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• How to Stop Being a Perfectionist

  Something done well enough doesn’t feel like enough. That’s the trap.

  You re-read the email 4 times before sending. You plan carefully but can’t quite start. The project gets another pass, then another. Perfectionism looks like diligence from the outside. It does something different on the inside.

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  What Perfectionism Actually Is

  Perfectionism is the tendency to set standards so high they become functionally impossible, and to tie your self-worth directly to whether you meet them.

  This is what separates it from caring about quality. Someone who cares about quality can finish something and feel genuinely satisfied. A perfectionist finishes the same thing and immediately scans it for what’s wrong.

  Researchers distinguish 2 types: adaptive perfectionism, the conscientious drive that motivates solid work, and maladaptive perfectionism, which links to anxiety, chronic self-criticism, and avoidance. APA research tracks a steady rise in maladaptive perfectionism over 3 decades, particularly among young adults. Birth cohort studies show it’s not purely an individual issue. It’s a pattern that has grown more common over time.

  The Signs That Are Easier to Miss

  The obvious version is someone who checks everything 10 times and never considers anything finished. But perfectionism has quieter faces.

  Chronic procrastination. Starting feels risky when it might not go right, so you don’t start. Avoidance dresses itself up as preparation.

  Difficulty delegating. Sharing work means losing control of how it’s done. So you carry everything yourself, and the load grows.

  Over-preparing shows up too: more research, another course, one more resource before you feel ready. Anything to postpone the moment of judgment.

  Emotional sensitivity to feedback is another sign. Mild criticism, even constructive feedback, can feel disproportionately painful. The reaction is rarely about the feedback itself. It’s about what it seems to confirm.

  And there’s the inner critic that doesn’t switch off, even after genuinely good work. High-functioning anxiety often runs alongside perfectionism, quietly reinforcing the sense that nothing is ever quite enough.

  Why Perfectionism Develops

  Perfectionism almost always has roots.

  Sometimes it’s an environment where approval felt conditional on performance. Sometimes it’s a child who learned that mistakes had real social or emotional consequences. Harvard Summer School research describes perfectionism as often stemming from early experiences of being valued for what you do rather than who you are.

  The adult carries those old rules into contexts where they stopped applying years ago. The standards were inherited. The work of letting them go is yours.

  

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  The Perfectionism-Procrastination Loop

  Perfectionism and procrastination feed each other, and the loop is hard to break from the inside.

  You set a high bar. The high bar makes starting feel threatening. You delay. The delay builds pressure. Pressure raises the stakes of the task even higher. So you delay again.

  From outside, this looks like laziness or lack of discipline. From inside, it feels like paralysis. These are two very different things, and treating procrastination as a scheduling problem without addressing what’s driving it rarely holds for long.

  How to Stop Being a Perfectionist

  Set completion benchmarks before you start. Decide in advance what “done” looks like for this specific task. Something like: “this draft is finished when it answers the 2 core questions clearly and I’ve read it once.” Then stop when you get there.

  Time-box the work. Give yourself a fixed window and commit to finishing within it. Building the muscle of letting go is the work itself, not a side effect of it.

  Separating your worth from your output takes time, but it starts with noticing when you’re using a task to prove something about your value. You’re not the report. The work is work.

  Practicing self-compassion when you fall short matters too. Treating yourself with the same care you’d offer a close friend after a setback isn’t soft. The Mayo Clinic notes that healthy self-esteem requires genuine self-acceptance, including in failure. That acceptance is a skill, and it changes how you relate to imperfection over time.

  Perfectionism rarely runs alone. It usually travels alongside self-sabotage and a particular kind of fear: being judged for what you really are.

  What Changes When Perfectionism Loosens

  Caring about quality doesn’t go anywhere. What shifts is the grip of needing everything to be flawless before it counts.

  Finishing things becomes possible. Handing work over becomes possible. Starting before conditions are ideal becomes possible. Energy that was going into re-checking and pre-emptive self-criticism can go elsewhere.

