tools, and a perfectly structured life…and still sabotage your peace if your brain is wired to equate worth with output.

That’s why my 1:1 VIP clients’ biggest breakthroughs don’t come from doing more - they come from learning to think differently.
They stop trying to “fix” themselves and start listening to the voice that actually supports them (the Advocate).

Because when your mentality shifts, your behavior follows, and your self-compassion increases.

Rewiring Your Thoughts

This is the work we do inside coaching - and it’s what I practice myself.
If you’re ready to start now, here’s where to begin:

1. Awareness: Notice what you say to yourself most often. Write it down. Get honest.

2. Pause: Ask, “Would I say this to someone I love?” If not, you’ve found the voice that needs retraining.

3. Redirect: Replace criticism with curiosity. Try, “What would support me right now?” or “What would my Advocate say instead?”

You can’t silence your inner critic overnight - but you can start to make shifts in the way you treat, listen, and hear yourself.

What Happens When You Shift

When you change your thinking, everything else follows.
You stop overreacting.
You stop spiraling.
You stop chasing validation from a critic that’s been lying to you.

And for the first time in a long time, you start feeling calm, grounded, and proud - not because you finally achieved enough, but because you stopped fighting yourself.

That’s what this work is really about: getting your peace back.

Subscribe now

This Is the Work We Do in VIP Coaching

My clients aren’t changing because they’ve suddenly become more disciplined. They’re changing because they’ve learned how to think differently.

They’ve built the mindset that allows them to:

• Achieve without anxiety

• Rest without guilt

• Speak to themselves with compassion

• Feel at home in their own lives again

If you’re ready to stop surviving on self-criticism and start thriving with self-trust, this is your invitation.

My VIP 1:1 Coaching program is currently full, but I’m opening two new spots for the next round.
This is the deepest, most personal work I offer: sixteen weeks of complete support for high achievers ready to reset perfectionism and reclaim peace.

Apply for your free strategy call through the link in bio. Let’s build the mindset that changes everything.

And please, work to be nicer to yourself, just a little.

You deserve it.

To learn more about the parts of the inner critic, check out my last article, The Three Faces of the Inner Critic. Or if you want to watch a presentation that teaches you each part, check out my YouTube video All About The Inner Critic.

Subscribe now

Your toughest competition isn’t other people - it’s the voice inside your head.

Perfectionists and high achievers are often the most guilty of being unaware of just how brutal, harsh, and critical they are toward themselves. I see it in my clients every day - and I’ve personally experienced it too.

The truth is, we live in a society that constantly revolves around self-comparison, doing more, and chasing success. The critic’s voice becomes so prevalent and so loud that it’s the only thing we hear. Our brains get used to it.

Eventually, we start to believe that being harsh and critical is the only thing keeping us going. But here’s the catch: that slow burn leads to anxiety, depression, overwhelm, burnout - and for some, physical health conditions driven by chronic stress.

Shifting your inner critic and learning to tame these voices is one of the highest acts of self-compassion.

A Story We All Know Too Well

One of my clients once told me she had finally landed a big promotion. She should have been celebrating. Instead, she went home, opened her laptop, and kept working.

When I asked why, she said, “Because I don’t feel like I’ve really earned it yet, and now I have to work harder.”

That’s the Monger at work - the inner critic that convinces you that your accomplishments are never enough.

And this is just one of thousands of stories I could tell you.

Why I Teach This Work

High achievers and perfectionists live in a constant tug-of-war with their inner critic. For years, they’ve relied on it like a survival mechanism: push harder, achieve more, keep everything under control.

The problem is, when that becomes the only strategy you know, it feels impossible to slow down without guilt or to make mistakes without spiraling into shame.

That’s why I don’t just tell clients to “quiet the inner critic.” The critic isn’t something you can erase. It’s wired into the way you’ve learned to survive, succeed, and protect yourself. But you can understand its different voices, learn what they’re trying to do, and retrain them so they stop running your life.

This work is essential for high achievers and perfectionists because:

• Without it, success always comes with a side of anxiety, burnout, or resentment.

