Why High-Functioning People Might Feel Alone |
How high competence and emotional isolation can exist in tandem.
Connection requires signal—strength without visibility breeds distance.
High-functioning people are rarely the ones we worry about.
They're the steady hands in the room, the ones whose nervous systems appear almost immune to chaos, who metabolize disappointment before it spills into the air; they solve problems before emergencies arise. They have a structural composure reminiscent of architecture designed to withstand bad weather. They might demand much, but input even more, earning trust, and refusing to fracture.
Many of them are alone in a philosophical way. It's an 'aloneness' that accumulates quietly in spaces where vulnerability is missing. It settles through the steady containment of rejection without witness.
Competence is seductive because it works. If you can calm yourself, you don’t have to wait for someone else to steady you. If you can reinterpret hurt before it sharpens, you don’t have to risk asking for comfort. If you can carry the weight, you don’t have to expose the tremor.
Neuroscience would call this strong top-down control
The prefrontal cortex modulates the alarm systems efficiently; emotional surges are evaluated, contextualized, and folded back into order before they disrupt behavior. It's adaptive. It protects careers, families, and reputations. It keeps conversations from escalating and decisions from derailing.
But connection forms in a different register. Attachment requires more than just composure. It deepens through signal and response: one nervous system revealing strain, then the other moving toward it. When emotional signals are consistently dampened before they’re expressed (or worse – entirely hidden), the relational field recalibrates. Others stop scanning for cues and stop leaning in. The invitation, after all, is so faint it’s barely legible.
If we bring overwhelm to order (or pretend we have) before anyone can witness it, there's nothing for another to answer. Always navigating uncertainty in solitude necessarily means no one learns how to steady it with you. And if we discipline our needs without ever disclosing them, how can intimacy find any surface on which to form?
Being admired for our steadiness and relied on for our composure can, if practiced in isolation, slowly weigh down the door to our interior life. It becomes more and more heavy, until hardly anyone even tries to open it. We don't have to be a "cold" person, so long as nothing in us appears to invite entry, much less need it.
The Stoics never intended this narrowing
The discipline of assent wasn't a command to conceal what you feel, but a refinement of how you respond to it: it’s about fitting in wisdom and intention in the space between stimuli and response. It's a practice of discernment, resisting disappearance. Marcus Aurelius returned again and again to the image of the body politic, each limb dependent on the others for function and vitality. Sovereignty, in that vision, was never isolation. It was strength exercised within relationship.
High-functioning people often carry an unspoken contract: be the strong one.
In families, in teams, in friendships, they become the anchor. The point of stability around which others orient. And anchors, by design, hold fast. But holding without being held creates a particular fatigue. It likely manifests as a thinning, a subtle sense that while you’re deeply involved in other people’s lives, very few are fully inside yours.
When we're thus accustomed to absorbing impact, it can feel indulgent to introduce our own ache. If clarity is our only currency, confusion can seem like a liability. If steadiness isn’t just a component but the core of what defines us, longing can feel like a flaw. We interpret it and silence it. That’s what we do because that’s who we, the steady ones, are. That silence then doesn’t get shared.
Over time, emotional regulation can begin to look like self-containment. You quiet the surge before it spills. You metabolize the disappointment before it reaches the surface. You translate the sting into perspective before anyone has the chance to notice it was there.
This is skill, it is discipline, it is strength
But true emotional regulation requires being seen. It is, at least partly, relational.
The nervous system doesn’t calm in isolation alone; it settles most deeply in the presence of another regulated mind. Neuroscience has long shown that threat responses soften when we are held, heard, or simply accompanied. Co-regulation, then, is just biology. No part of it is or requires weakness.
If our overwhelm is forever resolved in private, regulation becomes indistinguishable from concealment. When uncertainty is always mastered alone, it loses the relational dimension that gives regulation its depth. What remains is control: effective, admirable, solitary. We survive beautifully and endure much with grace. But wake up one day to find no witnesses to our lives and a withdrawal we can’t explain. Isolation doesn’t need hostility to grow. It grows wherever strength is practiced without being known.
Stoic empathy offers a quieter correction. It doesn’t demand emotional spillage or theatrical vulnerability. It asks for permeability. For moments in which the reflex to reframe is delayed long enough for the original feeling to be seen. For sentences that aren’t fully polished before they're spoken to a trusted confidant. For needs that are named without desperation but also without apology.
You may stand tall, but a silent room that needs nothing from you will still leave your life echoing hollow. Strength is the ability to face it without losing yourself. If yours is a high-functioning heart, your work isn’t to abandon regulation, but to practice it in the open. Let the tremor flicker before it's quieted. Uncertainty can take a breath every once in a while before you solve it. And maybe even move an inch or two, letting another nervous system, a wisely chosen intimate one, to stand close enough to feel it with you.
Shermin Kruse, Stoic Empathy: The Road Map to a Life of Influence, Self-Leadership, and Integrity, Hay House, 2025.
James J. Gross & Brett Q. Ford (Eds.), Handbook of Emotion Regulation, Third Edition, Guilford Publications, New York, NY, 2024.
Mary Ainsworth, Mary Blehar, Everett Waters, Sally Wall, Patterns of Attachment: A Psychological Study of the Strange Situation, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1978. (Foundational attachment framework on signal and response; longitudinal study.)
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, circa 170–180 CE, Book 2.1. (Body politic / interdependence framing.)
Epictetus, Discourses, Fragments, Handbook, translated by Robin Hard, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2014.