Do you know the feeling of walking into a room and silently asking, how do I win this? I do. I have asked it at work, at parties, even at my son’s play dates. That is achievement addiction, and I have been living with it for most of my life.
I sat down with Dr. Naz on The Village Podcast to talk about my book, Healing the Success Wound, and we went straight into this loop. The high of the win. The crash after. The next goal we grab so we can feel okay again. If that sounds like your brain, keep reading.
The High of the Win Is a Real High
I am an Enneagram 3, the achiever. I have been obsessed with work, with making a name for myself, with being the best, for as long as I can remember. I grew up in Silicon Valley, went to a very preppy school where I was a middle of the road student, and I always felt behind. Deficient. Not enough. I am the 89.5 student. B plus, almost an A minus, forever almost there.
In my research I found five ways the success wound shows up at work and in life. The type that captures the addiction most clearly is the one I call the grinder.
They measure their worth by the volume of their productivity. They get a high from checking things off their to-do list.
Dr. Naz and I both confessed it on the spot. We put things on our to-do lists that we have already done, just to check them off. Look how productive I am. I did get gas.
That little hit feels like proof that we are okay. And that is the loop. The win is not really the goal. The win is the substance. The goal is just the delivery system.
Underneath it sits the success wound, the pain that comes from mistaking success, productivity, and achievement for self-worth. When your worthiness of love, belonging, and safety feels contingent on what you produce, of course you chase the next hit. It is the only thing that quiets the voice saying you are not enough.
Why the High Never Lasts
Dr. Naz shared something fascinating with me. She has big ideas, takes the first step, starts building, and then quits at the first glimpse of success. Not failure. Success. In her words, I put in 20 percent and I got this. What if I put in 100 and this gets so big? All right, I am done.
That is called an upper limit problem. You will only succeed to the capacity that you can hold it in your nervous system. You get the dopamine hit from the first little bit, and the second little bit, but when the thing threatens to really take off, the freak out kicks in. That freak out is your nervous system saying this is not safe.
I have my own version. I work just enough to get the B plus, because the A minus might kill me. I am scared of the overwhelm. So the addiction is sneaky. We chase the high, and we also cap the high, because our bodies do not yet trust us to hold more.
Your Body Knows Before You Do
On the podcast I shared a Gabor Mate insight that gave us both goosebumps. He said women typically suffer from diseases of the tissue because they are the connective tissue of society.
Our body is taking in 40 million times more signals than our brain is at any given time. So you can rationalize your stress away, but your body can’t.
You can rationalize that you are in a job you do not love. Your body cannot. You can rationalize a toxic culture as just what it takes to get ahead. Your body cannot. Dr. Naz told me she gets sick every other week in fall and winter, when teaching and application season stack on top of mom life. That is not a coincidence. That is the bill for the chase.
My husband left consulting, and it took about nine months for his nervous system to fully reregulate and for him to rewire his addiction to being busy and always on. Nine months. This lives in the body, not just the calendar.
The Culture Keeps Us Hooked
Here is why you cannot simply think your way out. There is a concept I write about called effort moralization. In a study out of the University of British Columbia, two men, Mark and John, both made four widgets per hour in a factory. For Mark it was easy. John had to work twice as hard to make the same four widgets. And people rated John as having better character. He is probably a great husband, a great father, a man with great values.
We assign morality to effort. Nobody made more widgets, but the one who strained got the halo. As long as we are not aware of that, the culture will keep handing us the drug and calling it virtue.
How to Break the Cycle
This is what I teach my clients and practice myself.
First, micro-dose risk. Take small steps outside your comfort zone every day and learn to trust yourself when you have 51 percent of the answers, not 99.9 percent. Every small risk you survive builds your self-trust muscle and raises your upper limit, so success stops feeling like danger.
Second, name your ultimate concern. People who work themselves to exhaustion usually have a million competing priorities and no larger concept of what they are actually here for. Think of the figure skater Alysa Liu, fresh off her gold medal. Her intention was never to win the gold. It was to go out and do her best program. When you know your ultimate concern, exhaustion becomes a signal that you have drifted from it.
Third, ask two questions before you chase the next thing. Why do I want this, and is it worth pursuing? And who do I want to be while I am pursuing it? Identity is the most powerful force in human personality. The words we put after I am determine our behavior.
Fourth, write an aligned ambition statement. Unless you have a standard by which to evaluate your efforts, the culture will always set one for you. Mine is simple. I measure my success by how much I am connecting and how much fun I am having. By that definition, sitting in Dr. Naz’s living room laughing about to-do lists and toddlers, I was extremely successful.
You Can Put It Down
One more thing. I got sober ten years ago, and showing up as a member of a sober community is the only reason I can be a mom today. So when I tell you that a loop that once ran your life can be put down, I am not speaking in theory.
You do not have to give up your ambition. You have to change what it runs on. When your drive is powered by wholeness instead of the wound, the wins become fun instead of oxygen.
Yes. Yes. YES. That freedom is available to you.
I walk you through the whole process, including the aligned ambition work, in my book Healing the Success Wound.
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