If your life is functioning at a high level of efficiency and everyone around you is benefiting from your output, how would you even know if you were actually drowning?
It is a question most people in our community never think to ask. We are taught to be reliable, to serve with our whole hearts, and to magnify our callings. We are told that “if it is worth doing, it is worth doing well,” and for a lot of us, that has become the subconscious operating system for every hour of our day.
But there is a specific, quiet misery that comes when your excellence is no longer a choice you are making, but a cage you have built for yourself.
The 10:40 P.M. Kitchen Table
Take Bryce. It is on a Tuesday. The house is quiet, the kids are asleep, and he is sitting at the kitchen table with his laptop. He is re-reading an email he already sent to a client two hours ago. He isn’t looking for a mistake-he knows there isn’t one.
He is looking for… something else. A sense of safety, maybe. A confirmation that he didn’t accidentally sound too casual or too aggressive. As he stares at the sent folder, he notices that his jaw hurts. It’s a dull, rhythmic ache that has been there since lunch, a physical manifestation of the pressure to keep everything perfectly aligned.
The problem with Bryce’s situation is that no one is going to tell him to stop. His boss loves his precision. His Bishop loves how he handles the ward’s financial audits with zero errors. His wife appreciates that the cars are always maintained and the lawn looks like a putting green.
Surface Perception
A provider, a protector, and a pillar of the community.
Internal Reality
A high-tensile wire one vibration away from snapping.
On the surface, Bryce is the ideal Latter-day Saint man: a provider, a protector, and a pillar. But inside, he feels like a high-tensile wire that is one vibration away from snapping.
When Perfectionism Wears a Costume
We often talk about perfectionism as a flaw-a tendency to be overly critical or pedantic. But for the high-functioning person, perfectionism doesn’t look like a flaw; it looks like a virtue. It looks like “good enough isn’t good enough.”
It looks like the extra of prep time for a Sunday School lesson that is already well-written. It looks like the refusal to go to bed until the kitchen counters are bleached, even when you have a flight the next morning.
The core frustration is that you have become genuinely excellent at everything you’ve taken on. You aren’t “faking it.” You really are that good. But privately, you have lost the ability to distinguish between wanting to do something well because it matters, and being terrified of what happens if you don’t. You’ve forgotten what it feels like to do something “adequately” and still feel like a person of worth.
The July Static
Last month, I spent in my garage in ninety-degree heat untangling a giant ball of Christmas lights. It was July. There was no reason to do it then, but I couldn’t stand the thought of the mess sitting in the plastic bin for another .
I told myself I was being “proactive.” In reality, I was just trying to soothe a specific kind of internal static that I couldn’t name. It was irrational and physically exhausting, yet I felt a strange, hollow satisfaction when I finally laid them out in straight, parallel lines.
The Christmas lights were untangled five months before the first snow-a proactive move that was actually a soothing mechanism for anxiety.
Lily S., a voice stress analyst I spoke with recently, noted that the most profound indicators of internal pressure aren’t usually the big, jagged spikes in pitch.
“The real story is usually in the flatness. It’s the voice that is trying so hard to remain steady that it loses its natural resonance entirely.”
– Lily S., Voice Stress Analyst
When your life is a series of steady, flat, perfect notes, you lose the resonance of actual joy. You are performing a part that everyone else finds very useful, but you aren’t actually inhabiting the role. You are just managing the production.
The Success Trap
Why would anyone in your life ask you to change? If you are the one who always remembers the birthdays, who always turns in the report early, and who never loses their temper with the kids, you are a dream to live with.
Your “symptoms” are exactly what the world calls “success.” The system-your workplace, your family, even sometimes your ward-has no incentive to interrupt your perfectionism because the output is uniformly beneficial to everyone except you.
This is why untangling the standard from the fear almost always requires an outside party. You cannot think your way out of a pattern that the rest of the world is actively reinforcing with praise. You need someone who isn’t benefiting from your over-functioning to look you in the eye and ask: What are you so afraid will happen if you just do a “B-minus” job on this?
In our faith, we talk a lot about “becoming.” But sometimes we confuse becoming more like Christ with becoming more like a perfectly calibrated machine. Christ was many things, but He was never a machine. He was tired. He was frustrated. He let things be messy when messiness was required for growth. He prioritized people over the precise execution of a checklist.
The Performance Review
If you find yourself sitting at your computer at with a jaw that feels like it’s been clamped in a vise, it might be time to admit that your excellence has become a hiding place. There is a specific kind of safety in being beyond reproach.
If you never make a mistake, no one can ever find a reason to reject you. But that safety is a mirage. It’s a deferred tax that you are paying with your mental health, your sleep, and your ability to be present with the people you love.
When we work with individuals and couples who are struggling with this kind of high-functioning anxiety, we focus on reintegrating the “whole person” into the decision-making process. It isn’t just about clinical protocols; it’s about understanding the spiritual and cultural weight of these expectations.
For many in Utah, finding
lds counseling services near me
is the first step in speaking a language that includes both clinical expertise and the deep-seated values that drive us. It’s about learning that your covenants were never meant to be a performance review, but a relationship.
We often see this play out in marriages where one partner is the “perfect” one and the other feels like they are constantly failing to keep up. The tension isn’t because one person is better than the other; it’s because the “perfect” partner is using their high standards as a shield to avoid the vulnerability of being imperfect.
You can’t be truly known if you are only ever seen through the lens of your achievements. Breaking this cycle is uncomfortable. It involves intentionally letting a ball drop just to see if the world ends.
It involves sending an email without checking it four times. It involves going to bed with the dishes in the sink because your body is telling you it needs rest more than the kitchen needs to be spotless. It’s not about becoming lazy; it’s about becoming human again.
We have to realize that our worth was never tied to the quality of the email or the straightness of the lawn. Those are just things. The real work-the work of the soul-is much messier, much slower, and far less likely to result in a “thank you” from the people around you.
If you feel like you’ve been running a race that has no finish line, maybe it’s time to stop and ask who you’re running for. Because the version of you that is tired, slightly disorganized, and occasionally “fine” is actually a much better person to spend a life with than the version of you that is perfect and perpetually exhausted.
You don’t have to wait for someone else to give you permission to stop being flawless. You can just decide that being whole is better than being perfect.