248. Pressure ≠ Devotion: The Food Freedom Breakthrough High-Performing Women Need
248. Pressure ≠ Devotion: The Food Freedom Breakthrough High-Performing Women Need
There is a breakthrough high-performing women everywhere need if they want to heal binge eating, emotional eating, burnout, and self-sabotage.
It is this:
Pressure and devotion are not the same thing.
And if you have spent your whole life confusing the two, that confusion may be quietly driving more of your suffering than you realize.
For years, many ambitious women have been taught to romanticize pressure. We hear things like “pressure is a privilege” and interpret it as proof that our stress means we care. Proof that we are committed. Proof that we are doing something important.
But pressure is not devotion.
Pressure is force.
Pressure is contraction.
Pressure is self-coercion dressed up like ambition.
Devotion is something entirely different.
Devotion is loyalty to what matters.
Devotion is love in motion.
Devotion is the steady, self-honoring pursuit of what you know is meant for you.
And when you finally learn the difference, everything starts to change.
Why pressure keeps high-performing women stuck
Pressure often looks productive from the outside.
A woman under pressure may still be meal prepping, hitting her workouts, building the business, posting the content, checking the boxes, and achieving the goals. From the outside, she might look disciplined.
But internally, it is a very different story.
Pressure usually comes from fear, not love.
It often grows out of the belief that if you just achieve enough, perform enough, perfect enough, or prove enough, then maybe you will finally be safe. Safe from criticism. Safe from rejection. Safe from judgment. Safe from disappointment.
The problem is that pressure never actually resolves itself through achievement.
Instead, it tends to intensify.
You hit one goal, and instead of feeling peace, you feel more pressure to keep the thing, prove you deserve the thing, or hurry toward the next thing. The nervous system never gets the memo that it is allowed to exhale.
This is why so many high-performing women can create dream outcomes and still feel deeply unhappy inside them.
They know how to build.
They do not always know how to safely receive, hold, and inhabit what they have built.
Pressure and binge eating: the hidden connection
This matters deeply when it comes to food freedom.
Because when your life is being run by pressure, your body is going to look for relief.
If your work feels pressurized, if your wellness journey feels punishing, if your relationships feel loaded, if your goals feel like a test you have to pass to be worthy, eventually your system will want a way out.
That is where binge eating, emotional eating, numbing, and self-sabotage often enter the picture.
Food becomes relief from the misery of pressure.
Then, after the binge or overindulgence, the pressure gets even worse.
Now there is more self-judgment.
More urgency.
More disgust.
More “I have to get back on track.”
More bracing.
More coercion.
And the cycle tightens.
This is one of the reasons so many women stay trapped in an exhausting loop. They are trying to solve the symptom without addressing the pressure-based inner environment creating the symptom in the first place.
What devotion feels like instead
Devotion is different in both spirit and sensation.
Where pressure feels like contraction, devotion feels open.
Where pressure feels externally driven, devotion feels internally anchored.
Where pressure says, “I have to do this or else,” devotion says, “I care about this deeply, and I want to honor it.”
Devotion is connected to your values, your vision, and your identity.
It does not require self-betrayal.
It does not ask you to sacrifice your wellbeing.
It does not demand that you bully yourself into becoming who you want to be.
Devotion can still involve discomfort. It can still ask for courage, consistency, and stretch. But it feels like a labor of love rather than a punishment.
That distinction matters more than most women realize.
Why pressure and devotion can look identical from the outside
This is where things get tricky.
From the outside, pressure and devotion can look almost exactly the same.
Two women can both be pursuing a body transformation.
Both can be going on walks.
Both can be meal prepping.
Both can be strength training.
Both can be trying to become more consistent.
But one woman may be fueled by fear, shame, and a desperate need to finally become acceptable.
The other may be fueled by care, self-respect, and a sincere desire to feel stronger, more energized, and more alive.
Same behaviors.
Completely different nervous system reality.
And over time, those different internal realities produce very different outcomes.
The woman operating from pressure is more likely to burn out, rebel, binge, and spiral.
The woman operating from devotion is more likely to create a sustainable rhythm, recover from setbacks more quickly, and feel far more peaceful during the process.
