How to Cope With High Functioning Anxiety?
You struggle with anxiety, but you haven’t let your symptoms stop you from making progress in school or at work. Does this mean that you’ve actually learned how to cope with high functioning anxiety, or are you in denial about the negative impact this condition continues to have on your life?
To learn more about mental health recovery options in Philadelphia, call us today or verify your insurance online. We look forward to helping you get started on your personal recovery journey.
What Is High-Functioning Anxiety?
You won’t find an entry for high-functioning anxiety in the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) – but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.
People most commonly use this term to describe those with generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) who can still lead what appears to be a productive and successful life.
Unfortunately, outward indicators of success can’t prevent a person from experiencing the intense fears and excessive worries that are characteristic of GAD and other anxiety disorders.
Signs You Might Have High-Functioning Anxiety
If the following examples sound familiar to you, you may have high-functioning anxiety:
- You have set ridiculously high expectations for yourself, and your self-esteem suffers whenever you don’t meet these standards. This can be a source of ongoing frustration in various areas of life. You may experience it at school, on the job, or in your relationships with others.
- You have a great deal of difficulty delegating tasks or asking for help. If you encounter a problem while working on a project, you interpret this as evidence that you need to work harder, devote even more time to the effort, or both.
- You’ve yet to encounter a challenge that you can’t overthink. This includes worrying excessively about events that haven’t occurred yet as well as stewing over “mistakes” that you think you made in the past.
- You often delay getting started on tasks. This is because you’re afraid you may not have what it takes to see them through to successful completion. When you finally get started, you’re often forced to work more quickly than you’d like. Which increases the odds that you’ll make mistakes, turning your misguided fear into a self-fulfilling prophecy.
- In some cases, your tendency to procrastinate turns into outright avoidance. This allow relatively minor concerns to grow into major problems that you can no longer avoid.
- No matter how successful you become, you can’t shake the fear that other people are about to discover that you’re not as smart or talented as you’ve led them to believe. This is sometimes referred to as “impostor syndrome.”
- You often have headaches, stomach aches, muscle tension, and other physical symptoms that aren’t associated with an identifiable medical cause.
How to Cope With High-Functioning Anxiety
You’ve done your research, taken an honest look at your life, and determined that there’s a good chance you have high-functioning anxiety.
All that’s left is to answer one deceptively simple question: What do you do with this information? Or, to put it in more active terms, how can you learn how to cope with high-functioning anxiety?
Anxiety can affect different people in decidedly different ways. Variables include:
- The types of symptoms a person experiences
- How these symptoms impact their life
- What strategies they’ve used to try to manage their symptoms
- The effectiveness of their personal support network
In other words, anxiety is not a “one size fits all” disorder. Coping skills that are ideal for one person may offer little to no benefit to another. This means that you may have to experiment a bit to find the approaches that are best for you.
To get you started, here are a few suggestions:
Practice Self-Care
Eat nutritious food. Find a physical activity that you enjoy, and make it a regular part of your schedule. Meditate. Keep a journal. Find a fun hobby (and refuse the urge to try to monetize it). Go to a play or a concert. Stop doomscrolling before bed.
Some of these activities can improve your health and help you do a better job of managing stress. Others may simply add moments of joy to your day. All of them can remind you that you are valuable individual who deserves to live a healthy and satisfying life.
Set Realistic Expectations
You can’t do everything, nor can you be perfect at whatever you do. If you are trying to learn how to cope with high-functioning anxiety, that sentence may be hard to read, and even harder to accept. But as long as you continue to expect perfection from yourself, you will continue to be disappointed.
Another drawback of perfectionism is that it encourages all-or-nothing thinking. “If you ain’t first, you’re last” may have been a memorable catchphrase from a goofy Will Farrell movie, but as a life philosophy, it leaves a lot to be desired.
Therefore when you set realistic, achievable expectations, you give yourself the opportunity to grow and improve. If you come up short, you will have a clear idea of what you need to work on. And on the days when you hit your goal. You can simply enjoy the feeling of success without worrying that you made a mistake somewhere that you haven’t yet discovered.
Establish Healthy Boundaries
In a sense, healthy boundaries are a combination of self-care and realistic expectations. They are also an acknowledgement that you can’t be everything to everyone.
At work, this might involve resisting the urge to volunteer for every extra project as a means of proving your worth. At home, it can mean supporting the people you care most about without taking on the responsibility of solving their problems for them.
In any scenario, establishing and maintaining healthy boundaries can stop you from overextending yourself, so you can give your full attention to a manageable set of true priorities.
Talk to a Friend
Isolation can amplify feelings of anxiety. One way to prevent this from happening is to talk with a close friend or trusted family member. Simply putting your struggles into words forces you to consider them from a slightly different perspective. And the conversation itself may help you come up with a more effective strategy for easing your emotional distress.
Another benefit of keeping in touch with friends or family members is that it encourages you to focus on other people instead of yourself. This can be especially valuable if you have a tendency to hyperfocus on current problems or ruminate on difficult experiences from your past.
Get Professional Help
As we alluded to earlier in this section, these suggestions for high-functioning anxiety aren’t guaranteed to work for everyone. If your efforts to cope with high functioning anxiety on your own (or with the help of friends and family) haven’t been as successful as you’d hoped, it may be time to schedule an appointment with a therapist, counselor, or other mental health provider.
Please know that getting professional help is not a sign of failure. If anything, it’s evidence that you have hope for a better future, along with the courage to take the necessary steps to get there.
Find Help for High Functioning Anxiety in Philadelphia
New Mind Wellness offers customized outpatient programming for adults who are trying to learn how to cope with high-functioning anxiety and other mental health concerns.
Treatment options at our center in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, include a partial hospitalization program (PHP), an intensive outpatient program (IOP), and an outpatient rehab (OP). Each program is staffed by a team of experienced professionals who are committed to providing personalized care within a safe and highly supportive environment.
To learn more about how we can help you or a loved one, or to schedule a free assessment, please visit our Contact page or call us today.
Begin Healing at Our Mental Health Rehab in Philadelphia
If you are ready to take the first step towards a healthier mind, contact us today. You will be connected with someone who can help guide you through our simple and straightforward admissions process. Learn more about our mental health programs in Philadelphia and begin your journey towards lasting wellness.
