How my anxiety has both helped and hurt my career
I have always been attracted to stressful jobs. From scrambling in the newsroom to get the newspaper out because breaking news happened to trying to piece together a client proposal at the last minute, I thrive working under deadlines. Nothing can really beat the adrenaline you feel when you are pushed up against a wall and you have to deliver a quality product under deadline. Nothing can beat the rush you feel when the odds are stacked against you, and everyone is counting on you to pull through to get to done. Some people might find this kind of pressure absolutely terrifying and not a positive “adrenaline rush” so to speak. For me, it’s the only way I know how to work. Deadlines are only one of the many contributors to the birth of my stress-induced anxiety – which has both helped and hurt my career.
How I developed stress-induced anxiety
Let me be clear about one thing: I have always been a pretty anxious person. My anxiety stems from my compulsion for perfection. In one of my other articles How I Became a Manager by 24, I go into detail about my perfectionist personality and how it allowed me to quickly climb the corporate ladder to manager by 24. The short version is that I have a desire and need for everything I do to be perfect. When I would write papers in school, for example, I would print them out and read them out loud, re-reading and editing until they were what I considered “perfect.”
This attention to detail and desire for perfection came in handy when I pursued a degree in Journalism (News Editing) from the Missouri School of Journalism. You need to be crazy OCD/detail-oriented in order to be a copy editor. You need to be a perfectionist in order to notice the nitpicky details and then subsequently correct them. So it really was a match made in heaven. Even this morning, before I started writing this article, I was copy editing answers for a proposal. I read all the responses to the 75 questions twice, yet I still don’t feel confident I caught everything.
However, when you are overly concerned with details and perfectionism, it can lead to stress-induced anxiety. In my case, I am so paranoid that I am going to miss something or make a mistake that I become anxious. I create self-induced anxiety out of nothing. No one else has ever looked at any of my work and substantially criticized it. I mean, I’m sure I have missed things over the years (I’m only human), but it’s not like it’s been a constant pattern of people criticizing my work that would justify my paranoia. My anxiety is irrational and all in my head.
The birth of my anxiety in college
As mentioned earlier, I have always been a perfectionist when it comes to school. Even in high school, I had to go WAY above and beyond. In addition to reading and re-reading papers time and time again, I would study a ridiculous amount for tests. You wouldn’t think you could study too much for tests, right? Wrong. For example, I would handwrite my notes, then type them up and make flashcards on them. No one should have ever spent that much time and energy on something, much less a school exam. But I did it anyway because I was so focused on perfectionism and achieving success.
And I did achieve success. I graduated as valedictorian of my high school, and I received a few academic scholarships for college. When I got to college, I was no different in terms of my overachieving behaviors. I would still repeat my ridiculous processes of re-reading papers, writing notes multiple times and creating flashcards. I was very successful for the majority of my college career as well because of this compulsion for perfectionism. I graduated with a 3.94 GPA and Summa Cum Laude honors. I am proud of everything I accomplished in my schooling, both high school and college. I worked very hard to achieve this success. But I’m not sure if it was worth all the stress-induced anxiety I needlessly put myself through.
Where I really cracked was when I got to my senior year of college. The previous three years, I really hadn’t worked very much (I maybe worked 10-15 hours a week tops as a writing tutor), so I was able to devote most of my time to my studies. When I got into my senior year of college, I had two jobs and a reoccurring shift for one of my design classes. Between my job as a writing tutor, the print desk manager and design shifts, I was working anywhere from 30-40 hours a week while going to school full-time.
For me, this came as a big adjustment because I had very little time to devote to my schoolwork. Working basically full-time and attending classes full-time was a challenge in and of itself, much less spending the time to do the actual schoolwork, such as the readings, papers and tests. With these new added priorities to my schedule, I should have just lowered my standards and not been as perfect, right? Wrong. That would have been the healthy thing to do.
But knowing the perfectionist I was, I tried to do it all. But I couldn’t do it. So I broke, hence the birth of my stress-induced anxiety.