Three ways to stop confusing pressure with devotion
1. Learn how to hold your manifestations
One of the most important skills high-performing women can build is the ability to actually receive and enjoy what they create.
So often, a manifestation arrives and instead of savoring it, we turn it into the next test.
The new home becomes proof pressure.
The business becomes proof pressure.
The freedom becomes proof pressure.
The blessing becomes a burden.
This is why micro-reps of appreciation matter.
Not vague gratitude as a performance.
Not forcing yourself to “be positive.”
But real moments of presence.
Walking and noticing your surroundings.
Breathing deeply in the life you built.
Pausing long enough to let something feel good.
Choosing not to immediately turn every win into the next scoreboard.
This is how your system learns that success is not a threat.
2. Normalize your manifestations
This one is huge.
High-performing women often put massive emotional weight on the things they want.
The soulmate relationship.
The dream business.
The goal weight.
The financial milestone.
The body transformation.
We load these desires with what could be called salvation energy. We imagine the next thing will finally fix everything. That once we get it, we will feel secure, healed, and whole forever.
But no manifestation can carry that burden.
When you expect a goal to save you from yourself, it becomes loaded, intense, and heavy before it even arrives.
Normalizing your manifestations softens that intensity.
It does not mean you stop caring.
It means you stop expecting one outcome to resolve every wound you have ever had.
A healthier body is wonderful.
A thriving business is wonderful.
A beautiful relationship is wonderful.
And still, you will remain human.
You will still have growth edges.
You will still have bad days.
You will still need presence, support, and self-leadership.
That truth does not make your desires less meaningful.
It makes them safer to hold.
3. Untangle self-worth from productivity
This may be the deepest layer of all.
Many high-performing women carry overactive protector parts that believe they are only valuable when they are useful. Only lovable when they are producing. Only safe when they are doing.
This is where pressure often becomes identity-level.
If resting makes you feel guilty…
If slowing down feels morally wrong…
If your output determines how you feel about yourself…
Then productivity is no longer just behavior. It has fused with worth.
Healing this requires more than being told to “stop tying your worth to productivity.”
It often requires embodied work.
Creative work.
Relational work.
Parts work.
You have to begin creating new internal experiences where your worth is felt in moments of rest, softness, pleasure, slowness, and being, not just in performance.
That is part of what makes imaginative and archetypal healing work so powerful. It allows women to meet the protector parts beneath the pressure with compassion, story, and new possibility.
The real breakthrough
The breakthrough is not becoming someone who no longer wants big things.
The breakthrough is becoming someone who can pursue big things without abandoning herself in the process.
Someone who can desire deeply without desperation.
Someone who can create without coercion.
Someone who can achieve without making every milestone a courtroom for her worth.
Someone who can build a beautiful life and actually live inside it.
That is the shift from pressure to devotion.
And for high-performing women who are done with burnout, binge eating, and self-sabotage, it may be one of the most important shifts of all.
Links Mentioned
Transcript
Welcome back Embodied Writing Warrior. Today we are talking about the breakthrough that high performing women everywhere need. If they're gonna break through binge eating, emotional eating, burnout, self-sabotage, all the things, this conversation does pick up where we left off on our last solo episode.
In this episode, you are gonna learn. The difference between pressure and devotion and why people often mistake the two.
You're gonna learn why this confusion can lead to binge and emotional eating, burnout and inconsistency. And then I'm gonna share three ways you can stop confusing pressure with devotion. This work is going to change so much. It's gonna help you become someone who doesn't just get good at achieving and manifesting.
It's going to help you become someone who can actually live inside the life she's created. Because there is a massive difference between creating the dream and then letting yourself live peacefully and happily inside that dream once it's here. High performing women are often exceptionally good at that first part, and they're also often deeply challenged by the second.
So I'm gonna start off by admitting something. I have had something very wrong for the last year or so. Sometime last year I read Getting to Neutral by Trevor Moad, and there was this line in the introduction that always stuck with me. Once I heard it, it became a mantra that got me through a lot of tough moments.
