My favorite life coaching client is similar to me. An intelligent, hard-working, high-achieving person who cannot quite comprehend why this life they've built, which is admirable and enviable by all external standards, feels hollow, shitty, and empty to them.

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The question they always ask first is—why? They did everything right. They got the A’s, went to the big-name school, got the fancy job title, made the money, started a family, bought a house in a major city, and regularly go on 2 or 3 vacations a year. So why don’t they feel happy and why aren’t they enjoying their life?

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It’s the (literal) million-dollar question. And answering it isn’t easy, because it requires seeing through one of life’s big illusions.

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The illusion that there is actually a correct way to do this crazy, wild thing we call living.

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The belief that if only you do all the right things at the right times, you will ascend to such a level that you avoid the pain, drudgery, inconvenience, and dullness that are an inherent part of the human experience.

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The Buddha himself said this millennia ago—life is dukkha. The best translation for dukkha isn’t actually suffering, as popular Western translations have, mysteriously, caused us to believe.

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The word’s connotation in Pali is more like “dullness.” I explain it to my clients as “bleh-ness.”

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Life has an inherent bleh-ness that we will never be able to exercise, meditate, or spend away. And, ironically, this inherent bleh-ness is what actually makes all of the good parts of life, well, good. Dualities can’t exist without their opposite. If you never had a bad day, you’d never be able to conceptualize a good one.

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This whole conundrum of dukkha gets us to the heart of what I call the overachiever’s paradox: “The more you try to make your life better or do it right, the more your life ends up sucking.” The avoidance of dukkha in its various faces and costumes actually creates more dukkha.

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If you’re an overachiever reading this right now, perhaps your eyebrows are raised, and you are ready to pull the 🚨woo-woo 🚨alarm on me. Totally fair, because my clients usually roast me when I tell them this at first, too.

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So, I’ll approach this the same way I do in a session—with the practical bits first.

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Pull out your calendar app, because I want to talk about your schedule.

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The overachiever’s schedule is a nightmare

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But it’s not an obvious nightmare at first because on paper, it yet again looks like “doing all the right things.”

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I’ll pick on myself to show you what I mean!

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There was a point in my life when I struggled, brutally, with OCD, panic disorder, and GAD. I wouldn’t wish those disorders on anybody, because they are actual, literal nightmares. And while today I’m fully recovered, early on in my anxiety recovery, my daily schedule looked something like this:

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Wake up at 8 AM. Immediately go outside for morning sun exposure for 10 mins. Meditate for 20 minutes. Have a small non-inflammatory breakfast. Go to the gym for an hour. Sauna. Cold Plunge. Come back home. Work 9-12. Take 7 anti-anxiety supplements with an anti-inflammatory lunch. Work 12-6. More supplements. Anti-inflammatory dinner. Acupuncture at 8. Writing at 9. Read for 45 minutes in bed. Take sleep supplements. Wake up the next day and do it all over again.

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Do you see the glaringly obvious problem with a schedule like this?

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There was literally not an unstructured moment in my day. My daily habits were fine-tuned so that my body always felt good, my work always got done, and I never had to feel even a moment of anxiety throughout my day.  

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I was really, really productive. And I also felt like a bowl of cold oatmeal nearly all the time.

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I was uninspired, bored, and yes, you might have guessed it, still anxious despite all of my pseudo-medical efforts to not be.

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I considered myself not only an overachiever, but a hyper-optimizer. I wore a WHOOP strap and listened to Andrew Huberman regularly, mining little tips and insights I could use to enhance my HRV, my sleep, my work, and, of course, my tendency towards anxiety.

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And despite the still present anxiety disorder, my body and mind did feel mostly good. But I wasn’t having any fun or enjoying my life at all. It felt like I was living out the plot of Groundhog Day because, effectively, I was.

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The thing we often forget about joy, wonder, and adventure is that they traffic in surprise and spontaneity. They’re too cool for calendars, schedules, and social media. They pop up unplanned and uninvited, throw glitter on everything, shake their asses for a bit, and then disappear to God knows where when you’re not looking. This is why I like to say that we gay men are the physical avatars of these feelings, btw.

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So when a client comes to me asking me why they feel bleh and then shows me a schedule that is gridlocked tighter than the commute from Manhattan to JFK at 5 PM on a weekday, I smirk.

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Because it looks like the right thing on paper. But it tastes like unflavored oatmeal. And if for some godforsaken reason you enjoy unflavored oatmeal, sub in a different food you find gross here.

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Sometimes, that conversation alone is enough to get the person on the right track back to joy. But often, it’s not.

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Because we also have to address the greater WHY behind the optimization. How did the client end up with their iron maiden of a schedule in the first place?

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The answer is different for every single person, but the common thread is this. They were emotionally on the run from one of dukkha's many faces.

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Hyper-optimizing is often emotional avoidance in disguise

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This is where the real work starts to happen.

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Seeing your hyperachieving and optimizing tendencies as emotional avoidance doesn’t always sit well with people at first. It can seem like a pop psychology Instagram post. Not quite the 🚨woo-woo 🚨alarm, but close to it. So, as always, it’s worth exploring the particulars more deeply.

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What was I actually trying to do with my insane schedule above? The answer wasn’t apparent to me until I worked with my own coach. But years later, I can tell you beyond a shadow of a doubt that what I was REALLY trying to do was avoid anxiety at all costs.  

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Like any good overachiever, I thought if I was experiencing a problem, there was a solution to get rid of the problem. I just had to find the right strategies and tactics! And I wanted to find them so, so bad because these things were really making me suffer.