  When something falls short, you look at it clearly and move forward rather than treating it as evidence of who you are.

  If perfectionism is keeping you stuck, in your career or your personal life, get in touch to explore how coaching can help. We’ll look at what’s driving the pattern and build something that actually holds.

  Quiz: what’s blocking your success?

  This quick quiz will help you uncover which mental or behavioural pattern might be holding you back from reaching your full potential. Identifying your specific blocker is the first step to overcoming it.

  Read each question and choose the answer that best fits your situation.

  No email or payment required to complete the quiz and receive your personalised results.

  Paloma Chiara

  Once you know your main blocker, you’ll have clarity on what’s been holding you back. These patterns are not permanent traits, they are habitual ways of thinking and acting that can be changed with the right guidance and practice.

  If you’re ready to overcome your specific blocker, email me to try a coaching session.

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• What High Functioning Anxiety Actually Feels Like

  You get things done. Meetings attended, emails answered, plans made. To the people around you, you look like someone who has it together.

  Inside, there’s a low hum running. A background noise that says something is about to go wrong. That you missed something important. That it’s only a matter of time before the whole thing unravels.

  Follow on Instagram · @paloma_chiara.coach

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  What High Functioning Anxiety Is

  High functioning anxiety isn’t an official diagnosis. You won’t find it in the DSM-5. What it describes is a pattern: persistent anxiety that coexists with, and in many cases drives, a high level of external performance.

  According to the Mayo Clinic, people who experience this tend to appear responsible, reliable, and driven. They show up on time, keep their commitments, and push through discomfort. What’s invisible is the worry underneath: the constant preparation for worst-case scenarios, the inability to rest without guilt, the loop of “am I doing enough” that doesn’t switch off when the day ends.

  It’s anxiety wearing a productive face.

  The Signs That Point to It

  Some patterns show up consistently.

  Constant overthinking. A conversation that happened four days ago. A decision you already made and keep second-guessing. You’re still running it back, checking for what you might have missed. There’s more on breaking this particular loop if that one resonates.

  Bracing for outcomes that haven’t arrived. Building detailed mental scenarios of failure before anything has gone wrong. What starts as preparation tips into a kind of perpetual low-grade alarm.

  Difficulty switching off. Rest feels like falling behind. Time off triggers guilt rather than relief. The productivity is real, but the engine running it isn’t enthusiasm or curiosity. It’s the sense that something bad happens if you stop.

  People-pleasing as a safety mechanism. Saying yes when you mean no, smoothing things over, making yourself useful to avoid conflict or disapproval. The mechanism is about safety, and the pattern tends to expand quietly if nothing interrupts it.

  Physical signals. Tight chest. Jaw tension. Headaches that tend to arrive on Sunday evenings. The body runs the anxiety even when the mind is fully occupied with being fine.

  

  Check out the Vision to Action Planner for only 6$

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  Why High Achievers Run This Way

  Achievement and anxiety can reinforce each other over years, without either one naming the other.

  If worry has reliably produced results, the brain learns to treat it as useful. The dread becomes part of the preparation. Switching it off starts to feel risky, because some part of the brain genuinely believes it might be what’s keeping everything together.

  Psychology Today notes that high-achieving adults often learned early that performance and productivity are how you stay valued, stay safe, or avoid criticism. The anxiety wasn’t irrational. At some point in the past, it was an effective strategy.

  The problem is that a strategy built for one context rarely stays contained to it.

  The Exhaustion It Creates

  High functioning anxiety is expensive, even when you can’t point to exactly what it’s costing you.

  You’re managing your workload. And you’re also managing the internal commentary about your workload. The performance review in three weeks. The email that felt slightly off. The sense that you’re one missed thing away from everything unraveling.

  This is why people with high functioning anxiety often describe a specific kind of tired: not physical tiredness from doing too much, but something closer to the exhaustion of sustained vigilance.

