You’re in your room at 2 AM, three energy drinks in, working on a project that’s due in six hours. Your friend texted you earlier asking if you needed help. You said no. Your boyfriend offered to proofread. You said you’re fine. Your professor has office hours every day of the week. You haven’t been to even one of them.
Now you’re here alone, exhausted, and honestly not even sure if what you’re doing is right anymore. But for some reason, asking for help at this point feels worse than just pushing through. So you push through. Again.
If this sounds like you, you’re not broken. You’re an overachiever. And there’s actual science behind why asking for help is physically impossible, even when you’re drowning.
When overachievers face evaluation or the prospect of asking for help, their bodies flood with cortisol, the stress hormone. Research published in Psychosomatic Medicine found that perfectionism was significantly associated with heightened cortisol responses to psychosocial stress, with perfectionism alone accounting for 18% of the variance in stress hormone release.
Your body is not being dramatic. The need for help literally triggers a stress response. So instead, you code websites for your boyfriend at 3 AM, wake up early to help your roommate study, do literally anything for anyone else; instead of admitting that you need the same in return.
Your Worth Is Tied to Achievement
Asking for help when you are known as “the capable one,” “the smart one,” “the one who has it together” is more than awkward. It’s like you’re erasing yourself. Each time you accomplish something on your own, your brain rewards you with dopamine. You know the feeling when someone praises your work, it’s great for five seconds before you’re already thinking about what you need to prove next? That’s your dopamine system telling you to get another fix. The price you pay is that you can’t distinguish between who you are and what you do. So when you get stuck, it’s not like you failed at something. It’s like you are a failure.
You’re Convinced You’re a Fraud
Even with outstanding grades and an impressive resume, there is a voice whispering: “They don’t know you’re faking it.” This is known as the Impostor Syndrome studied by psychologists Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes in the 1970s. The paradox: the more you succeed, the more you are convinced that you have successfully deceived everyone, that seeking help will finally reveal your secret. So you sit in class with a question racing through your mind, but you don’t raise your hand. Why? Because what if everyone else already knows? What if this is the moment they realise you don’t belong here?
You Learned That You’re On Your Own
Most overachievers didn’t choose to accomplish all things on their own. Somewhere in the process, they learned that asking for help would only end in disappointment. Perhaps your parents were too busy or too hard on you. Perhaps you asked a teacher for help and were scolded for not taking responsibility. Perhaps you saw a classmate get teased for not understanding something.
After a series of experiences where being vulnerable left you hurting, your mind adjusted to the point where self-reliance was the only safe choice. Now you’re the go-to person that everyone else leans on for help, the one who has their life together, who never complains, who handles everything with ease. But no one asks if you’re all right. Because you’ve taught them not to.
You’re Too Exhausted to Ask
By the time, you’re too exhausted to ask for it. Self-control is a finite resource. Each decision uses it up. And overachievers are always making decisions: managing school, internships, relationships, the facade of having it all together, the secret of not being well-rested, the illusion of being fine.
What It Actually Costs
But chronic stress is more than just fatigue. It’s changing your brain. When cortisol is high for too long, it shrinks the hippocampus, which is the part of your brain that handles memory and learning. The thing you’re killing yourself to protect is being harmed by the very thing you think is helping.
Your relationships fall apart. You become the person that everyone wants to be but nobody actually knows. The loneliness piles on top of the anxiety.The cruel joke is that isolation makes you worse at what you’re trying to do. When you work together, you do better. When you have support, you perform better. You already know this. You give this advice to everyone else. You just can’t take it yourself.
There’s No Easy Exit
I’m not going to tell you “just ask for help.” If that were the solution, you would have already done it. What I will say: the voice that tells you needing help makes you weak? That’s not wisdom. That’s trauma pretending to be productivity.
You’re not an overachiever because you’re a high achiever. You’re an overachiever because at some point, you realized your worth was tied to it. That achievement was the only safe place. That struggling alone was better than risking disappointment.
You learned it because you had to. But you don’t have to live like it’s true.
The price of asking for help is too high because you’ve based your entire identity on not needing it. But the price of not asking? You’re already paying it. In sleep. In sanity. In relationships that feel miles away. In exhaustion that never ends.
The question wasn’t “Can I do this alone?” You probably can. You’ve already done it. Repeatedly.
The question is: Do you have to?