• Without it, “rest” feels unsafe, like you’re falling behind.

• Without it, even your biggest wins feel empty, because the critic moves the finish line.

When you learn to identify the Monger, the BFF, and most importantly, strengthen the Advocate, you stop living in survival mode. You build a way of relating to yourself that feels sustainable, compassionate, and growth-oriented.

The Three Faces of the Inner Critic

1. The Monger

The Monger’s entire job is to prevent you from failure. It overdrives, pushes you past your limits, and makes you feel worthless, no matter how much you’ve done. Perfectionists and high achievers often live here because past trauma or experiences taught them that only this voice keeps them “safe.”

The hidden benefit: When used correctly, the Monger helps in a crisis or when intuition is needed. It’s the voice that sharpens your focus and gets you to act fast. The problem is when the Monger becomes the only voice you listen to - then every day feels like a failure if things don’t go exactly as planned.

2. The BFF (aka Procrastination Station)

This voice wants you to always be right, stay comfortable, avoid conflict, and steer clear of fear. It whispers: “Don’t rock the boat. Don’t change. Just do what feels good right now.” At its worst, it leads to procrastination, avoidance, and constant fight-or-flight whenever something gets uncomfortable.

The hidden benefit: The BFF knows how to protect your energy. It’s the voice that reminds you it’s okay to rest, to play, and to not be “on” all the time. The problem is when it takes over completely - then downtime turns into avoidance, and self-care becomes self-sabotage.

3. The Advocate

This is the voice we all need to strengthen. The Advocate mediates between the Monger and the BFF. It takes in what’s really happening, lowers reactivity, and finds balance in how we function.

The benefit: It’s the safest, most grounded voice. The Advocate helps you get things done without burning out, and also gives you permission to celebrate, rest, and grow. It’s the growth voice perfectionists are constantly seeking but rarely know how to embody.

Questions I Ask When Listening for the Inner Critic

When I work with clients, I don’t just explain the inner critic - I listen for it. The voice shows up in subtle ways, and each one tells me which “face” of the critic is running the show.

Here are the questions I use - try them as a self-check:

The Monger

• Do you feel like you’re never good enough, no matter what you accomplish?

• Do you obsess over what people think of you?

• Do you struggle to release anything unless it’s absolutely perfect?
  

The BFF

• Do you get close to success, only to stall out or stop yourself?

• Do you distract yourself with familiar tasks instead of trying something new that feels uncomfortable?

• Do you pull back or sabotage when vulnerability or deeper commitment is required?
  

The Advocate

• Do you recognize your own worth outside of achievement?

• Do you encourage yourself in positive and supportive ways?

• Do you accept that no one is perfect, and still allow yourself to move forward?

Your Challenge

Over the next week, pay attention to which voice shows up most often for you. Is it the Monger pushing you to exhaustion? The BFF keeping you stuck in comfort? Or the Advocate helping you find balance and perspective?

Awareness is the first step to shifting your relationship with your inner critic and choosing which voice you’ll let lead your life.

That client I mentioned earlier? When she finally learned how to strengthen her Advocate, she began celebrating her wins without guilt. She didn’t need to prove her worth by working herself into the ground. That’s the transformation waiting for you too.

Ready to Shift Your Inner Critic?

If you’re tired of letting the Monger or the BFF run your life, my VIP 1:1 Coaching is where we build the Advocate voice into your strongest guide.

Over 16 weeks together, we’ll reset your relationship with perfectionism so you can:

• Achieve without burning out

• Rest without guilt

• Finally feel good about your success

I offer free strategy calls to make sure we’re the right fit - and even if I’m not your person, I’ll help you find the resources or person you need and want.

This is the most personalized coaching I offer, with complete access to me for both the personal and professional challenges that come with being a high achiever.

I only have two spots left this year. If you’re ready, let’s talk. Link in bio to book your free call today.

My Own Restless Rest

When I started my private practice, I thought becoming my own boss would give me control. I imagined rest would finally come once I managed my schedule, set my hours, and called the shots.

But the truth? I worked harder than ever. Even when I sat down, my brain kept running: What else do I need to do? Who still needs me? What’s waiting on my list?