  HelpGuide’s research overview points out that chronic anxiety raises cortisol levels and disrupts sleep quality even when the person isn’t consciously aware of feeling anxious. The nervous system runs on alert around the clock. Over time, that catches up.

  The connection to burnout from overwork is real. The fuel source runs dry eventually, and the early signs are easy to dismiss as normal until they aren’t.

  How to Work with It

  A few things tend to make a real difference.

  Separating anxiety from drive. Drive and anxiety can coexist for years before it becomes clear they’re different things. Genuine motivation doesn’t require dread to function. Finding out whether you can want something without the anxious engine underneath is one of the more meaningful shifts available, and it usually requires some deliberate testing rather than just deciding to feel differently.

  Distinguishing rumination from problem-solving. Useful thinking arrives somewhere: a decision or a clearer view. Rumination circles the same content without landing anywhere. Once you can tell them apart reliably, you can respond to each one differently instead of treating every worried thought as something that needs solving.

  Working with the nervous system. Anxiety lives in the body as much as in thoughts. Consistent practices, breathwork, regular movement, sleep structure, lower the baseline level of alert the system is running on. These work in ways that willpower and reframing alone can’t replicate.

  Going under the surface pattern. High functioning anxiety often protects something deeper: a belief that your worth is tied to your output, a fear of what happens when you stop performing, an old pattern around what it cost to let your guard down. Working with that root, rather than just managing the visible symptoms, is where lasting change tends to happen.

  If any of this sounds familiar, reach out to book a coaching session. This kind of pattern is exactly what structured, one-to-one work is designed for.

  Quiz: what’s blocking your success?

  This quick quiz will help you uncover which mental or behavioural pattern might be holding you back from reaching your full potential. Identifying your specific blocker is the first step to overcoming it.

  Read each question and choose the answer that best fits your situation.

  No email or payment required to complete the quiz and receive your personalised results.

  Paloma Chiara

  Once you know your main blocker, you’ll have clarity on what’s been holding you back. These patterns are not permanent traits, they are habitual ways of thinking and acting that can be changed with the right guidance and practice.

  If you’re ready to overcome your specific blocker, email me to try a coaching session.

  Read blog

• How to Stop Overthinking

  There’s a particular kind of exhaustion that has nothing to do with what you’ve done. It comes from what you’ve been thinking. Conversations replayed a dozen times. Decisions turned over until the edges are worn smooth, and still no resolution. Scenarios built in careful detail for problems that haven’t arrived yet.

  Most people who overthink know they’re doing it. Knowing doesn’t stop it. Telling yourself to just move on tends to make the loop louder, not quieter, which says something important about how this pattern actually works.

  Follow on Instagram · @paloma_chiara.coach

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  What Overthinking Actually Is

  The clinical term is rumination: repetitive, passive focus on negative feelings or experiences. It shows up in two main directions. Replaying the past, dwelling on what went wrong, what you said, what someone else did. Rehearsing the future, anticipating failure, imagining rejection, building worst-case scenarios before they’ve had a chance to be anything else.

  Useful reflection is different. It arrives somewhere: a decision, a clearer perspective, a plan. Rumination circles. Same content, same emotional charge, round and round without resolution.

  The distinction is not about what you’re thinking. It’s about whether the thinking is going anywhere.

  What’s Happening in Your Brain

  Overthinking is not a willpower problem. It is, at the neurological level, a circuit that’s stuck.

  The default mode network (DMN) is the part of your brain that activates during rest, when you’re not focused on an external task. It handles self-referential thinking, including imagining the future and replaying the past. In people who ruminate chronically, research published by the National Institutes of Health shows the DMN tends to over-engage with negative material rather than processing it and moving on.

  Sustained rumination also raises cortisol levels. That stress response disrupts sleep, weakens immune function, and over time increases the risk of anxiety and depression. The thoughts can feel like a reaction to your circumstances, but they are also actively producing stress, making the situation harder to think about clearly.

