High Functioning Anxiety
High Functioning Anxiety: When Success Hides Stress
You might appear calm, capable, and even successful on the outside, but inside, your mind could be racing and overactive while your body feels depleted, wired and tense. This is often referred to as high-functioning anxiety, a form of anxiety that drives achievement and productivity while quietly wearing down your nervous system. People with high-functioning anxiety often push themselves hard, manage responsibilities exceptionally well, and appear composed under pressure, yet struggle with chronic stress, overwhelm, tension, and sleep disturbances. Understanding this hidden form of anxiety is essential to managing it effectively, reclaiming balance, and maintaining both mental and physical well-being.
Symptoms of High-Functioning Anxiety
Symptoms of high-functioning anxiety often mirror those of generalised anxiety or panic, but in the context of a person who appears to be living a life of competence. Daily Symptoms can include:
- acting calm but feeling out of control
- poor recovery outside of work and daily demands
- living with a feeling of being stuck in fight / flight mode
- racing thoughts and internal dialogue
- feeling detached
- muscular tension and stress physiology, such as high heart rate
- feeling on edge
- fatigue and lack of energy
- hypervigilance for criticism or mistakes
- going over what you’ve said or done
- low self-esteem
High Fucntioning Anxiety and the Nervous System
Anxiety and fear are adaptive emotions that everyone experiences at times. They are neurochemical and nervous system responses designed to help keep us safe and calculate risk around new situations, about outcomes and people. These physiological reactions can also be accompanied by fear-based thoughts, worries, and behaviours, also intended to help us predict, be prepared and feel in control.
Anxiety is part of our survival and ‘fight or flight’ response, and we need it. It is when the fear response is out of balance, disproportionate and unable to be calmed that we run into problems. It is the role of the parasympathetic nervous system to help us rebalance after stress, and this can be helped significantly by good recovery routines, fitness and strength training, supportive relationships with others and ourselves, as well as thinking that is balanced and proportionate to the situations we encounter.
Helping your body and mind interpret the world differently
For some people, fear and anxiety responses are no longer adapting appropriately to the needs of each situation and have become habitually out of balance. It can be a sign that the brain and nervous system are stuck in a stress response and need help re-balancing sympathetic and parasympathetic activity. By calming the nervous system, the brain can return to interpreting situations as less threatening.
Once your nervous system and brain have come out of a prolonged stress response, then it is important to reassess lifestyle factors and coping strategies that keep you unintentionally more stressed and anxious than necessary.
Help for High Functioning Anxiety with BodyMindBrain
At BodyMindBrain, we understand that modern-day, high-functioning lifestyles are often the cause of excessive sympathetic nervous system activation, with insufficient recovery and parasympathetic balance. One of the negative consequences of this can be heightened anxiety and stress responses, leading to diminished or unsustainable performance levels..
We prioritise the use of advanced technologies that support your body, nervous system and brain to come out of a prolonged stress response. By optimising brain function, increasing oxygenation, boosting physical fitness and endurance, alongside re-establishing habits that support better recovery during high-stress times, we help you set up the right conditions for your body and mind to return to optimal balance between ‘fight /flight’ and recovery modes.
We also help you reappraise your high-functioning lifestyle so that you can future-proof your ability to perform and recover in equal measure.