Rest didn’t feel like relief. It felt like failure.

I remember being in a coaching group that helped therapists build side hustles. One day it hit me: my schedule looked nothing like theirs.

I was seeing 20-30 clients per week. They capped at 12.
I was filling every hour with gym sessions, content creation, or business planning. They were reading fiction books and taking naps.

They were resting. I was proving. And I was driving off of my maladaptive perfectionism.

I had never felt so misplaced in a group of people I shared so much in common with - and honestly, so confused. Was I doing all of this just to prove something? Was income that important? And why, when I finally sat down to rest, did it feel so unjustified? Why did rest need to be justified at all?

Why Rest Feels Unsafe

There are patterns behind this:

• High Achievers tie their worth to productivity. Rest feels like laziness.
  

• People-Pleasers are wired to meet everyone else’s needs first. Rest feels selfish.
  

• The One Everyone Relies On fears dropping the ball. Rest feels dangerous when your role is holding everything together.

It’s not that you can’t rest. It’s that your nervous system has been trained to see rest as a threat to your identity.

The Metaphor

Rest for me felt like driving 90 mph and suddenly slamming on the brakes - the car stops, but my body still jolts forward.

Or it’s like setting down a heavy bag you’ve carried so long your arms feel empty without it. The weight was painful, but the absence feels unbearable.

For me, the first sign I needed rest wasn’t the feeling of fatigue. It was when I found myself scrolling Zillow at midnight, convincing myself a new house and a new location would solve my burnout.

And for many high achievers, people-pleasers, and those stuck in the fawning response, there’s something else at play: cortisol addiction.

When you’ve been taught to constantly be “on,” your body adapts to the stress hormones that come with busyness, urgency, and over-functioning. The rush of cortisol becomes familiar, even comforting, while stillness feels foreign. Rest isn’t just uncomfortable; it feels unsafe because your nervous system has learned to equate calm with vulnerability.

The Truth + Small Shifts

Rest isn’t laziness, it’s a reset. But when perfectionism and high-functioning anxiety are running the show, your inner critic will always frame it as weakness.

Here are three small shifts that helped me reframe rest:

• Start tiny. Give yourself 10 minutes a day to do nothing - literally nothing. Let your brain learn that rest doesn’t equal danger. OR schedule 2 hours of rest/doing nothing into your week.
  

• Reframe the word. Instead of calling it “rest,” try “recovery” or “reset.” High achievers accept recovery in athletics - your mind deserves the same.
  

• Flip the script. Ask yourself: “If someone I loved was this tired, what would I tell them to do?” Then give yourself that same permission.
  
  

Tools I Use to Actually Rest

Here are some of the best tools and practices I’ve leaned on to promote rest, even in the midst of chaos:

1. Schedule downtime. Block at least two hours a week where you’re not being productive, not answering your phone, and simply doing something for you. Also, turn off some of the notifications on your phone…you don’t need all of them.
   

2. Yes Days. Once a month, give yourself a “yes day” (like the movie). Do what you want, when you want. If you find yourself overdoing it, move to the next tool.
   

3. Check your rest rhythms. Your brain can only give you about 90 minutes of executive functioning before it needs a 5–30 minute reset. If you’re not a napper, find “non-consuming” rest: go for a walk, listen to music, stretch, or practice deep breathing.
   

4. Redefine rest. It’s not a mountain to climb or a whole day off. Even going to bed 30 minutes earlier counts as rest - and it can make a huge difference.

What would rest look like if it wasn’t something to earn, but something to protect?

What’s Next

Next week, I’ll share the first step to retraining your brain (and your inner critic) so rest feels safe, not shameful.

Because if you’re tired of chasing “happy when,” learning to rest is where the healing begins.

Reply with your favorite way to rest - I’m building a reader-made list of ‘unconventional rest rituals’ to share in a future post.

If this resonated with you, subscribe and follow to get next week’s letter.

I’m glad you’re here, and I’m sending you so much self-compassion.

Success is built into the work. But healing is built int

o the rest.