High Functioning Anxiety Support In Brighton and Hove

When success hides stress: calm on the outside, anxious on the inside.

You might appear capable and composed on the surface, yet internally your mind is busy, your body is tense, you can feel exhausted and switching off feels harder than it should.

High functioning anxiety is not a formal diagnosis. It is a pattern: you keep showing up, keep coping, keep managing, and your nervous system rarely fully recovers after stress; it remains switched on and at the ready.

This page will help you recognise the pattern, understand why it persists, and the steps needed to start working with BodyMindBrain to retrain your anxiety.

Signs of High-Functioning Anxiety

You may recognise yourself in some of these:

• You function well externally, but feel stressed and anxious internally
• Your mind runs ahead: planning, anticipating, replaying conversations
• You sometimes feel detached
• You frequently feel on edge
• You hold yourself to high standards and feel a strong need to “get it right”
• You can’t fully relax, even in downtime
• Sleep is lighter or more disrupted; you wake unrefreshed
• You hold a lot of tension in your body (jaw, shoulders, chest, stomach)
• You’re sensitive to making mistakes or criticism
• You feel fatigued or exhausted
• You overthink decisions, rehearse outcomes, or second-guess yourself
• You appear calm, so that others may not realise the extent of your inner fight/flight reactions

All of these can indicate a state of running in a chronic high alert.

Why high-functioning anxiety happens

Anxiety is a normal human system designed to help you anticipate risk and respond to challenge.
The issue arises when the “threat system” becomes the default setting, especially under prolonged demand.

High-functioning anxiety is often maintained by two interacting factors:

1) Psychological patterns that increase load

• perfectionism and high internal standards
• responsibility bias (“it’s on me”)
• discomfort with uncertainty
• over-control and over-preparation
• avoidance of confrontation
• self-criticism as a motivator

2) Stress physiology that keeps the system activated

When the nervous system spends too much time mobilised (sympathetic activation) and too little time in recovery (parasympathetic settling), the body can remain “switched on” even when life is safe. 

That is why “thinking differently” often helps, but doesn’t fully resolve it.

High-functioning anxiety vs burnout

A simple distinction:

• High functioning anxiety: you are still performing, but it costs you (tension, worry, sleep fragility, fatigue).
• Burnout: recovery fails—performance, mood, and energy become harder to sustain, sometimes culminating in a state of collapse.

If you relate more to burnout symptoms (slower thinking, depleted energy, weekend recovery no longer working), see: Work Burnout Recovery.

How to deal with high-functioning anxiety

Focus on the way you cope with stress, psychological and your physiological recovery after stress.

By working on both sides of the equation, you gain a greater ability to handle stress with less resorting to unhelpful coping patterns:

• reduce the psychological drivers that keep you in pressure mode
• restore your body’s ability to downshift your nervous system response back to safety
• build a realistic operating system for high-demand life (leave space for imperfection)

This is not about becoming less ambitious. It is about becoming more sustainable.

How BodyMindBrain can help you

High-functioning anxiety is psychological and physiological, so we work on both.

Psychological support: reduce overload and change sustaining patterns

In our stress and recovery psychology approach, we focus on:

• making your patterns visible (including the ones that seem “normal”)
• reducing perfectionism-driven load and chronic self-pressure
• changing the relationship to uncertainty and control
• strengthening boundaries and decision-making under pressure
• developing an internal stance that is calmer, more resilient, and less reactive

Physiological support: regulation, recovery capacity, and resilience

Psychological change lands more deeply when your nervous system can settle ad your physiology is more adaptive to stress and water to recover.

Depending on your needs and suitability, we may integrate:

• Neurofeedback to support steadier brain regulation (sleep, reactivity, clarity)
• IHHT and targeted physiology training to support recovery capacity and stress resilience
• EMS / strength and movement and physical endurance work to increase strength and support embodied steadiness, and build physical capacity

The aim is practical: a system that can meet demand and return to baseline more reliably, so you feel more in command of your responses.

How to start

Everything starts with an initial session to understand what’s driving your pattern and what will help most. There are two initial options:

Ongoing work is weekly. Consistency is the minimum effective dose for real adaptation in recovery, resilience, and performance.