Anxiety and Perfectionism

It’s like moving in a dense fog.

Your thoughts keep whirling around, creating a fog of harsh words, sharp worries, dread, and pain.

There is a nagging feeling something is going wrong or something terrible is coming. A relentless loop of worst-case scenarios and what-ifs continues repeatedly. And that persuasive inner voice that thinks it can criticize you into ‘enoughness’ or punish you into success, not realizing you are already enough just as you are.

You feel lost, turned around. The anxiety and the striving are debilitating, eating your life. You recognize the disconnection, exhaustion, burnout, and impact on your relationships, work, and health.

It feels like there’s no way through this.

It’s an impossible weight of expectation.

You told yourself if you were alert and worked hard enough, you could prevent everything from going wrong. You wouldn’t need to worry if you just did everything exactly right… and double-check everything. And if you can just push through this one thing, it’ll be easier on the other side.

But there’s always another one and another. There’s always a new skill or task to master, a new problem to solve, and all the old ones don’t just stop mattering, either. No matter how often you check things or how compulsively you do every task on your list, it doesn’t lead to a way out.

And that critic never stops telling you how much you have to carry and how much it will ruin if anyone sees you stumble, much less fall. It’s overwhelming.

Life gets smaller and smaller…

…and so does our capacity to experience it. Anxiety and perfectionism eat our lives, our joy, and our sense of ourselves.

When anxiety gets big and when we fear the costs of making mistakes, it takes over everything. Our brains become wired for fear to drive us to do whatever is needed to survive.

And anxiety and perfectionism can make it seem like everything is a threat to our survival. It’s hard to hear ourselves when those voices and worries are so loud.

We can set down the burden and make a path through whatever comes.

The good news is that there are many ways to heal anxiety, set down the burden of unrealistic expectations, and trust ourselves to manage whatever comes.

When we work together, we’ll learn to identify our anxieties and what they cost us. So often, our efforts to avoid anxiety make our lives smaller. As we seek not to feel anxious, not to experience the sting of what our anxiety thinks it protects us from – hurt, rejection, shame, loss, failure – we end up avoiding anything that scares us and missing out on learning, connecting, mastering, exploring, playing, and loving.

So, we’ll learn how to identify the things that matter most to you. These are things worth doing even if we can’t do them perfectly, and they are worth maybe hurting to have, do, and be.

We’ll learn to manage the feelings and sensations that anxiety creates, to turn down the volume on them so we are really in control instead of fear and perfectionism pushing us around.

It’s time to step into the light!

Together, we’ll step out of the fog and into the light of a clear path.

Your values will provide a compass you can use with the skills and perspectives you learn to navigate even when difficulties make it hard to see again.

Start the journey today: contact me for your free 15-minute consultation.