I put so much pressure on myself to still get straight A’s my senior year even though I really didn’t have the time to do it all. Plus when I started as the print desk manager, I put a lot of pressure on myself to succeed and do a good job. I didn’t want to disappoint anyone since I had been entrusted this job of making sure the newspaper got put together well and published by the required deadline. I couldn’t just do an “okay” job with any of my responsibilities; everything had to be “perfect,” which eventually started to wear and tear on me, emotionally and physically because I just didn’t have the time or energy to be perfect at everything.
I can’t remember a particular situation, day or breakdown that I realized I had anxiety. But I knew it was always there throughout my college career weighing on me, especially that last year when I tried to do it all. I consider my anxiety “stress-induced” in that it’s not all the time or every day, just in response to stress, so you would think it would be better since it’s not a chronic condition. The problem was that the stress never went away. Between school and work, I was stressed, and subsequently anxious, 24/7. Also at that same time, my boyfriend had decided to join the military, so I had to deal with no communication except letters while he was in basic training and the long-distance. It was just one more stressor to add to the list, and of course, I put the unrealistic expectation on myself that I had to write a letter every single day, even though that was never asked of me, so I just became even more anxious. I wish I could say that once I graduated college, my stress and anxiety lessened, but it wasn’t the case when I took a job as a proposal coordinator.
The stress of proposals
Immediately after graduating college, I started my job as a proposal coordinator for CGI’s Financial Solutions. I really didn’t know much about what to expect as a proposal coordinator. I do remember my interview with my former boss when she asked about how I worked under deadline pressure, and my answer then and now is “that’s the only way I know how to work.” I started the job and quickly fell into the quick pace of proposals. We would get a proposal in and sometimes have to turn around a response in a matter of days. I was right at home. I mean, a couple of days is longer than a daily newspaper deadline, so it was nothing unfamiliar to me.
One of the most difficult parts about coordinating proposals is that you often have to wait on other people to get their parts done in order for you to do your job. For example, I couldn’t copy edit or format the proposal until I received all the content. I could do some of it in advance along the way, but because things would get re-reviewed and moved around, I would still have to look it all over again in the end. What would be difficult is when I would have very little time left to finalize a proposal before a client deadline because I didn’t receive the input from the subject matter experts early enough.
Now this wasn’t an unfamiliar situation to me either – receiving content late in the game and having to get to done in a short time period under deadline. On more than one occasion, we would get a City Council story in late, for example when I was working on the newspaper, which would have to be very quickly edited and inserted into the newspaper in order to meet our deadline. Or breaking news would cause us to completely re-arrange our front page and subsequent news pages. No, this wasn’t unfamiliar to me, but it still didn’t make it any easier for me to “let go” of certain things.
By that, I mean in order to meet a deadline, if you don’t have enough time to do everything you’d like to do, you have to prioritize the most important things. I probably wouldn’t have time to read the entire proposal word for word, but I could run a Word spellcheck on it. I might run out of time to fix a slightly off footer, but at least I could make sure we had the right year and legal entity on the proposal. It was, and still is, a balancing act of figuring out what you can feasibly get done in the given amount of time. To this day, I still find it hard to let go of these details because I want everything to be perfect. It kills me to send out an imperfect deliverable to a client. I realize some of the nitpicky details are not going to be the difference in winning a bid or not, but I can’t shake my devotion to getting things done right – regardless of its impact on my health.
On more than one occasion, I would leave the office and embark on my 25-minute drive home, only to spend the entire drive sobbing. The impossible standards I put on myself were unachievable within the given deadlines, yet I still felt like a failure for not meeting them. This self-induced stress resulted in near constant anxiety that carried over into other aspects of my life. The crazy thing about my anxiety is that it actually has helped propel my career. The cause of my anxiety ultimately leads back to my compulsion for perfection, which is the primary reason I was able to rise to manager level by age 24. It has done me a world of good and allowed me to achieve a lot of success along the way, but was it worth it?
How my anxiety has helped my career
One of the best things my anxiety has done for my career is allowed me to work successfully under deadlines. That feeling of adrenaline working under deadlines that I described at the beginning of this article? Part of that feeling is my anxiety. It fuels my desire for perfectionism and achieving success, so I work even harder to get things done right and on time. For some people, anxiety could cripple their ability to work under deadlines, but for me, it really just propelled me forward. In the moment, the adrenaline motivates me like a drug. It’s only afterward when the drug’s worn off and I come down from the high that my anxiety comes crashing down around me.
