You’re Putting Too Much Pressure on Yourself (and It’s Making You More Anxious) | Ep. 512
In this episode, I’m talking about the pressure we put on ourselves, how all of those “shoulds” and imaginary timelines can fuel anxiety, and how we can still chase big goals without tying our worth to the outcome.
In this episode, I’ll share:
- How to recognize when a goal has shifted from something you want into something you feel you have to achieve
- Why feeling “behind” can make us push even harder, and why that often backfires
- The difference between pursuing a goal with pressure versus curiosity, playfulness, and self-compassion
- How to question the invisible timelines and checklists we’ve been taught to follow
- A simple way to respond when your brain starts telling you what you “should” be doing by now
- Why slowing down may actually help you move forward more effectively, especially when anxiety is already along for the ride
Content
How to Stop Putting So Much Pressure on Yourself
You might think your anxiety is coming from the things happening around you.
The deadlines. The responsibilities. The intrusive thoughts. The uncertainty. The things you need to get done.
But sometimes, one of the biggest sources of anxiety isn’t actually outside of you.
It’s the pressure you’re putting on yourself.
Pressure to do more.
Pressure to be better.
Pressure to get better faster.
Pressure to reach the next milestone, make more money, find a partner, finish school, buy a house, be successful, or somehow prove that you are doing life “right.”
And then there are all of those shoulds.
I should be further along by now.
I should have figured this out.
I should be doing more.
I shouldn’t still be struggling with this.
If that voice sounds familiar, I want to talk about a different way to approach your goals.
Because I’m not going to tell you to stop dreaming big or stop wanting things for yourself.
Quite the opposite.
I want you to have big, ridiculous, exciting goals.
I just don’t want you to have to bully yourself to get there.
You Are Still Designing Your Life
Recently, I was driving my daughter to school, and we started talking about how much pressure kids feel these days.
She’s in 10th grade, and she’s already thinking about college.
And it hit me how early we begin creating these invisible checklists for our lives.
Go to college.
Get the right job.
Find a partner.
Get married.
Buy a house.
Have children.
Make a certain amount of money.
Reach a certain level of success.
And somewhere along the way, these things can stop feeling like options and start feeling like rules.
So I told my daughter, “You’re in the designing-your-life stage.”
But afterward, I realized something.
We never actually leave that stage.
You are still designing your life.
You get to decide what matters to you.
You get to decide which goals you genuinely want and which ones you inherited from your family, your peers, social media, or society.
There is no single correct way to do this life.
Delete the Imaginary Checklist
I’ve sat across from so many clients who are incredibly anxious because they haven’t checked off something they believe they were supposed to have accomplished by now.
I’m not married yet.
I haven’t finished my degree.
I haven’t had a baby yet.
I haven’t made enough money.
Everyone else seems further ahead than me.
When we believe there is one universal timeline we’re supposed to follow, every deviation from that timeline can start to feel like evidence that we’re failing.
But who decided on that timeline?
Who decided what age you should graduate, get married, buy a house, have children, or accomplish a particular goal?
A lot of these rules are simply socially accepted ideas that we have collectively decided to treat as facts.
They aren’t facts.
You are allowed to question the list.
And you are allowed to make your own.
The Goal Isn’t the Problem. The Pressure Is.
I want to be really clear about something.
I am not telling you that goals are bad.
I love goals.
I have a huge goal of helping 10 million people with anxiety.
That is a ridiculous number of people!
And the funny thing is, I may never reach it.
But that’s okay.
Because I’m having fun trying.
Years ago, I would have approached a goal like that very differently.
I would have worried:
What if I can’t do it?
What if people judge me?
What if I embarrass myself?
The goal would have become a test of my worth.
Today, it feels more like an experiment.
Let’s see what happens.
Let’s see what I can create.
Let’s have some fun with this.
That difference matters.
What Does Pressure Sound Like?
Start paying attention to the voice you use when you’re pursuing something important.
Pressure tends to sound aggressive.
Urgent.
Conditional.
It says things like:
You HAVE to do this.
You SHOULD be further along.
You’d better hurry up.
If you don’t accomplish this, you’ve failed.
And underneath all of that is often an even more painful message:
If I achieve this, then I’ll finally be good enough.
