Performance Anxiety Becomes Clinical: Self-Worth and Productivity
When a child grows up in a domestic and scholastic environment that prioritises their academic achievement over their physical and mental health, it is not surprising when people end up tying their self-worth to how well they have scored in school. In India especially, it is not uncommon to see children as young as five years old being given paracetamol and sent to school because “they would miss important classes and/or exams”, something that could reflect badly in their later career.
More insidiously, when such children grow up, their perfectionism becomes internalized. The story of ‘former gifted children’ who are now ‘depressed/anxious adults’ has been made the subject of various memes, but it’s far from being a laughing matter. In schools, certain children are marked out as overachievers, and they have to perform to that standard for the rest of their lives or keep feeling as though they have not lived up to their potential. High-achieving children often become so used to regimentation that in later life, when they have to design their own schedule and take responsibility for their own time, crippling anxiety takes over and they inevitably lose motivation to perform. Because their self-esteem has become tied to their ability to get tasks done throughout their childhood and teenage years, they find themselves at a loss when they attempt new experiences and are not immediately good at them, because the education system hasn’t accounted for their mental health and trained them to be more resilient.
One of the key triggers for clinical anxiety is performance anxiety, be it performance at work or in school or in social life. This need to ‘perform’ to be valued as a person has been drilled into the minds of individuals from a young age and it is hard to escape that trap even when a pandemic is underway, for example. As soon as the lockdown began, a series of articles were found doing the rounds, detailing methods for enhancing productivity now that everyone was at home and had a lot of ‘free time’, without accounting for the fact that the fear and anxiety related to the very real possibility of catching a debilitating illness like COVID 19 will render people unable to work at their usual efficiency, let alone at a higher one.
Similar messages of tying one’s worth to one’s productivity have been responsible for the self-policing that we’ve been doing as a culture, of beating ourselves up when we can’t be productive or perform well every single hour at work, or when we cannot master a language in six months. Mental health care needs to account for such socio-cultural factors when a patient comes to healthcare providers seeking to feel more competent and worthy.
