The Thing Nobody Told You About Success

By Dr Addy Dunkley-Smith, Doctoral Clinical Psychologist & Fellow Human | August 2026 | 4-minute read

I see them all the time in my practice. Accomplished people - directors, managers, executives, business owners. People you'd describe as having it together.

Except they don't feel like it.

On the outside they're calm. Reliable. Organised. The person everyone counts on. The person who delivers.

On the inside, it's different. There's an incessant voice... It's reviewing what they said in that meeting, checking the email they sent, planning for the thing that could go wrong tomorrow. And genuinely unable to remember the last time they felt good about something they did at work.

That's high-functioning anxiety paired with perfectionism.

And it's the invisible tax on achievement.

What the research tells us

This anxiety isn’t a sign of falling short at work, it’s a pattern is a systematic thing happening in how we process threat and standards.

High-functioning anxiety is when someone experiences significant anxiety while maintaining outward success. They show up, perform, accomplish things. No one sees the internal chatter because it's masked by competence.

Perfectionism, according to the research, comes in two flavours. There's the striving kind. That's ambition. The part that helps you be thorough. But then there's the other kind, the perfectionistic concerns. That's the part that believes that errors are catastrophic. That anything less than perfect means something's very wrong with you. That's the part that's reliably linked to problematic anxiety (Egan et al., 2023, Gilman et al., 2023).

The part that keeps people locked in this pattern is the reinforcement loop. You feel anxious. You overwork. You check your work. The outcome is usually fine. Your brain thinks: "Anxiety meant it wasn’t ready. It made me keep checking. The checking made the work good enough. So I need to pour over the work every time to make sure it's okay." You're trapped in a system where anxiety feels like it's actually keeping you safe.

It's not.

On the other hand burnout can lead to ineffective work output, a lack of creativity and capacity for perspective taking and result in withdrawal from work. So often I hear about these boom-and-bust cycles. Driven by loads of self-criticism about their shut down periods, this further motivates perfectionists into the unrelenting work behaviours… which ultimately also make periods of burnout or avoidance and withdrawal more likely too.

Imposter syndrome is tangled up in this too. People with high perfectionism are more likely to dismiss their accomplishments, attribute them to luck or effort rather than ability, and engage in social comparison that reinforces self-doubt (Mowbray et al., 2024). The research is clear on this. Studies show the majority of professionals experience it at some point.

But here's what matters clinically: if this pattern stays unchanged, the cost accumulates. More perfectionism correlates with more anxiety, more depression, more rumination (Egan et al., 2023).

What changes it

The research on this is hopeful… if we act on it.

First, understand what you're fighting. This isn't laziness. It's not ambition gone wrong. It's a particular way of processing threat (the belief that imperfection equals danger, that anxiety equals a lack of preparation, that your output is of poor quality unless you work in this manner) mixed with a particular way of relating to yourself (the belief that your worth is contingent on performance). Those things can shift… IF you are willing to test them as theories rather than take them as absolute truths.

1. Name the cost, not as motivation, as information.

Perfectionistic thoughts often come packaged as helpful. "If I worry, I'll remember the detail." "If I feel bad about it, I'll do better." Cognitive Behavioural Therapy calls this "thought-feeling fusion". Write down what your worry actually delivers. Most of the time it delivers nothing except tiredness. When you see that clearly, something can change (Egan et al., 2023).

2. Break the achievement equals worth equation.

The part of you that drives achievement has a job. It's trying to prove something. Usually safety, or value. It may not actually believe you're safe or valuable unless you achieve. That's the contract you need to renegotiate. A trained psychologist can help you have a conversation with that part of yourself, find out what it's protecting you from, and expand its view of what actually makes you safe or worth. This changes the internal pressure.

3. Add self-compassion. Genuinely.

This isn't about being soft. A randomized controlled trial found that even brief self-compassion interventions reduced perfectionism and anxiety simultaneously (Neff & Germer, 2013; Kelly et al., 2021), which leads to better, not worse outcomes work-wise. The mechanism is neurological. Self-critical perfectionism activates threat systems in the brain. Self-compassion deactivates them. Your nervous system actually has to believe you're safe before you can relax your guard.

4. Challenge the social comparison specifically.

You're comparing your insides to other people's outsides. A 2025 study of engineering students found that the link between imposter feelings and poor mental health was strongest when students were making ability-based social comparisons. Stop. When you catch yourself comparing, get curious instead. What's that comparison actually telling you? Usually that you're afraid of being exposed. Usually that's not true.

5. Start with acceptance, not change.

ACT teaches this. Your anxiety is there. Your perfectionism is there. You don't fight it first. You notice it, acknowledge it, and choose what you actually want to do anyway. Want to send an email that's 95% perfect instead of redrafting it seven times? Do that even though the thought "but it might have an error" shows up. The thought is not data. It's just a thought your anxious brain produces.

This is not about fixing yourself. You don't need fixing. You need a different relationship with the part of you that believes you do.

It doesn't have to feel this way. This is a pattern. It's treatable. And it's worth treating seriously, because success that still doesn't feel good is just expensive, lonely exhaustion.

If perfectionism and anxiety are affecting your work or relationships, a psychologist trained in CBT, ACT, or IFS can help. It’s evidence-based and it works.