That’s where we get into trouble.
A goal approached with curiosity sounds very different.
I’d like to try this.
This matters to me.
I wonder what I could learn.
Let’s see what happens.
I could do this.
I want to do this.
There can still be challenge.
There can still be effort.
There can still be discomfort.
But your worth isn’t hanging in the balance.
Your Worth Is Not on the Checklist
This is one of the most important things I want you to take from this episode.
Your accomplishments do not determine your worth.
Finishing college at 22 instead of 27 does not make one person more valuable than another.
Getting married doesn’t make you more lovable.
Running a marathon doesn’t make you more worthy.
Making more money doesn’t make you more deserving of respect.
And reaching my goal of helping 10 million people won’t make me more worthy either.
You are worthy whether the box gets checked or not.
That doesn’t mean you can’t want things.
It means you get to pursue those things without putting your self-worth up for negotiation.
What If You Feel Behind?
I know some of you are reading this thinking:
Okay, Kimberley, but I really AM behind.
Maybe school took longer than expected.
Maybe anxiety or OCD interrupted your plans.
Maybe you needed time away from work.
Maybe your life simply looks different from the lives of the people around you.
First, I want you to question what “behind” actually means.
Behind according to whom?
But even if you still feel behind, there is a trap I really want you to watch for.
When people feel behind, they often try to catch up by pushing themselves even harder.
They take on twice as much.
They sleep less.
They work harder.
They demand more from themselves.
They press the accelerator.
But if anxiety, stress, or another difficult experience was part of what slowed you down in the first place, adding even more pressure often doesn’t help.
It makes everything harder.
Sometimes You Have to Slow Down to Speed Up
I say this to my clients all the time:
We have to slow down to speed up.
When you feel behind, your instinct might be to rush.
But rushing can increase anxiety, stress, exhaustion, insecurity, and overwhelm.
Eventually, that pressure can slow you down even more.
Instead, ask:
What pace is actually sustainable for me?
Not:
What pace would prove that I’m good enough?
There’s a big difference.
If I tried to reach my own goals by sacrificing sleep, constantly pushing myself, and living in a state of stress, I might actually make it harder to get where I want to go.
I’d much rather move toward my goals at a pace that allows me to sleep, eat, take care of myself, enjoy my life, and feel safe within myself.
Slow doesn’t mean unsuccessful.
Different doesn’t mean wrong.
Notice the “Should” Thoughts
Another skill I want you to practice is learning to observe the thoughts that create pressure.
You might notice:
I should be doing more.
I should have finished this already.
I should feel differently about my partner.
I shouldn’t be having this thought.
That last one is particularly relevant for those of you with OCD.
Here is the reminder:
Thoughts are not facts.
Just because your brain produces the thought I should does not mean you actually should.
And just because something feels urgent does not mean it requires an urgent response.
Try noticing the thought instead:
I’m having the thought that I should be further along.
That tiny shift can create some space between you and the pressure.
You don’t have to immediately obey every thought your brain produces.
Replace “I Have To” With Something Gentler
Listen for the difference between these:
I have to.
I should.
versus:
I could.
I want to.
Let’s see.
I’m going to experiment with this.
That isn’t about pretending you don’t have responsibilities.
It’s about noticing when your brain has turned a goal into a threat.
You can be ambitious without being cruel to yourself.
You can work hard without making your worth dependent on the outcome.
You can care deeply without creating unnecessary urgency.
Let Failure Be Information
Part of taking the pressure off also means changing your relationship with failure.
I’ve embraced failure much more than I used to.
Because really, what is failure?
It’s data.
It tells me what worked and what didn’t.
Then I get to decide whether I want to adjust something and try again.
Failure doesn’t have to mean:
I’m not good enough.
It can simply mean:
Okay. That didn’t work the way I hoped. What did I learn?
Imagine how differently you might approach your goals if failure wasn’t a verdict about who you are.
Add Some Fun Back Into Your Life
When my son was younger, he came to me one night in tears because he was terrified of becoming an adult.
Honestly, I understood.
Being an adult can sound pretty scary!
So I reminded him of one very important perk.
When you’re an adult, you can drive yourself to the grocery store and buy an entire chocolate cake.
