Have you ever noticed that some success doesn’t actually feel that great?

From the outside, everything looks as it should. You’re functioning, winning, achieving and keeping things moving. But something about all that momentum feels… a little ‘off’.

Maybe you have a sense of being slightly ahead of yourself all the time, as if you’re always tilting forward, ready. Even when you do stop for a moment, you don’t really feel like you ‘arrive’.

While the whole world talks about underperforming, could it be that you are…overperforming?

Chronic overperformance isn’t simply about doing too many hours at work. Its when your way of living, working and thinking becomes organised around output, achievement, and ‘staying on’. So much so that you find yourself constantly willing to override the signals that say ‘too much’, and defend the need to keep your foot on the gas and grit it out.

Over time, it comes at a cost.

Why we overperform

Chronic overperformance is shaped by both culture and personal histories.

Most of us are living inside powerful narratives that have told us since childhood that we need to be more, do more, improve constantly, and keep moving forward.

Our mentalities whisper to us that rest must be earned. That you cannot drop the ball, ever. That you can sleep when your dead or when you hit that illusory finish line later. That just a bit more would be better.

At the same time, for some people, performance is tied to something deeper. Being capable, useful, or successful may have once been a way of feeling safe, valued or connected. In that sense, overperformance is more like an intelligent adaptation - but one that may have been carried too far and relied on too often.

The cost of always being “on”

It’s not inevitable that a chronic overperformer will crash and burn - although they regularly do. But it can be more subtle than that.

A gradual disconnection. A narrowing of your emotional range. Regularly feeling tired but wired. Reduced capacity to truly rest without a dose of angst. A body that feels tense or hard to fully settle when you have ‘allocated time’ for just that.

Pushing through, revving harder, and constantly deferring your well-being for a more convenient time gets expensive psychologically and physiologically.

You might still be functioning well, but you’re no longer fully present in your own life.

Coming back into relationship with yourself

What if you changed the question running through your mind from: ‘how do I keep going?’ To ‘How do I come back to myself?’

This is what I think of as “coming home”.

Coming home is ‘returning’ and renewing within your life rather thinking you need to get a whole new one. Instead of fixing, transcending or becoming someone new, it’s about reconnecting with what’s already there, beneath the layers of pressure, performance and exhaustion.

It might begin with small shifts:

• Becoming more aware of your baseline state (‘I’m a little amped’)
• Noticing when you are pressing the override button and ignoring yourself (“I’m out of gas, pushing = harm right now”)
• Allowing a little more honesty in how you respond to your own needs (‘This is a no from heart and gut - I’m saying yes for approval”)

In many ways, it is about reducing the gap between your behaviour and what is true for you.

A different way to perform

As a sports and performance psychologist, I’m not likely to encourage you to diminish either ambition nor effort towards it. What I would like to know though, is what is driving that ambition, and whether it’s sustainable.

When I start working with people, it’s common for me to notice a pattern of someone living slightly outside of their own capacity and pushing against themselves. They have often learned to override early signals of tiredness, tension, emotional discomfort - in order to keep going.

This is necessary for all of us now and then - on ‘game day’ so to speak, but when it’s adopted as a way of life, it creates strain. It offers no space to renew, to regenerate.

There is a more regenerative way of living and working, and the shift is not necessarily in how much you do, but how you relate to yourself while you are doing it.

This means that effort is no longer driven primarily by fear, approval, or the need to prove something. Instead, it comes form a more grounded place - one that includes curiosity, expression, and a greater sense of connection to self and others.

From that place, you are more likely to be faithful to yourself and your needs.

Small shifts that make a difference

There are many simple, small steps that you can make to get started.

Creating what I call psychological ‘firebreaks’ in your day or your week can interrupt the sense of constant urgency and invite time that isn’t directed towards output.

Coming to presence is a powerful circuit breaker - even just for a moment or two. This might look like pausing between tasks, getting outside for air and a sense of the horizon, or reducing unnecessary input from group chats that suck up your psychological space.

Learning to vary your pace is also important. Chronic overperformers tend to live in one speed: fast. A healthier system can move between modes - between doing and being, effort and recovery, intensity and depth. It’s a game-changer to plan for regular gear shifts.

Refocusing on finding rhythm rather than attempting to ‘make time’ for yourself is also valuable - like how you start and finish each day. Like what you do in spring that’s different to winter. And like revisiting the best rhythm for this chapter of your life - not the one that you were in a decade ago.

And perhaps most importantly, learning to listen anew to the vast intelligence of your body. Fatigue, tension, frustration and the desire to numb out are signals to work with, not just problems to fix or control.