People laugh when I say I'm afraid of success. Fair enough. It sounds like a humblebrag, or like something a guy says to explain why he never finished anything.
But I know the feeling in my body. Something goes right and I get more nervous, not less. People like the work and my first thought is how do I get out of this before they notice.
So, is fear of success a real thing? Yes. It isn't a diagnosis you'll find in the manuals, but the idea has been around in psychology for over a century. Freud wrote an essay section in 1916 about people "wrecked by success," who fell apart right when they got what they wanted. In the late 1960s, psychologist Matina Horner made "fear of success" a research topic, studying how women anticipated the social costs of achieving. Her findings got argued over for years, but the concept stuck. Today most clinicians would describe it as anxiety about what success brings: being seen, higher expectations, changes in your relationships, and the nagging sense that you don't deserve any of it.
What fear of success actually is
Nobody's scared of a paycheque. What scares people is everything that comes stapled to it.
For me, a few attachments do most of the damage.
Being seen. Success puts you in front of people. Visible means people look closer. And some part of me has always believed that if anyone looks closely enough, they'll find out I'm faking. That's the imposter piece, and I wrote about it in feeling like a fraud at the front of the room.
The bar going up. One win means people expect another. I start things with huge energy and then crash, so a success feels less like a reward and more like a promise I'm not sure I can keep next month.
People changing. This one's sneaky. If I succeed, will people start treating me differently? Will they leave? I have a well-worn fear of abandonment, and I tend to leave before I can be rejected. So success can feel like the start of a countdown. More on that in why I leave before I can be left.
Losing the old story. I've carried low self-esteem and a habit of running myself down for most of my life. That's a miserable story, but it's mine. If I'm suddenly the guy who did well, who am I? It sounds dramatic written down. In real life it's just a low hum of wrongness.
The experiment that explains a lot
There's a classic 1978 study by psychologists Steven Berglas and Edward Jones that I think about a lot. Students worked on test problems, and some were told they'd done very well on problems that were mostly unsolvable. In other words, they "succeeded" without knowing how. Then they got a choice between a drug they were told would help their performance on the next test and one they were told would hurt it.
Many of the students who'd had that unexplained success chose the drug that would hurt their performance.
That's where the term self-handicapping took off. When success feels like luck, you can't trust it'll happen again, so you set up an excuse in advance. If I do badly next time, it was the drug. Not me.
I read that and thought about my own life with drugs. Substance use has been part of my story, and I haven't touched cocaine or heroin in sixteen years. I'm not saying I used because of fear of success. That'd be too neat. But I'd be lying if I said good stretches and bad decisions never showed up together.
Fear of success vs fear of failure
They feel like opposites. They work like twins.
Fear of failure says don't try, you'll be exposed. Fear of success says don't let it work, you'll have to keep it up. In both cases you end up protecting your self-esteem by not fully showing up. Psychologist Christian Jarrett, writing in BBC Science Focus, describes self-sabotage as mostly a way to shield self-esteem, and notes it's more common in people with low self-esteem or a fear of failure. The fear of success fits right in that same family.
That's why I don't spend much time arguing about which one I have. The behaviour looks the same from the outside: me, backing away from something good. I go into what that looks like day to day in why I wreck things when they go well.
Is it worse for autistic people?
I can't point you to a study that says so. I can tell you how it works for me.
I was diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) at 50, during a breakdown in the COVID years. Looking back, a lot of my "fear of success" was fear of the cost of success. More people and more hours of being on. I can run a room. I've been doing it for years. But the more something succeeded, the more rooms there were, and every one of them took something out of me.
Some of that, I think now, was exhaustion I didn't have a name for.
Can you get over fear of success?
You can get better at noticing it, which in my experience is most of the battle.
What's helped me is saying the fear out loud, even just to myself: "this is going well and I'm scared, and that's why I want to quit." Once it's said, it's harder to dress up as a reasonable decision. Self-compassion helps too, and I go into how in how I'm interrupting my self-sabotage. And if your self-esteem has been underground for decades like mine, building self-esteem after 50 is the slower, deeper work.
If it's tied up with anxiety or depression, it deserves real help. In Québec, Relief runs programs for anxiety and depression, and the public route starts at 811 or your CLSC.
If this is pulling you somewhere darker, the numbers for your country are on the Get help now page.