When Success Feels Empty: Embracing Healthy Growth for Lasting Fulfillment

As a Family Doctor, I’ve seen many people through my work who have achieved a lot in their lives but remain deeply discontent. There’s a lack of something.

It’s a paradox, right? We achieve what we set out to do, yet happiness eludes us.  Of course there may be some short term contentment but this is often short lived.  

The common thread seems to be a lack of perceived progress, growth, hope, newness, inspiration, or something to look forward to. Perhaps, chemically speaking, a lack of dopamine.

When we’ve ticked off our goals, it’s harder to find room for growth, isn’t it?

With this in mind, it’s vital to seek healthy newness and growth rather than the unhealthy versions I’ve unfortunately seen in these individuals.

Healthier newness and growth don’t come at the expense of meaningful connections or stability.

I wonder if you can relate. 

The 3 Pillars of Mental Wellbeing

In my counseling work over time, I’ve observed that people are happiest when their core needs are met:

1. Stability / security / certainty / control
2. Connection / belonging
3. Growth / newness / progress / variety

People are unhappiest when these needs are not met.

They feel more content when they move towards these collective needs, and more anxious or unsettled when they move away from them.

As part of self-care, it’s important to regularly move toward these needs.

With the diagram above, try to aim for the overlapping area in the center—where all three needs intersect. This represents an ideal state for good mental health, where stability, connection, and growth coexist.

It’s also important to remember that too much focus on one need can come at the cost of the others.

Can you relate this to your own life—or the lives of the people you care about?

Medications Help You Focus — Counseling Helps You Focus on What Matters

When helping our patients struggling with ADHD, these are my thoughts around Stimulant Medications and counseling.

 
Medications help patients to “zoom into” thoughts and feelings to take consistent action for impact.

Counseling helps folks with “zooming out” in the “right amount” to gain the clarity to “zoom into” the stuff that matters to them and the people they care about, stuff that they can control, and stuff that is workable in their context.

So a combination and balance of both dependent on their context is critical in the management of ADHD.

Clarity without action is a problem and action without clarity is also a problem.

Metaphorically speaking, medications give you the fuel to go somewhere, and counseling helps you to know where you want to go and/or where you have to go!

Is our Anxiety Primary or Secondary?

In assessing anxiety, I always ask the question of whether this is primary or secondary. Secondary to being a “Fish out of water”.

Do they have a personality style or cognitive style that is mismatching their environment or context creating unhealthy level of stress?

Answering this question correctly will give one more clarity on how to move forward especially from a counseling point of view.

It can empower them to seek and/or create with more clarity, a better fitting context for their personality and cognitive style compounding over time.