246. The High-Performing Woman's Upper Limit Pattern Nobody Talks About
246. The High-Performing Woman's Upper Limit Pattern Nobody Talks About
What if binge eating isn’t actually the sabotage?
What if it’s the aftermath?
That’s the conversation we’re having in this episode of Embodied Writing Warrior, because this pattern is one of the most overlooked drivers of emotional eating and inconsistency in high-performing women.
So many women think the problem is food.
Or discipline.
Or motivation.
Or a lack of willpower.
But often, the real issue starts much earlier.
It starts the moment something good happens.
You hit the goal.
You get the opportunity.
You have the breakthrough.
You finally create the result you’ve been working for.
And instead of feeling settled, proud, and safe enough to enjoy it, your system starts generating pressure.
Pressure to keep it.
Pressure to prove yourself.
Pressure to perform at an even higher level.
Pressure to justify what you’ve received.
Pressure to make the success “worth it.”
That pressure is often the real upper limit pattern.
What Is the Upper Limit Problem?
The idea of the upper limit problem comes from The Big Leap by Gay Hendricks. The core idea is that many people have an internal thermostat for how much joy, ease, abundance, and success they feel safe experiencing.
When life gets hard, they eventually return to baseline.
But when life gets really good, they may also unconsciously pull themselves back down to baseline, because the higher level of happiness or expansion feels unfamiliar.
Gay Hendricks talks about common ways people do this, including getting sick, getting hurt, worrying, or picking fights.
But for many high-performing women, the sabotage can show up differently.
It often shows up as pressure.
The Version of Self-Sabotage Nobody Talks About
High-performing women are often extremely capable.
They know how to set a goal and go get it.
They know how to perform.
They know how to push.
They know how to override discomfort.
They know how to be disciplined.
Which is exactly why the usual advice to “just be more disciplined” misses the point.
Because these women are already using discipline.
They are already applying pressure.
They are already performing hard enough to get the result.
The problem is what happens next.
Instead of landing in satisfaction, they land in vigilance.
Instead of enjoying the breakthrough, they start bracing to maintain it.
Instead of feeling safe in success, they feel responsible for proving they deserve it.
That’s where the upper limit pattern becomes especially dangerous.
Why Binge Eating Often Happens After Success
This is where food comes in.
If your system is overloaded with pressure, fear, hypervigilance, or internal performance demands, it’s going to seek relief.
Food is fast relief.
Food is familiar relief.
Food is embodied relief.
That doesn’t make you weak.
It makes sense.
For many women, binge eating or emotional eating is not the first act of sabotage. It’s the nervous system’s attempt to discharge the pressure created after success.
That is a wildly different frame.
Because if you treat binge eating as the main problem, you’ll stay stuck trying to control the symptom.
But if you realize the real issue is the pressure building in your system after good things happen, then you can finally start addressing the source.
The Hidden Trap of Body Transformations
This pattern becomes especially intense around body image, weight loss, and fitness milestones.
Why?
Because body changes feel visible.
Public.
Trackable.
If you change your body, other people often notice.
And if they noticed the progress, part of you assumes they’ll also notice if you lose it.
That creates an internal pressure cooker.
Now it’s not just:
“I achieved something I’m proud of.”
Now it becomes:
“I have to keep this.”
“I can’t mess this up.”
“I can’t go backward.”
“I have to prove this is who I am now.”
“I’m not allowed to relax.”
That’s where a so-called success can become what Mark David calls a false positive.
It looks like success on the outside.
But internally, it feels like fear, rigidity, food obsession, and white-knuckling.
And eventually, something gives.
Why High-Performing Women Struggle to Sustain Success
Many high-performing women are actually better at achieving than receiving.
Better at striving than holding.
Better at chasing than enjoying.
Better at proving than resting.
That doesn’t mean they’re broken.
It means their nervous systems may still associate safety with effort, pressure, and earning.
So when something beautiful arrives without more struggle being required, the system doesn’t know how to settle.
It may even think:
“This is dangerous.”
“This could be taken away.”
“You’d better work harder.”
“You’d better prove you deserve this.”
This is one reason success can feel more destabilizing than failure.
Failure is familiar.
Pressure is familiar.
Self-criticism is familiar.
Peace, joy, satisfaction, and sustained pleasure may actually be the more unfamiliar terrain.
The “I’m Not Loved” Wound Beneath the Pattern
This upper limit dynamic often connects to a deeper wound: the belief that love, goodness, or success must be earned.
If part of you believes you only get to keep good things by proving yourself, then success doesn’t feel like relief.
It feels like a contract.
A contract that says:
Now don’t screw it up.
Now earn it.
Now justify it.
