Each New Year, we pledge to transform our bodies, improve our careers, organize our homes and develop new hobbies. We dedicate ourselves to doing more—more exercise, more work, more activities and social engagements. On its face, striving for more sounds pretty good. But it also has a dark side that we need to resist.
As a neuropsychologist, much of my work focuses on how people respond to stress. I often find myself helping people understand the effects of self-defeating behaviors that I call the Overs. It’s a familiar list: overworking, overachieving, overthinking, overexplaining, overgiving, overcommitting and overaccommodating.
We engage in the Overs to create psychological safety for ourselves. They’re a form of nervous-system regulation. When you feel anxiety, stress, frustration or uncertainty, it’s because threat networks in your brain have activated: You’re afraid. To restore balance, you engage in compensatory behaviors designed to alleviate your fear. You may think, for example, that you overwork so your boss won’t get mad at you, but the deeper explanation is that you overwork to relieve the stress you feel in the face of that prospect.
All too often, however, the Overs themselves become a primary source of psychological danger in our lives. In my work with high-achieving individuals, they often agree that all their overfunctioning feels bad to them, but they insist they need to continue overdoing it in order to stay safe—or, as they put it, to stay “relevant” or “on top.” Regardless of the semantics, the underlying neurobiology is the same: Overdoing is a form of self-protection. The problem is, it becomes bad for us.
Consider overachieving—the unrelenting drive for high performance. The conventional wisdom is that “striving to be one’s best” is a form of resilience that makes us more productive. Recent research suggests otherwise. A 2018 meta-analysis of 25,000 people, conducted by Dana Harari and colleagues and published in the Journal of Applied Psychology, found no relationship between actual performance and the perfectionism typical of overachievers. In other words, constantly striving to be the best performer doesn’t make you the best performer.
But it does carry serious costs in terms of mental and physical health. A 2017 study by a team of Chinese researchers found that perfectionism was related to greater anxiety and depression. Researchers at Vanderbilt University examined the relationship between overachieving and reward-related neurocircuitry and reported in a 2012 study that overachievers had higher levels of dopamine, a neurotransmitter related to both motivation and addiction. The brain can create powerful cravings that perpetuate our overfunctioning—the more you overfunction, the more you want to overfunction.
Or take another example: overthinking. If overthinking worked, it would allow us to solve more problems in our lives. But research shows the opposite is true. Overthinking is linked to poorer decision-making, greater interpersonal problems and more distress. The point of thinking about our problems is to reduce our problems, not to exacerbate them.
To break the grip of the Overs in the coming year, it’s imperative to see them for what they are: forms of safety-seeking. We think that if we overachieve or overthink, then “they” can’t harm us—other people can’t get mad at us, dominate us or reject us. But the reality is that when we chronically overdo it, we harm ourselves, with real consequences for our mental and physical health. Thinking more intelligently about the deeper psychological needs behind our behavior can help us find needed balance.
Here are three simple strategies to help you stop overdoing it in your life.
• Decide on a new boundary and expect it to feel bad.
To stop overdoing, plan for some feelings of distress to emerge temporarily as you behave in more balanced ways. Overfunctioning is a hypervigilance strategy, a way that your brain organizes your behavior to protect you from potential danger. For example, if you decide to stop checking email after 7 p.m. in the New Year, your brain will sound an alarm after 7 p.m.: What if there’s an important message you missed? What if your boss gets mad at you? If you respond to the urge, you will reinforce the very behavior you are trying to change.
But if you commit to your new boundary, your brain will habituate rather quickly. One of the most effective ways to overcome fear is through habituation. Habituation simply means repeatedly exposing yourself to something that initially frightens you, and after repeated exposures, your brain learns that the thing is not dangerous.
• Recognize the difference between danger and dislike.
As you start to create these new boundaries, there may be real consequences. For example, if you stop overaccommodating your friends, family and co-workers, they may become frustrated with you. It’s natural to dislike that, but it does not mean it’s dangerous. Research shows that people overestimate the negative consequences of their decisions.
What will harm you is chronically avoiding the negative feelings that your decisions may generate. Avoiding and denying take tremendous amounts of psychological energy—and often change our lives for the worse. Take PTSD: If someone was traumatized in a military convoy, the pain of PTSD often sets in later when, for example, they feel they have to avoid ordinary activities like driving on suburban streets. People avoid these things not because the activities are dangerous but because they believe their feelings are.
Although PTSD is an extreme example, a similar logic applies to our regular lives. Although we may think facing our feelings is dangerous, the opposite is true: We find relief when we’re able to distinguish real danger from mere dislike.
• Consider that you might be the most dangerous person in your own life.
In my work, this is the concept that produces the most profound shifts for people. Often, we overfunction because we feel like the “other” isn’t safe—that another person will reject, harm or disappoint us. When you repeatedly attempt to restore your sense of psychological safety through other people—through their validation, permission or mood—you might feel better temporarily, but you ultimately destabilize your own sense of safety. You have persuaded yourself that what is necessary to regulate your nervous system isn’t your own inner authority but someone else’s permission.
As a result, you’re not in charge of how much you work, give or do—someone else is. This is a perennial recipe for overdoing it. Instead, we need to recognize that the most powerful determiner of our own safety is no one but ourselves.
Source : (WSJ Article ) Julia DiGangi is a neuropsychologist and founder of NeuroHealth Partners. She is the author of “Energy Rising: The Neuroscience of Leading with Emotional Power,” published by Harvard Business Review Press.
