The Anxious Achiever Manage Anxiety When It's Your Daily Companion with Alice Boyes
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Mar 19, 2026 Alice Boyes, former clinical psychologist and author of The Anxiety Toolkit, shares practical, research-informed ways to relate to everyday anxiety. She explores why control backfires, common traps like perfectionism and rumination, how anxiety rushes decisions, and strategies to create distance from anxious thoughts and handle feedback without spiraling.
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Control Attempts Make Anxiety Worse
- Trying to control anxiety often backfires because the more you tug at it, the more it fights back and escalates.
- Alice Boyes recommends treating anxiety lightly and accepting responses while spotting behaviors that make it worse, like perfectionism and rumination.
Spot The Three Anxiety Traps
- Do identify common anxiety traps like perfectionism, rumination, and avoidance so you can stop them from escalating.
- Alice illustrates perfectionism: working 80 hours on a presentation then believing you must always do that to succeed.
Anxiety Favors Quick Certainty Over Better Outcomes
- Anxious people rush to resolve uncertainty, which can cause them to accept worse outcomes to get certainty fast.
- Alice's car-selling example shows choosing a low dealer offer to avoid the uncertainty of private sale timing and price.