Now do something big enough to deserve it.
That is exhausting.
And it also creates grief, because it robs you of the very joy you worked so hard to create.
You get the thing you wanted, but you don’t get to fully have it.
Not emotionally.
Not somatically.
Not peacefully.
That pain alone can drive the urge to self-soothe with food.
Signs Pressure Is Your Real Upper Limit Pattern
This pattern may be active for you if:
You are very good at achieving goals
You often feel let down, restless, or empty right after success
You immediately put pressure on yourself to maintain, monetize, justify, or outperform
You struggle to simply enjoy what you’ve created
Good things feel uncomfortable if you didn’t “earn” them hard enough
Emotional eating, binge eating, burnout, or shutdown tends to happen after progress
If that’s you, your work is probably not more force.
It’s learning to feel safe with goodness.
How to Start Changing the Pattern
The first step is awareness.
Start noticing the sequence:
A: The good thing happened
B: Pressure started building
C: You reached for relief through food, burnout, shutdown, numbing, or some other form of sabotage
This changes everything, because it helps you stop demonizing the coping behavior and start understanding what came before it.
From there, the deeper work becomes helping your system expand its capacity for joy, success, ease, and sustainability.
Not all at once.
Not through force.
But through intentional exposure to feeling good without immediately collapsing it.
That’s the real recalibration.
Final Thoughts
If you’ve ever wondered why you sabotage yourself right after a breakthrough, the answer may not be that you’re afraid of success in some vague, abstract way.
It may be that success triggers pressure.
Pressure triggers overwhelm.
And overwhelm triggers relief-seeking.
That is not failure.
That is information.
And when you learn to work with that pattern instead of shaming yourself for it, you create the possibility for real food freedom, real consistency, and real capacity to hold the life you actually want.
If this conversation hit something deep, make sure you listen to this episode and stay tuned for Part 2.
Embodied Activation
This week’s embodied activation is all about helping you notice the pattern underneath the pattern.
Grab your journal and reflect on a time when something genuinely good happened in your life.
Maybe you hit a fitness milestone.
Maybe you got a new job.
Maybe your relationship deepened.
Maybe you had a financial win.
Maybe you experienced a huge creative or personal breakthrough.
Then walk yourself through these three prompts:
A. What was the amazing thing that happened?
Name the breakthrough, the win, the upgrade, or the positive change.
B. How did pressure start showing up afterward?
Get honest here.
Did you start feeling like you had to keep it perfectly?
Did you feel pressure to prove you deserved it?
Did you immediately jump into “what next?” mode?
Did you make yourself responsible for turning the breakthrough into something bigger right away?
C. How did that pressure eventually spill over?
Did it lead to binge eating?
Emotional eating?
Burnout?
Restlessness?
Shutting down?
Picking yourself apart?
Reaching for relief in some other way?
The goal here is not to shame yourself for how you coped.
The goal is to see clearly that the binge, the burnout, or the sabotage may not have been the first problem.
The pressure was.
And when you start catching the pressure earlier, you create the possibility for a totally different response.
This is how you begin raising your capacity to hold good things without collapsing back into old patterns.
Links Mentioned
Transcript
Welcome to Embodied Writing Warrior, a show for women who refuse through white knuckle wellness and crave food freedom built for real life where your fire gets va, not DMed, while in lust with your own momentum and enjoy pleasure led creativity because healing was never meant to be a full-time job.
I'm Kayla, writer and health coach Gone rogue. Now let's make consistency feel like foreplay.
Kayla: Welcome back to another episode of the Embodied Writing Warrior Podcast. This conversation is gonna change how you view self-sabotage forever. This is something I have not seen talked about, and we need to talk about it. And this is also something that I have had to learn through my own lived experience.
And it's been so profoundly helpful for me that I wanted to pay it forward and share it with you. Today we are talking about the upper limit pattern in high performing women that nobody talks about. I'm going to share how this pattern is often one of the sneaky things that can also lead to everything from binge eating, emotional eating, and burnout.
You'll learn that many times binge eating isn't the initial form of self-sabotage. It's actually the aftermath and this knowledge alone, and then what you do with it is going to create so much more food freedom and consistency. We're gonna talk about why it's often easier to get the thing you desire than it is to happily, peacefully sustain and keep the thing, whether that is a body transformation, a financial glow up, a career upgrade, or any other type of growth breakthrough.
This conversation is so important. It's going to be in two parts. Next week I will drop the second part. Alright, let's dive in. If this is your first time hearing about the Upper Limit theory, I first learned about this in the book, the Big Leap by Gay Hendricks. And he shares that people have this inner thermostat for how good they allow themselves to feel.