Nobody can stop you.
He laughed.
But there was something important underneath that silly example.
Adulthood comes with responsibility, yes.
But it also comes with freedom.
You get to choose.
You get to decide what kind of life you want to create.
You can fill it with joy, love, excitement, curiosity, and silliness.
Life does not have to be one long checklist of things you have to accomplish before you’re finally allowed to relax.
You Don’t Have to Prove Yourself
Maybe you didn’t grow up with someone reminding you of this.
So I want to remind you now.
You do not have to achieve something to become valuable.
You don’t have to prove yourself.
You don’t have to accomplish your goals faster than everyone else.
You don’t have to live according to somebody else’s timeline.
You can absolutely aim for the stars.
Pick the crazy goal.
Pick the traditional goal.
Change the goal.
Try something and fail spectacularly.
Try again.
Change your mind.
Design your life.
But as you do, pay attention to the voice guiding you.
Is it saying:
You have to do this or else?
Or is it saying:
Let’s see what happens.
One creates pressure.
The other creates possibility.
And if you’re already struggling with anxiety, reducing that unnecessary pressure may be one of the most important things you can do.
So please, don’t stop dreaming big.
Just remember to pursue those dreams gently, kindly, playfully, and realistically.
Because reaching the goal will not make you worthy.
You already are.
And as always, it is a beautiful day to do hard things.
Transcription: You’re Putting Too Much Pressure on Yourself (and It’s Making You More Anxious)
You are putting too much pressure on yourself, and it is making you so much more anxious. We commonly talk here about triggers like intrusive thoughts or things that create anxiety for you, and they are outside stresses that cause you a lot of anxiety. But often, some of the most anxiety you experience is coming from inside you, the pressure you put on yourself. Maybe you’re putting pressure on yourself to be better, to get better, to win an award, to get a pay raise, to impress your friends, to check off all of these boxes. And this is a trap that we all fall into sometimes, and it can be, in some cases, the clients that I see, are the major source of stress and anxiety in their life. Or maybe the pressure’s coming from this voice inside you where it’s saying, “You should be doing this,” and, “You should be doing that,” and, “You should be doing more.” This pressure that you’re experiencing is often the thing that shoots your anxiety up so high, and today we’re going to talk about it. My name is Kimberly Quinlan. I am an anxiety and OCD specialist, and I am on a mission to help you suffer less with anxiety. Now, I’m not here, this is not an episode where I just tell you to take the pressure off. That is something you’ve probably already tried, and my guess is you have some big goals that you wanna reach in your life, so I’m not here to take those away. I am here to help you manage that pressure and have a different way of approaching it because I think I’ve mastered this. It’s something that I have gone from someone who is constantly putting pressure on themselves to now having a whole lot of fun making big goals. So let’s talk it through. So recently, I shared on social media my big goal that I’ve been sharing with you on your Anxiety Toolkit for some time, which is my goal to help 10 million people with anxiety. And I talked about how this is just such a fun goal and something that I think I probably will never reach, but it’s just so big and crazy that it felt appealing to me. Now, once upon a time, if I had have made that goal, and even worse, if I had have publicly shared it, all I would feel is anxiety. I would think, “What if I can’t reach it? What if they judge me? What if they think I’m stupid? What if, um, you know, I make a fool of myself in front of everyone?” And it really got me thinking and made me want to record this because how I approach big, lofty goals is a complete 180 to how I used to. Back in the day, I would be anxious, and I would feel this voice in me that is like, “Ugh,” it’s so loud, and it’s so mean, and it’s so aggressive, and it’s masculine, and it’s just brutal. And my guess is that you’re feeling that, too. Just this morning, as I was driving with my daughter to school, she’s in the 10th grade now, we were talking about the pressure that f- these kids are feeling in school. She’s already worried about getting into college in the 10th grade. The ninth grade, even the eighth, seventh, and sixth grade, kids are feeling the pressure of what is expected of them. And I said to her this really important point, and I wanna share it with you first before we get into the details, is I said to her, “You are in the 10th grade. Really all you’re doing right now is you’re in the designing your life stage.” I’m in more of, like, the stage of my life where I’m like, I’m sort of, like, maintaining and trying not to decline, right? But I’m like, “You’re in the growing stage of your life. You get to make choices. You get to design a life that’s just yours.” But then I thought about it, and I realized we never leave that