  The Cost You Don’t Always See

  The damage from chronic overthinking tends to be quiet.

  Decisions that take three times longer than they need to. Conversations that never happen because you’ve rehearsed them so many times it feels like you’ve already had them. Opportunities that close while you’re still weighing them.

  There’s also the link to self-sabotage. The mental loop becomes the reason nothing gets started, or the reason something almost-started stalls out. Overthinking and avoidance reinforce each other: one creates the conditions for the other to grow.

  And there is the energy cost. Holding an unresolved problem on a mental loop consumes real resources, the kind that aren’t available for anything else.

  

  Check out the Vision to Action Planner for only 6$

  More info

  Techniques That Actually Work

  Scheduled worry time. One of the most well-researched tools from cognitive behavioral therapy. Designate a specific 20-minute window each day to think through your concerns deliberately. When a ruminating thought surfaces outside that window, defer it: not right now, I’ll think about that at 6pm. Over weeks, this trains the brain to stop pulling the alarm constantly. It sounds rigid, but the mechanism works: the worried mind stops interrupting because it knows it has a time when it will be heard.

  Name the thought, don’t fight it. A technique from acceptance and commitment therapy: instead of trying to suppress a thought, label it. “I notice I’m having the thought that things will go wrong.” That small distance between you and the content matters. The thought stops functioning as fact and becomes something the brain is generating, which it does continuously, about everything, including things that never happen.

  Use the body as an interrupt. Overthinking is future- or past-focused. The body is always in the present. Splashing cold water on your face, going for a short walk, or doing something with your hands breaks the loop by pulling attention back to physical sensation. It doesn’t resolve anything, but it creates a gap. Sometimes a gap is enough.

  Address the negative self-talk underneath. There’s often a critical voice running below the surface of the overthinking. It predicts failure, catalogs past mistakes, builds the case for why things won’t work out. That voice is worth examining separately, because it is frequently the engine the loop runs on.

  Why Forcing It Backfires

  Trying to not think about something increases how often you think about it. This is the thought suppression paradox, documented in cognitive science since the 1980s: deliberately pushing a thought away puts the brain on alert to monitor for that exact thought, and the monitoring keeps finding it.

  Harvard Health consistently documents that sustainable behavioral change requires understanding patterns, not overpowering them. The same applies to rumination. The harder you resist the thoughts, the more attention the resistance itself consumes.

  Self-compassion also reduces rumination more effectively than self-criticism. It surprises people. But the logic holds: treating the overthinking as a character flaw adds another layer of distress, and distress gives the loop more material to work with.

  When the Loop Is Pointing at Something Real

  Not all overthinking is empty noise.

  Sometimes the loop is circling something genuine: a relationship that isn’t working, a fear of failure that’s keeping you in place, a decision that feels too costly to face. In those cases the question isn’t just how to stop the thoughts. It’s what the thoughts are pointing at.

  Persistent overthinking about a specific situation can be the mind’s way of signaling that something needs attention, even when attending to it feels overwhelming.

  Distinguishing noise from signal takes practice, and the responses are different. Techniques help with noise. A signal usually needs to be worked through.

  If you’re ready to do that work with support, get in touch to book a coaching session.

  Quiz: what’s blocking your success?

  This quick quiz will help you uncover which mental or behavioural pattern might be holding you back from reaching your full potential. Identifying your specific blocker is the first step to overcoming it.

  Read each question and choose the answer that best fits your situation.

  No email or payment required to complete the quiz and receive your personalised results.

  Paloma Chiara

  Once you know your main blocker, you’ll have clarity on what’s been holding you back. These patterns are not permanent traits, they are habitual ways of thinking and acting that can be changed with the right guidance and practice.

  If you’re ready to overcome your specific blocker, email me to try a coaching session.

  Read blog