They have this baseline for their comfortable level of joy, peace, contentment. When something bad happens, they might dip below their usual baseline, but then they'll often rebound back to their baseline after some time has passed. They've navigated the emotions, the event is behind them. This is obviously good news for negative challenging events, but unfortunately this cuts both ways.
So it's not such good news when you have a very positive life-changing event happen because nobody wants a cap on how good they can feel. Not consciously, at least. So this thermostat is not so helpful when we wanna deepen into more happiness, more abundance, more fulfillment, more expansion. And Gay Hendrix talks about some of the ways people will sabotage themselves when they get a big upgrade in their lives, whether that is a new relationship, a health breakthrough, a new job, or a financial windfall.
And he gives four key examples of sabotage, getting hurt, getting sick. Worrying or starting a fight with a friend or loved one. I first read this book years ago, maybe 20 17, 20 18, and I remember thinking, okay, but none of those apply to me. I might have done a little bit of worrying and that resonated, but it also didn't feel like I worried enough to.
Bring my thermostat back down. Meanwhile, I also knew that one of the things I did do was start to overindulge in food again after a big positive life change. This has happened many times. It happened when I got a huge career upgrade at my personal training job. It happened when I started dating my now husband who is seriously the best man ever.
It also happened when we got engaged and moved in together. Then it happened again when we sold our home and moved to this brand new town where I got to go all in on my dream business, had this beautiful house. So I am no stranger to the pattern of number one, something amazing happens that changes my external world for the better.
Then I barely enjoy it before the compulsions to binge come back, and then I start eating everything in sight for a while. So even though this amazing thing has happened, I often have a hard time fully enjoying it because now I've returned to the one habit that has haunted me since childhood and prior to these big positive life events, I had always been in these seasons where my eating was balanced, peaceful, and consistent.
You can see here that this return to binge eating is gonna create a host of negative effects, low energy, frustration, broken self-trust, and then more moodiness and irritation from the blood sugar imbalance. All of these things are gonna bring me back down to my comfortable level of feeling good. Let's say that number is 50 as a random example.
Then this epic thing happens that has the potential to shoot my level of sustained happiness up to a 63, but then the binge in emotional eating brings it right back to around 50. And as you're listening, I want you to start to think about your own upper limit patterns. Maybe like me, you don't resonate as much with getting hurt, getting sick, or arguing with loved ones.
Maybe you have a little bit of worry that creeps in, but at the same time, now you realize, wow. I also start to overindulge and sabotage with food when life changes for the better. The reason this happens, especially for high performing women is twofold. The first aspect of this is more universal, and it's gonna apply to most people who have this upper limit problem.
This thermostat metaphor works because it assumes we have a comfortable range. Our systems, especially the unconscious parts, are always seeking comfort, homeostasis, familiarity. This is true even if our conscious minds know that something unfamiliar would be better for us. Our deeper unconscious parts don't have this same logical reasoning.
They wanna keep us safe and alive, and they know whatever is comfortable and familiar is survivable, binge, and emotional eating to keep us at a level 50 instead of raising ourselves up to the unfamiliar level of 63. That's comfortable, that's familiar, and it's survivable. So what we want to do here is train our systems through short, intentional bursts of level 63 or higher positive emotions that it is safe to feel this good.
It is safe to be this joyful. It's safe to hold the thing we've been dreaming about and actually enjoy it. This is a huge part of the work we do inside Food Freedom Fantasy in our fire module. It is so important, but for high performing women, there's another layer of this entirely, which is why it can feel extra sticky to break through until you understand the mechanism at play, the upper limit pattern in high performing women.
Isn't getting sick, getting hurt or fighting with anyone. It's actually creating an intense amount of pressure once they achieve the thing. So what does this look like in real life? I'll show you a few examples for where this gets so problematic for high performing women with a few examples. Now, let's start with a body transformation.
It's common for people to achieve a weight loss or fitness milestone. Maybe they get in epic shape for a race or an event. Often they'll do it multiple times over their lifetime. They know how to do it. They know they can do it, but here's what will often happen in this arena. Say the person achieves the thing, they have the breakthrough, but instead of letting themselves enjoy it, pressure keep creeps in.
This is where you get what? Mark David from the Institute for the Psychology of Eating calls a false positive weight loss result. It might look like success on the outside, but the person is white knuckling just to hold onto it. So it's where someone reaches that milestone, achieves the goal weight, but holding it is another story altogether.
Because now they feel pressured to keep it, especially because you cannot hide a body transformation one way or the other. Chances are people around you have commented on your progress, so you know they've noticed. So you also know if you are to lose what you've achieved. They'll notice that too, whether they commented on that part or not.
