Self-discipline can be your worst enemy

Val Blair had climbed mountains to get to the pinnacle of her career. An accomplished marketing executive, she navigated high-pressure environments with a combination of dedication and discipline that set her apart from her peers.

But in 2017, she was at the top of a different mountain. A real one. She was suddenly struck with vertigo. Instead of seeking help from those around her, she sat down and decided to wait it out. She’d figure out a way to get down on her own.

“I sat there for an hour, thinking, ‘This is just going to be my life, and I’m not going down that mountain,’” she recalls.

Finally, two women approached her and offered to help. At first, she declined. Then, they convinced her and carried her down the mountain, as tears streamed down her face, she says.

“Looking back, I think the incident happened because I was at an internal breaking point between who I had been and who I was becoming,” she says. It was Blair’s first indication that the self-discipline she imposed on herself—insisting that she could do everything perfectly on her own—wasn’t healthy. In addition to the significant stress of her high-pressure job, she was also still carrying the grief of losing her partner five years earlier. She believes that her body was signaling that pushing through, no matter what she was feeling, was something that needed to change.

When Control Goes Too Far

Some high-performing colleagues seem to do everything just right. They’re controlled and committed. They collect achievements and optimize every moment. However, the very self-discipline and control that can spur achievement can also veer into negative territory. Overcontrol has been linked to chronic depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and other issues.

Licensed counseling and sports psychologist Blakely Low-Sampson sees this often in her work with executives and athletes. “Many high performers believe more discipline is better, and that often leads to burnout, exhaustion, and stalled performance,” she adds.

Executive coach Brooke Taylor, author of Healing the Success Wound: Align Your Ambition, Find Lasting Career Fulfillment, and End the Cycle of Never-Enough, had a similar experience when she was a team lead at Google and found herself “really struggling with my relationship with my ambition and achievement and productivity,” she recalls. She felt burned out and was also in recovery from addiction.

When Taylor tried to find literature to help, she found frameworks for issues like how to give feedback or better manage time. At the same time, she was getting sober and developing mindfulness practices. And she made the connection that, just as some people fill a void or feeling of emptiness in their lives (something Taylor calls “part of the human condition”) with alcohol, drugs, or other methods, “high-performers fill that with achievement, significance, productivity.” She also points to a 2023 study that linked effort with moral character, and that, in some settings, hard work is linked with morality, even when the effort is for its own sake and isn’t producing results.

Taylor calls the void and drive to fill it with achievement the “success wound—which is the pain that comes from mistaking success, productivity, and achievement for self-worth.”

The combination of rigidity in routine or goal pursuit veers into damaging perfectionism and not allowing for nonlinear progress, says executive leadership coach Allie Stark. “In reality, human behavior and habit formation are nonlinear and often winding. You might take two steps forward and one step back,” she says.

Addressing excessive self-discipline

As a high performer, you may begin to notice that you’re crossing the line into excessive self-discipline in your behavior, Stark says. “What that can feel like is a contraction in your body, a sense of overwhelm, anxiety, worry,” she says. An inability to be flexible or frequently getting angry or irritated with those around you may also be signs.

Low-Sampson says psychological flexibility is necessary to keep overcontrol in check, calling it “one of the most predictive factors of peak performance.” In other words, self-discipline must be tempered by an awareness of thoughts, emotions, and sensations to mindfully discern the best approach in any given moment. So, when your self-discipline pushes you toward powering through, such self-awareness allows you to determine when you need rest, recovery, or other approaches to be most effective overall.

In addition, high performers need to work on self-awareness and on understanding what it is that’s feeding their drive in order to ensure it’s healthy, Taylor says. Ask yourself questions like, “What am I using this self-discipline for?” and “What part of me is being expressed through that self-discipline?”

“In my own life, if that comes from a place of fear, self-hatred, wanting to manage and control, then that’s how I know it’s gone too far,” she says. However, there are times when being highly disciplined and focused is healthy and can help you get to your goals. “That’s when it’s coming from a place of desire, creativity, inspiration, and something that I’m wanting to work toward.”

For Blair, that mountaintop realization that she needed to include both others and self-care in her life was transformative. “I had self-discipline, but I wasn’t asking my team to come in and help me. I wasn’t asking to take a pause, maybe to walk around the block and to catch my breath,” she recalls. When she began to do those things—keeping the discipline she needed to achieve while also not being a soloist perfectionist—she found new strength.

“Being mindful of high performance doesn’t mean we become soft,” she says.