The Anxious High Achiever's Guide to Actually Resting
- Dr Lauren
- May 21
- 6 min read
You know you need to rest. You've known it for a while.
You're tired in a way that a good night's sleep — on the rare occasion you actually get one — doesn't fully fix. Your body is sending signals you've learned to override. People in your life have noticed. You've noticed.
And yet. The moment you actually stop, something happens. The to-do list surfaces. The guilt arrives. A low hum of anxiety fills the space that productivity used to occupy. Your mind, with nothing external to solve, turns inward — and what it finds there is not restful.
So you pick something back up. Check your email. Find one more thing to do. And tell yourself you'll rest later, when things slow down.
Things don't slow down. And later never quite comes.
Why Rest Is Hard for High Achievers
Rest is not simply the absence of activity. For many high-achieving, anxiety-prone adults, stopping feels genuinely threatening — not metaphorically, but neurologically. Here's why.
When your nervous system has been running at high output for long enough, it starts to treat that state as the baseline. Busyness becomes familiar. Productivity becomes regulating. The moment activity stops, the nervous system registers the change — and interprets it not as relief, but as a signal that something is wrong.
There's also the identity dimension. High achievers often derive a significant portion of their sense of self-worth from output. Not consciously, necessarily — but functionally. When you stop producing, a quiet but powerful question arises: if I'm not doing anything, am I still enough? For many people, rest triggers that question. And the anxiety that follows isn't really about rest at all. It's about worth.
Finally, there's the avoidance piece. Busyness is one of the most effective ways to stay out of your own head. The moment the noise stops, what's been waiting underneath — the worry, the grief, the uncertainty, the things you haven't had time to feel — surfaces. Rest doesn't feel peaceful. It feels like an ambush.
What Rest Actually Is — and Isn't
Here's a reframe worth sitting with: rest is not a reward. It is a biological requirement.
Your nervous system is not designed for uninterrupted high output. It requires cycles of activation and recovery to function — cognitively, emotionally, physically, immunologically. Chronic busyness without adequate rest doesn't produce better performance over time. It produces diminishing returns, increasing errors, emotional dysregulation, and eventually breakdown.
Rest is also not one thing. For anxious high achievers, the idea of "resting" often conjures lying still doing nothing — which sounds about as appealing as sitting in a waiting room indefinitely. But rest takes many forms, and the right kind varies by person and context:
Physical rest is sleep and stillness — but also includes gentle movement that downregulates the nervous system rather than pushing it further.
Mental rest is reducing cognitive load — stepping away from problem-solving, decision-making, and the relentless processing of information.
Emotional rest is being in situations where you don't have to manage how you come across — where you can be honest about how you actually feel without performing composure.
Social rest is solitude, or time with people who don't require anything from you.
Creative rest is exposure to things that are beautiful or interesting with no output expected in return.
Many high achievers are chronically deficient in all of these — not because they don't have time, but because they don't recognize them as legitimate needs rather than indulgences.
The ACT Angle: What Are You Avoiding?
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy offers a useful question for the high achiever who can't stop: what would you have to feel if you did?
Because often, the busyness is not really about productivity. It is experiential avoidance — the use of activity to stay out of contact with uncomfortable internal experience. Anxiety. Grief. The fear that you're not enough. The questions about meaning and direction that a full schedule keeps at a comfortable distance.
The problem is that avoidance works in the short term and costs you in the long term. The feelings don't go away. They accumulate. And the more you avoid them, the more threatening stillness becomes — until rest itself feels like something to be afraid of.
ACT doesn't ask you to empty your mind or achieve inner peace before you're allowed to stop. It asks a simpler question: what matters to you? Not what your anxiety thinks is urgent. Not what the performance expectations of your professional identity require. What do you actually value — and is the way you're spending your time and energy aligned with that?
For many high achievers, an honest answer to that question reveals that the busyness has been running on fear more than on genuine values. That the rest they've been postponing is not an obstacle to the life they want — it is part of it.