stage. We are always in the design your life stage. Believe it or not, you are in the design your life stage. I want to tell you a story before I get into the main points. And as we were talking, my daughter and I, we were talking about how around this age we start to develop checklists, these socially accepted lists of things that you, quote-unquote, should be doing. Now, some of us abandon this and completely roll our eyes and completely go against it, and that’s great. Others abide by these rules, and they make these rules the rule book, the law on what they have to do. I can’t tell you how many clients I have sat across from who have had panic attacks day and night, during the day, all through the night, having anxiety that they haven’t crossed certain things off their list. I haven’t gotten married yet. I haven’t got a boyfriend yet. I haven’t had sex yet. I haven’t kissed a boy yet. I haven’t completed my course yet. Maybe it’s taking… Your degree is taking longer than it did for other people. I haven’t made a million dollars yet. I haven’t got a million followers yet. Like, there… It’s these lists that they feel like they have to check off. So the first thing I want you to think of as we move through, and as I was trying to share with my daughter, is delete that list. You have to first decide what is best for you, and what is best for you might not involve that checklist. Now, if you actually thought, “No, actually, I want that checklist. I want to get married. I want to have a partner. I want to get a job. I want to buy a house. I want to pay off my mortgage,” or whatever it might be, I understand But that is where, once you’ve identified what it is you want, that is where we can determine whether we implement the plan with pressure or we do it a different way. And let’s talk about doing it a different way. A few, uh, would probably be el- over a year now, my son, who was I think nine at the time, came to me at bedtime and burst into tears and said, “Mommy, I am so afraid of becoming an adult.” And I was like, “Real.” “I don’t blame you.” Um, uh, but jokes aside, I felt so sad for him that he was afraid of growing up. He was afraid of having to become an adult. He said, “I just wanna be a kid forever.” And oh my God, I could just freeze that moment. He was so adorable, but he was in so much pain. And here is what I said to him. I held him and I said to him, “I know it’s scary, but when you become an adult, you are going to get to drive to the supermarket, and you get to buy whatever you want. No one’s gonna stop you.” I’m still shocked when I go to the supermarket, like, I could buy a whole cake right now, and nobody could stop me. I could buy a whole chocolate cake. And I said to him, “When you’re an adult, you can go, and you can buy an entire chocolate cake whenever you want.” And he giggled. He thought that was actually pretty funny, and he did say it made him feel better because I was trying to share with him that adulthood can be scary, yes But you wanna reframe with the freedom you get from being an adult. You get to choose whether you do the ABC list or not. You get to choose whether you infuse your adulthood with joy and love and excitement and silliness. And that is one thing I feel so proud that I have done in my adult life, is I have worked on that freedom. And so now that we’re talking about pressure, we can now start to see some hidden little tools and concepts I want you to take from me. Number one is you get to design your life. You get to pick what matters to you, and you get to leave the things that actually don’t work for you. If you don’t wanna get married, you don’t have to get married. If you don’t wanna go to college … This is why I love The Game of Life. I don’t know if you’ve played it. I’d never played it in Australia, but when I came to America, we play it with my kids all the time, and I love it because it’s about life. It’s about deciding, do you wanna go to college or do you wanna get a job? And learning about the wins and the consequences of our decisions. That is what life is about, and there is literally no right way to do this life. At the end of your life, no one is going to have a checklist and check off whether you achieved all of the things like buying a car and buying a house and getting married. Like, no one’s checking off your list. No one’s gonna care at your funeral whether you did those things Now, as you know, I have a private practice. I have six amazing therapists in Calabasas, California. However, we do not take insurance. Now, if you are looking for insurance-covered OCD or BFRB treatment, I wanna let you know about NOCD. NOCD provides face-to-face live video sessions with specialized licensed OCD therapists. Now, their therapists use exposure and response prevention. We know this is the gold standard for OCD, so you can be absolutely confirmed that you’re in the right place there, and they have a clinically proven app that helps you stay connected to your therapist and others who have OCD between sessions, so you’ll always feel supported. Now, the cool thing is NOCD is available in all 50 US states and even internationally, and they accept most insurance plans, making it