Another area where my anxiety has helped my career is my chosen career path. Because I am so focused on details and anxious about getting everything right, it has made me an exceptional copy editor and proposal coordinator. Without the anxiety/fear of failure always pushing me, I don’t know if I would be so worried about the details and getting everything right. Maybe I would be, but I think my anxiety definitely has played a major part in my professional success.
Additionally, because I notice everything and want everything to be perfect, I have been able to bring invaluable process improvement to our proposal processes. I am unable to stand by and let things go when I can see a way to do things better, so I volunteered to improve our processes by creating standard templates, developing a proposal answer repository, etc. I also quickly started taking on more responsibilities in the group. Taking on more responsibilities is nothing new for me since I have always tried to “do it all.” By taking on more and providing additional value to the team, I was able to quickly move up in our group to proposal lead and later proposal manager.
It’s a little terrifying to admit that all of my successes are due to my anxiety. It makes me think that if I didn’t have this anxiety, would I still be as successful? Would I still be as motivated and ambitious as I am today? Would I have been able to move up the ladder so quickly to management by 24?
I honestly don’t think so. Now I’m not trying to promote unhealthy behavior, and I don’t think you have to have anxiety in order to move up professionally by any means. But for me, my anxiety stems from stress which stems from my compulsion for perfection. And that compulsion for perfection is what has driven my success – from my education to my professional career. For better or worse, I wouldn’t be where I am today without my anxiety.
How my anxiety has hurt my career
One of the most obvious ways that my anxiety has hurt my career is my inability to delegate. Now if you asked my team now if I delegate things, they would say absolutely! I have been getting better about it, but it has been a difficult journey to get there. Because I want everything to be perfect, I think I am the only one that can do it correctly. That requires that I do everything myself. But if you want to move up into a higher position and oversee other employees, you have to be willing to delegate. Otherwise, you will always be stuck in your current position and will never be able to move up.
It took me a long while to be able to delegate. I spent a lot of time training other members of the team on various tasks, and over time, I had to step back and let them do their own work without me overseeing every little detail. If I didn’t step back and stop micromanaging them, they would never be able to do things on their own and succeed. Also, as I tried to do their job and my job all at the same time, I would be emotionally and physically drained. I had to learn – over time and with a lot of practice and coaching from my former boss – that you just have to trust that you trained your team well and they can do the work just fine themselves. Also, I had to learn that not everything has to be perfect.
I will say I am better about the first one, letting my team do their own thing, than the second one of realizing that not everything has to be perfect. Of course, I still want everything to be done “my way,” but that’s not a productive environment for a team to thrive. I need to empower my team to learn “my way” but also bring their “own ways” to the table to make our team and our deliverables even stronger. One of the hardest lessons I’ve ever had to learn – and that I am still very much learning – is that everything doesn’t have to be perfect.
One of the best pieces of advice I’ve ever received is that what we’re doing is not life or death.
We’re not doctors saving people’s lives. We’re not carrying people’s organs in coolers to do organ transplants, as one of my colleagues would like to say. No one is going to die if I don’t get a footer lined up correctly on a proposal. But for some reason, for me, it still feels that way. The urgency/desire for perfection seems absolutely ridiculous when you compare it to life and death.
We need to all remind ourselves more that it’s okay if we aren’t perfect in our work. Of course, we still should strive for perfection wherever possible but not to the detriment of our physical and mental health.
Another area where my anxiety has hurt my career is that it has caused me to waste time because I keep re-reading and re-doing things when they were probably just fine the first time. Of course, this makes sure that everything I put out there is of “top-notch quality,” and that’s okay. However, it’s not okay when the amount of time you spent on it isn’t worth it. If I spend 10 hours editing member recognition write-ups that don’t bring in any revenue to the business, is that really a good use of my time? Of course, there are lots of roles and tasks that don’t directly bring in revenue to a company. However, you should prioritize and spend enough time on something without going overboard and just wasting time and money. The more anxious you are, the less efficient you end up being in the end – which has made it so I wasn’t able to get other more important things done because I was so worried about small details of an unimportant initiative.
