Here’s a little secret: Some very successful people are wracked by anxiety. They worry about worst-case scenarios and every little thing that could go wrong. They stew over mistakes and unfavorably compare themselves with others. They focus on negative feedback while dismissing praise.

In many ways their anxiety is a benefit: After all, it fuels their drive, hard work, and achievement. They’re prized employees precisely because they go the extra mile and are satisfied with nothing less than the best. But if left unchecked, what may seem beneficial can make someone miserable, diminishing performance and career progress.

Consider Mark Goldstein, a lawyer. A few years ago he couldn’t stop imagining catastrophes, such as being sued for malpractice. He also constantly measured himself against his peers. “Our firm has about 1,800 attorneys,” he recalls, “and I thought the other 1,799 were all better able to deal with the stress of our jobs and lives.” To compensate, he obsessively reviewed his emails for mistakes and worked through vacations.

Nihar Chhaya tells a similar story. Despite being named one of the top 100 executive coaches in the world by the leadership coach Marshall Goldsmith, Chhaya used to routinely imagine his business faltering and question whether he’d be better off at a bigger company rather than on his own. “In my mind everyone else had it perfect,” he says. “I was the one who wasn’t going to excel.”

I’ll confess that I suffer from the same affliction. Recently asked to join an invitation-only business-book authors’ group, I felt instant panic. Who was I to be included among these best-selling writers, popular TED speakers, and even a three-star general? My impostor syndrome was acute.

Many of us do this: succumb to what psychologists call thought traps, or what others call cognitive distortion or thinking errors— patterns of untrue and negatively biased thought so ingrained that they arise automatically to ensnare us. Then we can’t see clearly, communicate effectively, or make good, reality-based decisions. And the consequences can have an adverse effect on us and the teams we lead.

Unfortunately, thought traps are exceedingly common among anxious achievers. To escape them, some people turn to overwork; others cope through drugs or alcohol, avoidance, or passive-aggressive behavior. But better solutions exist. The first step is to understand the various traps and identify which ones you’re most prone to. Then you can take intentional, straightforward, research-backed steps to set yourself free.

Thought Traps and Escape Hatches

Eleven thought traps most commonly affect us at work—and you can escape each in specific ways. Most of these examples come from David Burns’s classic Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy and The Feeling Good Handbook, though I’ve included a few others that seem to particularly affect anxious achievers.

All-or-nothing thinking.

Burns describes this as a tendency to view things as black or white. If a situation falls short of perfection in your eyes, for example, you might see it as a total failure. A common example is a job interview. All-or-nothing thinkers will leave the interview focusing on a single blunder they committed or the one thing they wish they’d said and conclude that the entire event was a bust. It’s healthier to consider the interview as a whole: Sure, you wish you’d done a few things differently, but by and large it went OK. One of the best ways to respond to all-or-nothing thinking is to replace the “or” with “and.” The interview had positive and negative moments. It was a mixture of good and bad.

When you’re convinced that something is a complete disaster and nothing else, reach out to a trusted adviser. I usually turn to my husband or my former business partner. Both know me well and have a knack for helping me see in shades of gray rather than in my natural perfection-or-failure mindset.

Labeling.

According to Burns, labeling is an extreme form of all-or-nothing thinking: “Instead of saying, ‘I made a mistake,’ you attach a negative label to yourself: ‘I’m a loser.’” We all have our own go-to labels when it comes to criticizing ourselves: “failure,” “incompetent,” “unqualified,” “undeserving.”

When you ascribe the source of a problem to someone’s character rather than to that person’s thinking or behavior, it suggests that the situation cannot be improved. If you think you’re inherently bad (I am a failure) rather than a normal person who makes mistakes or bad decisions (I occasionally fail), you’ve essentially given up. The same occurs when you label others. “You see them as totally bad,” Burns writes. “This makes you feel hostile and…leaves little room for constructive communication.”

One of the best ways to combat this thought trap (and others) is to use balanced thinking to examine the case for and against your knee-jerk assumption. Suppose you make a poor decision, and your automatic thought is I’m such an idiot! First, what’s the evidence that you’re an idiot? In this instance it’s that you made the wrong call. Describe the mistake. Now consider: Is a single bad choice really proof that you’re an idiot? Of course not. Documenting the opposing view also helps. Is there any evidence to indicate that you’re not an idiot? I think you’ll find plenty of things that attest to your competence and skill. If this balanced thinking points to areas in which you could improve—and they’re the ones making you anxious—it’s simply a sign to pay attention and put in more effort.

Jumping to conclusions.

This familiar thought trap takes two forms. One is mind reading, which occurs when you arbitrarily conclude that someone is reacting negatively to you. (He doesn’t think I deserve my promotion. I’m sure she hates me.) The other is fortune-telling, which involves predicting that things will turn out badly even in the absence of proof. That can lead to inaction. (Why bother trying?)

I once thought a colleague was angry with me because she didn’t smile when we passed in the hallway. It turned out that she was worried and unhappy because her kids were sick. I’ve also walked into presentations assuming that I was going to flub them—which made me more likely to do so. Indeed, both modes of jumping to conclusions can diminish self-esteem, productivity, relationships, and decision-making.

You can counteract this thought trap with truth. Ask yourself: “Do I have access to another person’s inner thoughts? Can I really know what’s going to happen in the future?” You can also remind yourself of times in the past when you jumped to conclusions and were proved wrong.