The Anxious Achiever

Morra Aarons-Mele fills a niche that surprisingly few other podcasts cover well: the intersection of anxiety and professional ambition. If you've ever pushed yourself hard at work while quietly battling anxious thoughts, this show speaks directly to that experience. With 294 episodes and a 4.7-star rating from over 550 reviewers, it's clearly resonating. The format is interview-driven, with Morra bringing in executives, psychologists, leadership experts, and regular people who share honest stories about managing mental health while building careers. Episodes run about 35-60 minutes and come out biweekly through the YAP Media network. Recent conversations have tackled topics like micromanagement, workplace perfectionism, and the anxious patterns that drive high achievers. What makes this show stand out in the anxiety podcast space is its refusal to separate professional life from mental health. Most anxiety podcasts treat work stress as one topic among many. Morra treats it as the central theme, exploring how anxiety shapes leadership styles, career decisions, impostor feelings, and workplace relationships. She's open about her own anxiety journey, which gives the conversations an authenticity that a purely journalistic approach would miss. The show isn't clinical in the way a therapist-hosted podcast would be, and that's actually a strength. It normalizes talking about anxiety in professional contexts where it's still often stigmatized. If your anxiety shows up most intensely around work, deadlines, performance reviews, or career ambitions, this is the podcast that gets it.