That mantra was, pressure is a privilege. When I first heard this, it felt like pure fire. It felt like this way to rewrite the struggle that often comes when you're chasing big goals or pursuing something you've never done before. It landed in the same place that Elizabeth Benton's line did for me.
Primal Potential Podcast. This was something I heard years ago and she said, I refuse to turn my blessings into burdens. Pressure is a privilege. Had that same energy of I don't have to chase this thing. I'm choosing to chase it because I want more for myself. It's a privilege to care this much, a privilege to have enough hope and ambition and possibility in me that I'm willing to stretch even when it hurts, even when it's uncomfortable, but I was wrong all along.
Pressure is not a privilege. Devotion is a privilege and they are not the same thing. Not even close. When you look up synonyms for pressure, do you know what you get?
You get coercion, force duress, oppression. Even harassment pressure is the voice of an inner bully saying, I must continue succeeding, achieving, moving the goalpost every time I hit a target or else I might get hurt. Even though you're already hurting yourself, this voice is terrified of being rejected, abandoned, or judged.
So it whips itself into this frenzy of achievement in hopes that maybe if it achieves hard enough, nobody can hurt it because it's too successful. It believes there's this imaginary milestone they can hit where they'll be beyond criticism.
Next, I'm gonna share some key distinctions to watch for when you're looking for pressure in your own life.
First pressure feels like it's coming from outside of you. It's an attempt to appear a certain way to the external world so that you can prove yourself. And it's also coming from a desire for safety and protection more than it feels like an intrinsic desire. Pressure feels like contraction in your body.
So it's often a tightening in your throat and a pressure in your solar plexes. And the thing about pressure is it rarely releases when you hit a certain goal. Actually, it often intensifies because with every milestone you feel like there's more to prove. When you achieve something, there's this pressure to not only keep the thing and also to prove you deserve to have the thing in the first place, and then the pressure builds because you got the thing that was supposed to release the pressure, which can feel like anxiety unease or chronic hap unhappiness, and then it doesn't.
So you think, okay, it wasn't that thing. It must be this next goal. So you put more pressure on your next pursuit and you repeat and repeat until you feel like an instant pot with a malfunctioning release valve. The other nasty thing about pressure is that it can often intensify to the point you abandon yourself.
You push so hard for a goal that you sacrifice your health, your relationships, your happiness, your peace, because pressure doesn't care about your wellbeing. Pressure just wants you to keep moving, even if it's at your own expense. So that's pressure. What about devotion? Very different synonyms for this word.
We're talking loyalty, faithfulness, fidelity, dedication, fondness, love. You go from cruelty and even violence with pressure to the highest forms of self-honoring When you make the shift to devotion, devotion is when you are pulled to something because you know it's meant for you. And you know it's meant for you because you want what's best for you., This isn't about what anyone else thinks. This is for you first and foremost.
This doesn't mean it won't provide value and service to the world. Because often we're devoted to something because we know it's going to help others, whether that's a community we're part of, our spouse, our children, our friends, our clients. But the biggest difference here is that any connection this has to the outside world comes from an open heart and a deep desire to make things better for the world.
When something comes from pressure, your heart is closed because you're trying to keep yourself safe from others through your achievements versus wanting to serve from a place of feeling internally safe and resourced. It would be more painful to abandon the pursuit than to keep it going when you're devoted.
Because your heart knows you are meant to have it. This doesn't mean there won't be discomfort as you work towards the thing, but it's this labor of love and you know it's worth it. The desire for what you're creating is gonna be coming from within, from this place of vision and self-worth and purpose.
Devotion is tied to your highest values. And your identity versus what the world tells you that you should prioritize and care about. Devotion also feels very different in the body. It feels lighter and open. It's easy to take deep breaths in. You can also exhale deeply. And it's much easier to get into a flow state where you can spend hours on a project or dedicate yourself to something that might be challenging, but you barely notice the time or the effort because you know this thing is meant for you.
And perhaps most importantly, devotion does not require self betrayal. It doesn't ask you to sacrifice what else matters to you in order to make it happen. There's more steadiness and gentleness in the pursuit. So those are the distinctions. The problem is pressure and devotion can often look the same from the outside.
