Why High Performers Still Struggle

Welcome to Beyond Stability, where psychiatrist, social scientist and humanitarian adviser Dr. Suzan Song shares reflections about how we think, decide, and partner during uncertain times to find a sense of groundedness and joy.

For the past decade, I’ve had a question circling in the back of my mind: what allows some people to feel grounded and find a sense of joy through life’s inevitable trials?

This question comes from the work I do. As a psychiatrist, I see people when life forces them to reckon with reality: when the scripts they’ve lived by no longer work, when the futures they imagined shift, when identity feels fractured. I see people who are externally successful but internally unmoored. I also work with people whose lives have been interrupted by extreme violence, displacement, torture, and war.

And across these very different experiences, one pattern holds: suffering isn’t always defined by an event, but what happens after—in the narratives we carry, the relationships available to us, and whether our environments allow us to be human or demand performance.

In our careers, we rarely talk about suffering with that kind of honesty. We talk about stress, burnout, resilience, and performance. Maybe the focus turns to self-optimization or self-improvement. But we shy away from naming our deeper interior experience.

And yet, it’s there.

It shows up when people can’t rest when they’re exhausted. Or in teams where small mistakes feel catastrophic. In organizations that keep moving faster even though people feel less connected, less rooted, and less able to speak honestly.

If suffering is created by how we make sense of an event, then culture matters. The stories we have available, the rituals we practice, and the ways we hold one another when things get hard, all determine whether suffering becomes corrosive or integrated.

I think about this in my clinical work and in humanitarian settings, where social structures break down and people have to find new anchors. But I also think about it in the everyday spaces of ambition and responsibility where so many high fliers live. There’s a swirl of unmet expectations and unlived potential that lead to a nagging, chronic dissatisfaction. 

That’s not a lesser form of suffering. We don’t need to disrespect our suffering by comparing it to others.

I’ve struggled with this, too. For much of my life, I minimized my own struggles—relationship breaks, house fire, loss—by comparing them to the suffering around me. I thought suffering was only “real” when it was catastrophic. 

But that isn’t how human experience works. Suffering is measured how much it costs internally and whether you have any way of integrating it into your life rather than simply enduring it.

Our capacity to be present with suffering is a skill. Not in a soft or sentimental way, but in a practical way: people perform, collaborate, innovate, and sustain when they feel seen and understood. When discomfort has to hide or when pain is always minimized, organizations become fragile.

One of the best predictors of how well we can attend to others is how well we attend to ourselves. If we can’t tolerate our own instability, loss, or internal contradictions, we’ll try to rush others out of theirs. But that makes exhaustion a default state.

In environments where people feel grounded, suffering isn’t avoided like an infectious disease. It’s located. People are given the space to speak about what matters and rebuild internal coherence rather than just manage external expectations.

Most likely, attending to and letting another know that we see them is less work than you’re imagining. We don’t need to be comfortable with suffering, just willing to stay with reality long enough to see what actually needs tending to. 

Suffering is part of life, regardless of who you are or where you come from. The question isn’t whether suffering exists in our lives or institutions—it does. The question is whether we have the capacity to recognize it, the language to name it, and the relational structures to hold it without isolating people or eroding trust.

Because what steadies us in life and in work isn’t relentless performance, but meaning. Connection. Honest engagement with what is real.

This is a request to look at suffering not as something to avoid, but as something to understand, so that we can lead with greater presence, resilience, and humanity. What we don’t acknowledge can show up later in how we work, love, and live. So we can move beyond asking whether people are carrying pain, towards questioning whether the cultures we create allow space for people to be human.

My upcoming book, Why We Suffer and How We Heal (Penguin, 2026), is a narrative exploration of how to find grounding and ease during instability, drawing on science, clinical experience and real-world cases. Available for preorder now (release Feb 24, 2026)

Free Guide on developing your own Three Friends of Winter Circles here

You can find occasional longer reflections, media, and event information at www.suzansong.com

If this resonated, feel free to forward this to someone who could use a little support right now! And if this was forwarded to you, you can subscribe here. Life is hard. But it’s harder when we’re at it alone.