affordable and accessible. We love that. Now, if you think you might have OCD or you’re struggling to manage your symptoms, you can book a free call. Just click the link in the show notes at nocd.com. I am honored to partner with NOCD. I want to remind you that recovery is possible. Please do not forget that. Now, big hugs, and let’s get back to the show. They will remember whether you had a really good time at life, and they will remember whether you were kind and the, the funny things that you did. They’re not going to be talking about how, yes, it was so great that you paid your mortgage off, and it was so great that you finished college by 22 instead of 27. Nobody cares about that. So we have to put things in perspective. Now, the other thing here, the other main point I really wanna hammer in is have fun with the things that you’re doing. I have a stupid, ridiculous goal to help 10 million people with anxiety. That is a lot of people. But the fun thing about it is I actually don’t care if I never make it. I don’t care. I don’t need to check it off. It’s the fun is in the practice and in the experience of it and the excitement of it. It’s not a checklist, and my worth does not depend on me making that 10 million list. It doesn’t. And so often when I’m talking about pressure with my patients in my office right here behind me, what I’m really talking to them about isn’t the actual checklist. It’s the idea that they have fused their worth with one of the things on that list, that they’re less worthy if they don’t get married by blank, 27, whatever the number might be, that they’re less worthy or that they’re less valuable than somebody else if they don’t run a marathon c- if– and the other one does. The, the main piece that you have to understand here Is that we are all worthy whether the list is checked off or not. Somebody who checks off other more things on their list, that doesn’t make them worth more. It doesn’t make them more lovable. It doesn’t make them more valuable. It’s just that their list is different than yours. And again, at our funeral, it’s not going to make a huge difference. We’re not here to celebrate whether somebody finished a marathon or not. That’s not gonna be a big thing. No one cares if I hit a 10 million people or not. I mean, the people I reach do, but nobody cares about this list except me. And my job is to remember that this is about a playful, curious, silly goal that’s fun. It’s not coming from the place of pressure. Now, what’s the difference? Well, well logically and tactically, pressure will sound mean. Pressure will have conditions associated, like you’re good if you do it, and you’re bad if you don’t. It will often come with this voice of aggression and force and urgency and anxiety. Whereas goals for the sake of it, goals for the fun of it, goals for the growth of it, are more curious and playful, and they have a little challenge, a little, um, a little mischievousness to it. That’s the difference, and I want you to start to check in on yourself on that voice and see which is which. Pressure will always create anxiety for you, and we’re in the mission of reducing anxiety, so let’s together work at reducing that pressure. Now, I also know that some of you actually feel like you’re behind, and that is completely okay. Sometimes we are, quote unquote, behind, meaning let’s say the average person finishes the high school at 18. Maybe you don’t finish till you’re 19, right? Because you had to stay an extra year, you got held back. Or maybe you wanted to, um, finish your bachelor degree by the time you were 22, everybody else did, um, and you still are only halfway through. Now, once again, I wanna remind you It doesn’t matter. Well, this is about letting go of urgency and pressure, and remind yourself that this timeline is just a made-up timeline. It’s the same with 10,000 steps. Like, I love the idea of 10,000 steps. I try to hit 10,000 steps every day. But at the end of the day, some random person just made up 10,000 steps. We actually have no clinical evidence that that’s the magic number. Why is it 10,000? Why is it not 9,000? Why is it not 11,000? Somebody just made this list up, and then for some reason, humans all started to agree for reasons I’m not quite sure. And that’s the same with when it comes to when you should graduate, when you should get married, when you should buy a house, when you should have bl- like, lost weight or whatever it might be. Um, often what we need to do is, again, let go of that expectation and allow it to be different. Now, what often happens with this pressure is if, in fact, you are, quote unquote, behind, which PS, we don’t agree with now, right? Agreed. We’re not following that anymore. But let’s say if you still feel that doom and dread and guilt and shame that you haven’t met the same pace other people may have met, what often people do, and I talk to my patients about this all the time, is because they feel behind, they then put pressure on themselves to catch up at a pace that’s not sustainable. So I’ll use an actual, like, example I see quite regularly. So let’s say you have a mental health condition that has impacted your ability to finish college. So