One person can be pursuing a body transformation because they've been bullied for their weight since they were young, and they think if they just hit their goal weight once and for all, then they'll be safe. Then no one will ever say another nasty thing about them or their body ever again,
Another person can also be pursuing a body transformation, and maybe they're doing it because they're struggling with low energy. They're sore all the time. And they wanna show their children an example of what it looks like to start taking amazing care of themselves because they know their children are always watching and they're excited about getting to take better care of themselves and feel the physical and emotional benefits.
But both of these people can be doing the same workouts. Meal planning, getting their steps in, and both look like discipline, but the pressure fueled pursuit is going to be filled with chronic stress. It's going to feel miserable most of the time. And when those states go on for long enough, the body will start to look for relief often in the form of food.
Then the pressure increases because now they've quote unquote undone all their hard work, and the cycle often continues and gets worse over time because every binge or overindulgence raises the pressure. The more the pressure mounts, the more miserable life becomes, and the stronger and more frequent the compulsions to escape with food are going to become.
Meanwhile, the person who's devoted to setting a loving example for her kids, she's gonna feel a lot better. She's gonna have a more gentle approach to her journey because she's not gonna wanna set an example where she's bullying and forcing herself into change, not when her kids are watching.
And because she genuinely wants to feel better, she'll create the conditions where the journey does feel good. Her thoughts are different. Her pace is gentler. Yes, she still might have off days or setbacks, but they don't create the same cycle of deepening frustration and impatience. She shakes it off with much more ease.
So if you truly want food freedom, one of the most powerful things you can do is eliminate pressure from your life and not just from your wellness journey, but everywhere. Because even if the pressure comes from your career, your relationships, your creative pursuits, or anything else.
You are going to face the same pattern of pressure leading to misery, which leads to compulsions, to numb out with food, which leads to more unhappiness, which deepens that cycle. And now you might wonder, okay, but how do I stop operating from pressure when that's been my default for decades? I'm gonna share three of the things that have helped me the most.
First, you wanna get deeply intentional about building the skill of holding your achievements and manifestations. This is moving from proving and pressure to get the next thing into a place of gratitude and presence. And this isn't something you do once and then forget about, it's going to take your system time to learn this skill just as it takes reps over time to learn anything, whether it's golfing, surfing, crocheting, anything.
So I realized recently that even after my husband and I moved into this beautiful new home, brand new town. Enough financial relaxation where I didn't have to work a nine to five. I wasn't letting myself enjoy it. Not really, because as soon as we moved and got settled in, my inner bully went, okay, now we're not working.
Now you have no excuse. Now you have to build the social media following, build the business, prove you can actually do this. After all the failed attempts. That pressure has created so much unnecessary suffering for six solid months. The abundance didn't feel like abundance. It felt like a test. It was turning a huge blessing into a burden that required earning proof and performance.
So it has taken a lot of intention and practice to keep coming back to gratitude, and this is something I want you to think about with a recent achievement or manifestation you've created. Or maybe you save this episode for the next big milestone you achieve instead of turning that achievement into a test.
Or worrying about keeping it or putting pressure on yourself to get the next thing. What would presence and gratitude look like?
For me, it's looked like, wow, I get to go on hour long walks every single day. And then working on being present for those walks, breathing deeply, noticing the surroundings, letting myself be in the moment. It's looked like eliminating the tasks and practices that created pressure, and trusting that the things that align with my values and identity are what will serve me best in the end.
It is also looked like slowing down and not turning my business into a courtroom where my self-worth is on trial. So as you think about doing this for yourself, start looking for number one. Where can you practice micro reps of appreciation and presence for what you have created? And more frequent micro reps are better than trying to sit in gratitude about something for an hour at a time.
Giving yourself more opportunities to practice is more powerful than intense, but less frequent practices. Number two. Where can you eliminate tasks and practices? You're only doing because you feel like you should do them to either keep the thing or to get ahead faster, even though deep down they don't actually align with you.
And finally, can you slow down? Can you take a pause between achievements to just let yourself savor what you've created? This doesn't mean you stop making any forward movement. It just means that you don't let such an intense focus on forward movement stop you from building the skill of appreciating where you are right now.