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My own little ego blinded me to the obvious. Anxiety is one of dukkha’s many faces. It is impossible to fully eliminate it from the human experience. And this is where we start to see paradox at play, yet again.

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Because it is true that hard work often makes things better. I did, in fact, start to recover when I went to therapy and changed my behaviors and over-reliance on my mind (that’s another article in itself, wink wink), which is to say that while anxiety might be unavoidable, anxiety disorders certainly aren’t.

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But what actually healed my disordered anxiety, in the 4th quarter play that nobody saw coming (ew I actually just used a sports analogy, gross), was hopelessness.

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It was taking the posture of “ok, anxiety, I can’t make you go away forever no matter how hard I try. So come here, you weirdo—you get a hug and some tea.”

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Translation from my last article—I chose to meet the experience with love instead of more fear, and that is what actually freed me.

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So to flip it back to you, dear overachieving reader, your questions for insight are: “What is the feeling I have been avoiding for so long? What face of dukkha have I deemed unallowable? What do I meet, right now, with continued fear instead of love?”

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Some examples from my own coaching clients:

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A gay client who obsessively works out because underneath their drive to be healthy is avoidance of the continual rejection they got when they were out of shape.

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A really intelligent tech worker who overcommunicates to her friends and family because she’s intent on avoiding feeling left out, like she used to when she was a kid.

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And many, many more.

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Now you might read these examples and go “well, dude, how do you know that Client 1 doesn’t just want to look really good and that Client 2 just likes maintaining relationships with loved ones? Are you saying that nobody should actually have goals, or try to better themselves?”

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Nope, but I’m so glad I forced you to ask that pretend question so that I can clarify more.

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Urgency and failure are your best clues about avoidance

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How do you discern a genuine healthy desire to be better or achieve something from unhealthy emotional avoidance?

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You take a close peek into two things—the urgency you act with, and your response when it doesn’t go your way.

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You can also look into frequency or intensity, but I find those are often red herrings. A CEO’s day is going to be detailed and long. A bodybuilder is going to be in the gym 6 days a week. High performance often requires frequent and intense work, as you well know.

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But urgency, on the other hand, is a byproduct of a nervous system that feels threatened by something. When it feels like you NEED to do something RIGHT NOW OR ELSE, that is often your clue that your actions are fueled by avoidance and fear.

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And similarly, if something prevents you from doing what you want, pay attention to your inner dialogue. Do you shrug it off and say “eh, no biggie, back to the grind tomorrow”? Or do you go into a shame, blame, or anxiety spiral about it?

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My gym bunny’s clue was that when he missed a workout, it wasn’t just no biggie. It was anxiety, shame, and self-flagellation.

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My newsletter writer’s clue was that when she found herself in a quiet, solitary moment, she was rushing to send texts to people RIGHT NOW OR ELSE.

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I had clues from both angles. I felt like I needed to take my anxiety supplements right now or else! And when I did experience anxiety, I got to shame and blame remarkably fast.

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And to be very clear, I’m talking about working with a trend of data here—not just a single day or moment. Experiencing urgency or shame is also allowed. But when it’s consistent over a long period of time, that’s life nudging you to take a closer look.

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And if you do look closer and see something, the next important question is—am I trying to eliminate something that can’t actually be eliminated like a feeling, a thought, or a future experience?

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Because if so, I have bad news that’s actually good news.

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Dukkha is here to stay—and thank God for that!  

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As I said, the most transformative moment in my journey was when I radically accepted that, sometimes, I would just be anxious and there was no hope of getting rid of anxiety forever. Period.

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My gym client came to the same acceptance with his fear of rejection. And my other client came to acceptance with her feelings of abandonment.

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Whether we liked it or not, these experiences, these psychic scars, happened to us. And until we invent the machine from Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, there’s no way to erase them.

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That doesn’t mean that things don’t get better, of course. Gaping wounds become little scars with dedicated action, time, and attention. To paraphrase the Buddha, pain is unavoidable but suffering is optional.

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The anxiety was the pain; but the disorder was the suffering. I closed the bleeding wound with help and effort, but the scar will never go away because dukkha never goes away. That’s the hopeless bit.

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And I’m really jazzed about that emo factoid.

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Because you know what my little anxiety scars remind me to do?

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They remind me to be grateful for my calm, peaceful, and resonant days. My past suffering provides the contrast that helps me appreciate the blessings of the ordinary.

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I’m sure some people take a peaceful mind for granted because that’s all they’ve ever known. I, luckily, was once insane. This is how duality works—I can only really know sanity because at one point in my life, I got close and personal with insanity.

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When you experience both sides of duality—the light and the dark, the good and the bad—you stumble on another major realization.

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Which is that the only real duality is non-duality. If there’s no pain without pleasure and no pleasure without pain, then how can they possibly be so distinct from each other?

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We obviously want one end of the pole more than the other—we want the joy, the rapture, the calm, the bliss, and the light without the boredom, the pain, the panic, the suffering, and the dark. Our bodies are naturally wired to seek what feels good and shirk what feels bad; this is normal.

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But when you can hold the entire system with love—when you can meet the many faces of dukkha with open arms without secretly plotting to make them go away or disappear—you, my little overachiever, will know what it is to live a whole and joyous life again, because for the first time in a long time, you’ve opened your arms to this entire sacred mess.

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I’m here, as always, if you have questions. Send this to an overachiever in your own life, too. If you aren’t one, I know you know one. You’re on Substack and Medium, after all…

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<3 Mike

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Image credit: Photo by Valentin on Unsplash.

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