instead of going full-time, you’ve had to go part-time, whether it’s because you had therapy or you needed some time off, or you needed to do a sh- lighter load so that you could sort of manage your stress. So you’re feeling behind, which again, you’re not, but you’re feeling behind, and so then you go, “Okay, well, now I have to find a way to sort of make up for it. So now I’m going to put… I’m gonna take double the credits.” And it’s like, but you’re forgetting about the fact the reason that you’re, quote unquote, behind was because of this struggle. It’s going to only get in the way if you put extra pressure on yourself to get it done faster than even the normal average person would do. Often what happens is you press the gas pedal, the accelerator, because you’re behind But the gas accelerator isn’t going to speed you up. It’s actually going to slow you down. I always say to clients, we have to slow down to speed up. That is so important, especially if you have anxiety. Pressure does not get fixed by speeding up. That just makes your anxiety worse. We need to slow down to speed up. If your goal, let’s say if my goal is to meet… I’m using this as an example. I don’t want to make it about me, but If let’s say my goal was to hit 10– that 10 million people that I help, gunning it and pushing myself so hard where I’m not sleeping, and I’m having more stress, and now I feel insecure, that’s gonna slow me down to get to that pace. I’m gonna reach my silly, ridiculous goal so much faster if I do it at a pace that is slow and sustainable, and I’ve created a safety within myself where my worth is not up for grabs, and is not here as a negotiation, and I can also sleep well now, and I can eat well. I’m not push– putting pressure on myself to be doing something that creates only more stress, and discomfort, and actual medical concerns in my body, like headaches, stomach problems, and so forth. And so we really wanna remind ourselves, even if we feel behind, sometimes our reaction to have feeling pressure is to speed up, and it is never the solution. Now, the last thing I really want you to understand here, which will make this actually possible, is to learn how to observe thoughts associated with pressure. And what I mean by that is just because you have the thought, “I should,” doesn’t mean you have to. Thoughts are not facts. Just because you have the thought, and it might feel real, that you should have completed college by now, or you should have had a baby by now, or you should have, um, had sex by now, or whatever. I should feel a certain way about my partner by now, or I should have these… This goes for people with OCD as well. I should and I shouldn’t have these thoughts. Just because you have a thought doesn’t mean you have to respond to it as if it is a fact. Thoughts are not facts. Just because you have the feeling that it’s true doesn’t mean the feeling is a fact either. And so what we wanna be able to do is, as we’re working, as we’re doing the day, if we start to observe pressure building up in our body, we can learn that I’m having the thought that I should be doing something. But just because I’m thinking it doesn’t make it true. And just because I’m thinking it doesn’t mean I need to respond from a place of urgency. Now, as you can imagine, you’re gonna need to practice a lot of self-compassion here. Mastering pressure may be the unlock with your anxiety that you have needed all this time. And maybe you didn’t have a mom voicing into you that you don’t have to be anything except yourself. You don’t have to prove yourself. You don’t have to achieve to be valuable. You’re already worthy. You’re already so worthy of love, and kindness, and respect. But you can go for your dreams. You can pick crazy, ridiculous, silly goals. You can pick the more standard goals that our society has got for you, and if you wanna keep those, that’s fine too. But the main thing you want to remember here is there is a massive difference between the pressure of I have to and I should to I could and I want to. Or let’s just see. Let’s do an experiment and see if I can do it, knowing that my worth has nothing to do with the outcome, and it’s cool to fail. I’ve completely embraced failure. I think that’s the other reason that pressure is not on, because who cares? I fail. All right then. I’ve failed like every other human on this planet, and it’s not a problem. What a- what is failure? It’s just data for me to know what worked and what didn’t work, and then I can decide if I wanna adjust or not. And so I hope that this has been helpful to you because it’s so important. Now, as always, I always say it is a beautiful day to do hard things. Please don’t stop aiming for the stars. But please do do it gently and kindly and realistically without the expectation, and please remind yourself meeting the goals will not make you worthy. You already are. Have a wonderful day, and I’ll see you next week. Please note that this podcast or any other resources from cbtschool.com should not replace professional mental health care. If you feel you would benefit, please reach out to a provider in your area. Have a wonderful day, and thank you for supporting cbtschool.com