The second way you can turn pressure into devotion is to start normalizing your manifestations. This one is going to go a long way towards diffusing the pressure, because sometimes as a high performing, intense, deeply emotional woman, we can put a lot of weight and intensity on the thing we're calling in.
We could even load the achievement with this. Salvation energy thinking this will be the thing that solves all my problems, makes me feel okay in my skin. This is the thing that fixes every single wound and problem I've ever had, and I'll be happy forever. Maybe it's the goal weight or the soulmate relationship, or the new job or debt freedom, this type of magical thinking.
It's gonna hurt you for two reasons. First, it is a myth. There is nothing in the world that will take away all of your pain or shortcomings or hard moments. And when you put that expectation on something and then you get the thing and you still have bad days, get sad or feel like something's missing.
Now you don't get to appreciate this beautiful thing because you've turned it into a disappointment, and as if this wasn't bad enough. This salvation energy is going to put so much pressure on the thing you're creating. Of course, something is gonna have pressure baked right into it if you think it's gonna solve all your problems.
And then of course it's going to feel stressful, loaded and intense, and it doesn't have to. So let's talk about what this distinction looks like. In a practical example, I've already shared how much pressure I put on my business success when we moved to our new hometown, but do you wanna know where I didn't put pressure?
You know what? I didn't infuse with a bunch of salvation energy and this. Oh my goodness, yes. This will solve all of my problems type of mindset, my door building job, and let's be real. Was that job perfect? No. Were there things that frustrated me at times? Absolutely. But you know what else? It was also the best job I've ever had for so many reasons, and I also literally manifested it 10 minutes after doing a manifestation meditation to call in a new job.
Seriously, I did the manifesting practice and 10 minutes later the phone rang with the job offer. But here's what was different about that. Versus my business building endeavor, I didn't hang my identity on succeeding there. Yes, I still showed up and I put effort in, but I didn't make it mean something when I built doors wrong or made a mistake when I was learning.
I didn't expect it to solve all my problems and save me from myself. Because this was the job I was only supposed to work at for a year so that I could honor the non-compete clause from my previous job. So it was just the place I went to earn a living. And then I wondered why I was happier and more peaceful there than I had been in over a decade.
And the reason was because this was the first time in years where I worked somewhere that didn't come with this self-imposed pressure, a compulsion to perform, and the painful belief that my body needed to be my business card. The difference here was not making this job so magical and precious that it was gonna change my entire life.
And this was very different from how I treated most of my manifestations, whether they were health related, career related, or relationship related. When something stays really special in this intense and all consuming way. It is going to stay pressurized and attached to your identity in a way that really hurts.
So you're gonna grip it harder, you'll fear losing it, and your entire body will stay braced and vigilant as you try to hold onto the thing. This is why normalizing your manifestations has the power to change everything. You might have some resistance to this idea, you might think, but if I normalize it, I won't care as much.
I won't try as hard, and I won't appreciate it as much when I get it. I am here to tell you that as a deeply emotional, high performing, growth oriented woman, you are not in danger of caring too little. Or not working hard enough, quite the opposite. Normalizing doesn't mean you stop caring. It doesn't mean you stop being grateful.
It means you stop expecting every next achievement to save you from yourself. And when you stop the magical thinking and release the excess pressure. Your body starts to feel safe enough to let your manifestations stay and be felt. So let's give a few examples of normalizing your manifestations. Let's start with a body transformation, because this is a big one for many women.
And I can't take credit for this idea, but it has lived rent free in my head for over a decade. So in her book, loving What is Byron Katie was talking about the weight we can put on creating our health transformations. And for what she basically asked, why the pressure, why the hurrying? Because at the end of the day.
You're still gonna sit, stand, or lie horizontal. This is the perfect example of normalizing a manifestation. Yes, you'll have more energy. Yes, it might be easier to stand for long periods of time, but you'll still just sit, stand, or lie horizontal. There's no pressure there versus the mentality of. When I hit this health or body transformation goal, then I will be loved.
Then I will be confident. Then I will get the relationship, the job, the money, as if a number on a scale is the reason you don't have those things. And then let's use business as another example. I've started to ask myself. What if I treated my business the same way I did my door building job? I still have my targets for the week.