Additionally, I can lose sight of the big picture when my anxiety forces me to hone in on the details. I am most definitely a detail person, not a big-picture person. For example, on a recent proposal I worked on, I spent a lot of time correcting small details up until the last minute, which ultimately led to the proposal being submitted late. Those smaller details could have been sacrificed had I realized the bigger picture issue of submitting the proposal on time. I did mention that I am good at working under deadlines, but it still is an internal struggle for me when I have to sacrifice quality in order to meet a deadline. Again, “quality” for me might be moving a few commas around, which really doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things, but it can be hard for me to get out of that head space because details really are what matter to me and how I frame everything. Especially in managing a team as well, it’s important to not get too caught up in the details; otherwise, you won’t be able to successfully see the bigger picture: shaping the direction of the team.
Another detrimental aspect of my anxiety to my professional success is that at some point, it causes me to shut down. I mentioned how my anxiety can fuel and motivate me – how the adrenaline can push me forward. However, when I get to a certain point of stress/anxiety, I just shut down and can’t do anything. On more than one occasion, I was so completely overwhelmed by a proposal that I have had to have one of my colleagues finish it and submit it for me. Because I put it on myself that I had to do it all and do it all perfectly, it was too much for me to handle, so I ended up shutting down and wasn’t able to do anything. It’s pretty counter-productive when this happens because you are so anxious about getting things done that you don’t end up getting anything done at all.
The final way my anxiety has hurt my career that I’ll mention here is probably the most troubling. It has nothing to do with the business, like me wasting time or shutting down and not being able to work. It has to do with me personally. My anxiety has affected every aspect of my life. It seeps from my professional life into my personal life. If I have a bad day at work and for example, cry the whole time on my drive home, it is going to affect the rest of my evening and potentially even week. I’m not going to want to do anything else because I am already so overwhelmed with my stress from work. This has stopped me from enjoying myself and doing the things I want to do because I let my anxiety control my life. If this sounds familiar to anyone out there, I just want to let you know that this isn’t healthy.
Anxiety – whether it be personally, professionally or both – is a serious condition you need to address. If you just try to bury it down, it will only get worse.
Is there such a thing as a “healthy” amount of anxiety?
I really don’t think there is ever a “healthy” amount of anxiety. In this article, I have treated my compulsion for perfection and anxiety as nearly synonymous because that’s where my anxiety comes from. My perfectionism has been good for me in that it has made me extremely ambitious and driven to succeed. But where it became harmful was when that drive to succeed turned into anxiety and started interfering in my everyday life. So ambition is perfectly healthy to have, but anxiety is not.
Also, I think it’s an important point to make that just because you like things to be right doesn’t mean you are necessarily anxious. And also people who have anxiety are not necessarily perfectionists. My anxiety just happens to stem from perfectionism, so that’s why these two things have been conflated throughout this article. I understand this is not the same for all people who suffer from anxiety, and I understand my experiences with anxiety are unique to me and me alone.
Overall, I think it is important to have a healthy amount of drive to succeed, but when that ambition turns into anxiety, that is where the problem lies.
How do you overcome anxiety?
If anyone has any ideas of how to overcome anxiety, they would be greatly appreciated because I still struggle with it every day. I don’t think you can ever really “overcome” anxiety; I think you just find ways to “live with” it. There are a lot of things you can do to start combating your anxiety, such as talking to a therapist, building healthy habits and practicing self-care. And there is medication available if you talk with your doctor/therapist and decide that’s the right course of action for you. I don’t have all the answers of how to “overcome” anxiety, but I’m hoping to start a conversation, especially for highly driven individuals like myself who don’t want to admit they have anxiety because they see it as a weakness. If you get anything out of this article, realize that it’s okay to admit you have anxiety. Honestly, probably a lot of high-powered executives have it – how do you think they got to where they are today? It’s terrifying admitting you have a problem or flaw, especially if you are a perfectionist like me. But you can do it. Recognize your anxiety, and make it a priority to address it.
