Why do highly successful people engage in extramarital affairs, take foolish business risks and even steal from the companies they have founded or inherited? Why do others feel compelled to leave well-established firms to strike out on entrepreneurial adventures? Why do still more, fully engaged in careers they themselves have chosen and in many cases in companies they have built, feel so unfulfilled and bored? Stephen Berglas says it's because the seeds of all these maladies are sown in success itself.

Berglas, a UCLA psychologist who specializes in studying the paradoxical maladies of high achievers, employs a rich language to describe these anomalous business people, who seem to have it all and yet burn to throw it all away. "Encore anxiety," he says, is the fear of not being able to live up to the performance expectations generated by your prior successes. This can lead to paralyzing depression as hyper-achievers contemplate the difficulty of topping their last act.

Eustress, Berglas describes as a more positive cousin of distress. But eustress is stress that energizes rather than upsets people. Family business members in search of eustress naturally tend to bail out of smoothly running companies to start new ventures or, even worse, take action to destabilize them.

There's much more here, including warnings about Supernova Burnout, when people feel trapped by their own excellence in work that is no longer satisfying. Emotions resulting from having to perform the same skilled activity over and over are often behind destructive moves to reclaim the fire, Berglas says.

Among the most fascinating phenomena Berglas describes is one he dubs "entrepreneurial arson." This occurs when successful business executives, for any of the above reasons, are driven to sabotage their own careers and companies by indulging in drug abuse, committing white-collar crime and becoming involved in inappropriate romantic liaisons.

So—what can you do about all this? First, recognize the problem and its source. That urge you have to start a new venture may not be based on sound recognition of a business opportunity, but merely boredom in what has become a routine administrative job. Pursuing exciting ventures within the scope of your current business can be just as good a source of eustress, and far less of distress, he says. You should also avoid over specialization. Never stop developing new skills, and finding ways of employing them in your work.

Finally, to avoid mid-life career ennui, dream big dreams that are based on your true personal passions, not the externally applied forces of family and friends. If these goals take a lifetime to achieve, so much the better. And if you get there early, feel free to pick a new passion that burns as brightly as the old.