Are You Addicted To Over-achieving?
It feels good, doesn’t it? When you get something done. When you tick something off your to-do list. That sense of accomplishment. That feeling of relief when you remove one more thing from that long list of things you need to do before you can relax...
If you’re like most, you probably don’t take a moment to celebrate or acknowledge what you’ve just achieved - it’s onto the next thing.
There’s no time you say! No time to take a break or a pause before you move onto the next email, text message response, phone call or business activity.
But what about when those feel good moments of achievement become an addiction? You can’t live without them. You can’t not be achieving....ever.....
Don’t get me wrong - I love achieving things. That’s how sh!t gets done, the world progresses and how we evolve.
It’s when this behaviour becomes dysfunctional that we need to stop and look at our actions and the impact they’re having. It’s when we are constantly burnt out, always feeling tired, can’t slow down or relax or choose working and doing over spending precious time with our loved ones that we need to take a deeper look at ourselves and the unconscious drivers that are creating our current reality.
So how do you know if you’re addicted to overachieving?? Here’s a simple test:
- How do you feel about yourself when you are doing, creating and achieving; vs
- How do you feel about yourself when you’re relaxing and doing nothing? And I’m talking about literally doing nothing.....not sitting on the couch watching a movie whilst checking and responding to emails!!!
Did honestly responding to the second question make you feel a bit uncomfortable? A bit squeamish? A bit uneasy.....be honest now!
“You mean - do absolutely nothing”........WTF does that even feel like!!??
It’s extremely likely that you place a high sense of self-worth on achieving. Meaning that you only feel good about yourself when you’re moving forward and ticking things off your list.
And conversely, when you’re doing nothing and trying to relax - you feel like crap. You’re trying to take some time out for yourself but pretty quickly you’ll be feeling the squirming inside to get back to achieving....and if you’re not aware of your patterns - you will.
Taking this one step deeper - it’s likely you only love yourself when you’re achieving.
Which means you love yourself ‘conditionally’ as opposed to unconditionally. You place conditions on yourself as to when you can and can’t love yourself. You tie your self-worth to when you are achieving and you tend to feel down on yourself when you are doing nothing and relaxing.
If you’ve resonated with this post then it’s likely you have some form of addiction to achieving - because that’s when you get to feel good about yourself and like who you are.
The work on from here then becomes one of firstly recognising that you have this addiction, noticing times when this pattern kicks in and then consciously working with yourself to be OK with yourself when you are having downtime / relaxing in order to do the work to rewire this pattern.
Hope this helps.
Josh ‘Downtime’ Stone
