Each New Year, we pledge to transform our bodies, improve our careers, organize our homes and develop new hobbies. We dedicate ourselves to doing more—more exercise, more work, more activities and social engagements. On its face, striving for more sounds pretty good. But it also has a dark side that we need to resist.
As a neuropsychologist, much of my work focuses on how people respond to stress. I often find myself helping people understand the effects of self-defeating behaviors that I call the Overs. It’s a familiar list: overworking, overachieving, overthinking, overexplaining, overgiving, overcommitting and overaccommodating.
We engage in the Overs to create psychological safety for ourselves. They’re a form of nervous-system regulation. When you feel anxiety, stress, frustration or uncertainty, it’s because threat networks in your brain have activated: You’re afraid. To restore balance, you engage in compensatory behaviors designed to alleviate your fear. You may think, for example, that you overwork so your boss won’t get mad at you, but the deeper explanation is that you overwork to relieve the stress you feel in the face of that prospect.Continued here