I still show up and put the hours in, but no matter what happens inside those hours, I still get to make peace the baseline. I don't have to tie my identity to how many clients sign up one week, or how many podcast downloads I get, or any other metrics. Just like if we missed target at my door building job, I didn't put myself worth on trial on the drive home and make it mean I was a bad person.
A failure, a loser, or doomed to never hit target again, hit would've been silly then, and it's equally as unnecessary in this season of life. So one of your embodied activations is to find something you've been working towards that maybe you've put too much pressure, too much salvation energy around and start trying to normalize it.
What if it's not going to be the answer to all your problems? You can still appreciate it. But now you don't make it the reason you're delaying the feelings you wanna feel in the present moment. If it's a body transformation, what if you remember? Cool. I'm still gonna sit, stand, or lie horizontal. If it's a relationship or career goal, what if you remember, even after I get this thing, I'll still have bad days.
I'll still have places to grow. Yes, this will be a life upgrade, but then there will be other life upgrades. Then watch how this changes the level of pressure you feel. The third recommendation I have for you is to continue the journey to untangle your self-worth from productivity. You are not what you create, and your worth does not depend on your output.
And for a high performing woman, this can still be an ongoing journey.
I will be honest, I still don't have all the answers quite yet because I first started talking about this on the podcast as early as 2024, and it's still something I work on. I can share what has helped me more than anything else because it's taken this idea and concept and it's turned it into something creative, relational, and embodied.
This has been using my Food Freedom Fantasy Method and specifically working with Rex. If you're new and don't know who this is, you can get the entire audio storybook@embodiedwritingwarrior.com slash Divine daddies. But all you need to know for context here is that I have two masculine archetypes that I've used to transform my relationship with food consistency and self-worth.
One of them is fiery, passionate, growth oriented. Basically your typical masculine energy. So that's Rex. The other one is nurturing, gentle, safe, and loving what you'd generally consider more feminine energy. But I wanted two masculine archetypes. So here we are, and Rex shares the same core wound. And harmful beliefs that I do because this is creative parts work, so of course he does.
So he started out believing he was only useful if he was doing things. At one point he actually said to me, I'm always the weapon. Sometimes I wonder if you even want me here when you're not in crisis. That line made my heart hurt because I recognized this protector part inside me that only knows how to prove themselves by doing.
And here's the thing. We all have some form of this protector part inside us. Maybe he doesn't have leather pants and a paddle that says consistency is foreplay. Maybe his name isn't Rex. But I promise you they exist inside you. And honestly, this can be where so much pressure comes from, especially in high performing women who have these overactive protector parts.
These parts want to be included. They love us and they want a job. And this can be why. When good things happen, we create pressure because that pressure feels like a crisis, and then this part feels useful again. This is why when it was just me and Rex to start, we were constantly self-sabotaging, whipping ourselves into chaos, even when it was totally unneeded.
We've often said that haven, the other archetype is the glue because he stops us from letting our fire burn us out. Haven stabilizes the fire and reminds us that yes, pressure is one option, but devotion is a better choice every single time. So often we heal through story, not through being told, oh, just stop basing your worth around your productivity.
Conquer the internalized capitalism. Okay? This creative work has helped me more than anything else. So now I have started being able to take a nap without turning it into a moral failing. And then when Rex is like. You and Haven go nap. I'll stand watch. I can scream and say, I'm not napping in these conditions.
And then Rex and Haven will be like, oh my God, what happened? Did the puppy bite your face? Are you okay? And then I'll remind Rex that we want him for the soft moments too. Then he comes and naps with us, and both of them roast me for being dramatic. Yes, this has actually happened. So one scene at a time.
I'm creating a new narrative around worth rest and productivity, one storyline at a time. I get to make the shift away from pressure and towards devotion. So I'm hoping this episode gave you some insights and some practical ways you can start to move from pressure into devotion inside your own life.
And if you're curious about the Food Freedom Fantasy Method, I'll include a link in the show notes. I am wishing you a week filled with loyalty, fidelity, and devotion to your wildest dreams. No pressure necessary. Take care and I will see you in a future episode very soon.