The CBT-I Connection: When the Problem Is Sleep Specifically
For many anxious high achievers, rest breaks down most visibly at night. You're exhausted all day, but the moment your head hits the pillow, the mind activates. You replay the day, rehearse tomorrow, solve problems that don't need solving at midnight. You watch the hours pass with a particular kind of dread.
This is not a character flaw. It is a well-understood clinical pattern — hyperarousal insomnia — in which the nervous system has learned to associate the bed and bedtime with alertness rather than rest. The harder you try to sleep, the more alert you become. The more nights this happens, the more the association solidifies.
CBT-I (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Insomnia) is the gold-standard, first-line treatment for this pattern — more effective than sleep medication in the long term, and without the dependency or side effects. It works by directly targeting the behaviors and thought patterns that maintain insomnia, rebuilding the association between bed and sleep, and regulating the sleep drive in ways that produce lasting improvement.
Dr. Brenner is a registered CBT-I provider — a credential held by a relatively small number of clinicians — and integrates sleep treatment into her broader work with anxiety and chronic stress.
Practical Starting Points
Knowing you need to rest and actually resting are two different things. A few evidence-informed places to start:
Scheduled rest — not optional rest. For high achievers, rest that is vague and aspirational rarely happens. Rest that is scheduled, bounded, and treated with the same seriousness as a work commitment is far more likely to occur. Fifteen minutes of genuinely unscheduled time is more restorative than two hours of guilty half-rest while checking your phone.
Separate rest from productivity. Rest that is instrumentalized — I'll rest so I can be more productive tomorrow — maintains the anxiety about output rather than addressing it. The goal is rest for its own sake, because your nervous system requires it and you are a person whose worth is not contingent on output.
Notice the anxiety without acting on it. When you stop and the discomfort arrives — the guilt, the restlessness, the sense that you should be doing something — try not immediately reaching for a task. Notice the feeling. Name it. Let it be present without acting on it. You don't have to fix the discomfort. You just have to not run from it.
Start smaller than you think you should. Five minutes of actually stopping is more valuable than an hour of half-stopping. Build the capacity gradually rather than attempting a transformation all at once and concluding that rest isn't possible for someone like you.
A Final Word on Worth
Underneath most anxious high achievers' relationship with rest is a belief worth examining directly: I am valuable because of what I produce.
It's usually not held consciously. But it operates constantly. And it means that stopping — even briefly, even when clearly needed — activates a quiet terror about what you are when you're not performing.
ACT would ask: is that belief actually true? And even if it feels true — is it the story you want running your life?
You are not a productivity machine that occasionally needs maintenance. You are a person. Rest is not something you earn. It is something you are entitled to — not because you've worked hard enough to deserve a break, but because you are a human being with a nervous system that requires recovery to function, and a life that deserves to be inhabited rather than merely managed.
That is not soft. It is the clinical reality. And it is the foundation of any genuine high performance that lasts.
About Dr. Lauren Brenner, Ph.D.
Dr. Brenner is a licensed clinical psychologist and founder of Brenner Psychological Associates, specializing in anxiety, trauma, burnout, and chronic stress. She works with high-achieving adults — professionals, healthcare workers, executives, and caregivers — who are managing significant external demands while struggling internally. She is a registered CBT-I provider and integrates ACT, CBT, and evidence-based sleep treatment into her work with this population. Before founding her practice, she spent nearly a decade at Massachusetts General Hospital as a staff psychologist and Clinical Director of Brain Health Services, with an appointment as Instructor in Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School.
Licensed in: Massachusetts (#PSY11040) | Rhode Island (#PS01731) | Vermont (#48.0135076) | New York (#027870) | PsyPact Provider (#19090)
All sessions are conducted via secure, HIPAA-compliant telehealth — accessible from anywhere in MA, RI, NY, or VT.
Ready to Actually Rest — With Support?
Dr. Brenner offers a free initial consultation — a conversation to explore where you are and whether this approach is the right fit.
📍 Boston, MA | Telehealth in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New York & Vermont 📧 info@brennerpsych.com🌐 www.brennerpsych.com
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