The false positive looks like you achieve the result, but you still live in fear of food. Fear that your old eating habits will come back. Fear. You're gonna lose the progress you've made. Fear that that is going to create public humiliation. Pressure builds to keep the thing. So instead of stopping, slowing down and being like, wow, I did that.
I came so far. And then letting yourself enjoy what you've created and that fear and pressure building in your system. Are what caused your body to cry out for relief, and eating is one of the fastest sources of relief, especially when you've had the habit of turning to food to soothe in the past. It's the pressure.
That often leads to binge eating or burnout. The binging itself is the aftermath of the upper limit pattern, not the upper limit pattern. Itselfs. And finally realizing this and turning your attention to the pressure building in your system, instead of trying to solve binge eating, the downstream effect of that pressure, this is what is going to change your relationship with food and help you raise your thermostat over time.
And I felt this one so profoundly right after my half marathon last June. After 13 years, 13 failed attempts. I broke the two hour barrier. I had had the most consistency with food and habits I'd ever had. I had achieved the thing. And yes, I've talked about that on the podcast before, but here's the part I haven't shared before.
You know what happened? Immediately afterwards, like literally on the walk back to my car after the race, I cried. I barely felt the joy and the satisfaction because that pressurized part of me was like, wow, I've cracked the code. I've figured this out. Now I have to go out into the world and help other people do this and put myself out there and get visible because this is too powerful not to share.
Then I went to IHOP for a celebratory brunch with my husband, and I was so unhappy. He looked at me and said, I thought you'd be stoked. You've wanted this for so long. He was confused. I was also confused. Granted, I might have had a little bit of heat stroke because the race took place at like 8:00 AM in June, and it was hot that day, but I know it was more than that.
It was this immediate knee jerk reaction of get the thing now. Put pressure on yourself to do something with it. This is why telling a high performing woman to just build more discipline or have more willpower is actually some of the worst advice you can give them. When this is their upper limit pattern.
They're already putting immense pressure on themselves to prove they can keep the thing to prove they deserve the thing by finding ways to pay it forwards. Instead of just letting themselves enjoy it, they're already applying discipline and willpower in the form of performing and proving and forcing.
So more of that is just gasoline on a fire that's already putting them on the path to break down and collapse often in the form of opening up the Domino's takeout menu or running to seven 11 at midnight for snacks. I, I want to give you a few red flags as we wrap up this episode. If applying excess pressure is your upper limit pattern, here's what to look out for.
One, you're actually very good at achieving things. You can set a goal, put your head down and make it happen. And often you even enjoy the pursuit then too. Once you get the thing you worked so hard for, you never feel as happy as you expected to feel. You often feel restless, empty, or you immediately start seeking the next thing.
Now that you've gotten this one, number three. You feel this intense amount of pressure to keep the thing or make the thing worth it. It's not enough to just get the new job or achieve the body transformation, for example. You have to be the best at that job from day one. You have to exceed expectations every time.
You are not allowed to be a beginner. Or once you get the body transformation, now you have to immediately go do that other thing you've been putting off because you were struggling with food. No rest, no pause to just enjoy what you've just created. And number four, you feel uncomfortable when good things happen without you earning them.
For example, when the good thing comes in the form of a windfall or an unexpected surprise, you might think to yourself, if you didn't sweat, bleed, or effort for it, do you even deserve it? And this upper limit pattern is a sneaky symptom of the I'm not loved wound. Because if part of you only feels worthy of good things, if you can prove you're worthy of keeping them, pressure will build.
And eventually you'll often seek relief from that pressure through food. Also, when this block is alive in your system, combined with this upper limit pattern. You never get to deeply enjoy the things that you've manifested, that you've been dreaming about and not getting to enjoy your manifestations and your achievements.
That creates so much pain. It's one of the reasons I cried all the way to my car after that race. Your system will also often want relief from the pain of this wound, which is again, where food will often come in to help you self-soothe. If you want to find out if this is your biggest block, this is where know your hungers comes in.
It is two free assessments that help you uncover your biggest block around food and consistency, and whatever your biggest block is, you get a customized audio care package. Link will be in the episode description. As always, your embodied activation this week is to journal about times you've seen this pattern in your own life.
So you'll start with A, the amazing thing that happened, B, how you started to put pressure on yourself, and then C, how that pressure might've led to binge eating, emotional eating, burnout, or some other form of sabotage. But the key here is noticing the ways you put pressure on yourself, and noticing that the binge eating wasn't the actual sabotage.
Now, that was just your system's need to release the pressure, and if this episode has activated something in you, you will absolutely want to tune into next week's solo episode where I dive even deeper into this topic. For now, I am wishing you an incredible rest of your week. Take care.
