251. 7 Deadly Sins Of High-Performing Women That Drive Binge Eating & Burnout | 2. Rushing
251. 7 Deadly Sins Of High-Performing Women That Drive Binge Eating & Burnout | 2. Rushing
High-performing women are often praised for speed.
Speed at work.
Speed in wellness.
Speed in business.
Speed in healing.
Speed in getting results.
Move faster. Do more. Optimize harder. Collapse timelines. Get there quicker.
From the outside, rushing can look responsible, ambitious, and efficient. It can even look admirable. But in the body, rushing often tells a very different story.
Because rushing is not just a scheduling issue. It is often a nervous system pattern.
And for many women, that pattern quietly fuels both binge eating and burnout.
What Rushing Actually Looks Like
Rushing is not always obvious. It does not just look like being late.
Sometimes it looks like speeding even when you are not behind.
Sometimes it looks like hustling through tasks just to get them over with.
Sometimes it looks like getting irritated by slowness, delays, red lights, inefficiency, or other people moving at a different pace than you.
For high-performing women, rushing often becomes so normalized that it stops registering as stress.
It just feels like life.
Like productivity.
Like being someone who gets things done.
But the body knows better.
In this episode, Kayla breaks rushing into two common expressions:
Flight-Style Rushing
This is the buzzing, anxious, hurry-hurry-hurry kind of pace.
It can look like:
rushing through tasks to be done
trying to get ahead so you can “relax later”
moving fast to avoid discomfort or difficult emotions
feeling internally chased, even when nothing is truly wrong
This kind of rushing often has a frantic undercurrent. It is less about power and more about escape.
Fight-Style Rushing
This version has more force and irritation in it.
It can look like:
snapping when things are too slow
pushing the pace aggressively
feeling unusually angry at traffic, obstacles, or interruptions
trying to dominate time by forcing everything to happen faster
This version often gets rewarded socially because it can look decisive, driven, and high-functioning. But underneath it is still sympathetic activation.
And many women carry both.
Flight underneath.
Fight on top.
An internal fear of slowing down, covered by force, performance, and pressure.
Why High-Performing Women Get Rewarded for Rushing
This is what makes the pattern especially sneaky.
Our culture rewards rushing everywhere.
In wellness, women are sold rapid transformations and fast results.
In marketing, speed is often the hook.
In business and spiritual spaces, faster success is glamorized.
Even healing gets turned into a race.
The message is constant: faster is better.
Faster weight loss.
Faster healing.
Faster business growth.
Faster body change.
Faster proof that you are doing enough.
The problem is that this makes rushing feel not only normal, but virtuous.
It starts to seem like slowing down is weakness.
Like spaciousness is laziness.
Like rest means you are falling behind.
So women keep moving faster, often without realizing the cost.
The Nervous System Cost of Chronic Urgency
Rushing requires sympathetic activation.
That means when you are rushing, your body is in fight or flight.
In small, contained doses, that is not a problem. The nervous system is meant to move in and out of activation throughout the day. We need mobilization. We need energy. We need moments of intensity.
The issue begins when intensity becomes chronic.
When everything feels urgent.
When your pace is always fast.
When your body never gets the message that it is safe to come down.
At that point, the nervous system does not stay activated forever. It escalates and escalates until it eventually collapses.
That is where freeze and shutdown can enter the picture.
And for many women, that collapse shows up in one of two ways:
burnout and deep fatigue
binge eating and disconnection
The Link Between Rushing and Binge Eating
This is one of the most important ideas in the episode.
Binge eating is not always about lack of discipline.
It is not always about cravings.
It is not always about the food itself.
Sometimes binge eating is what happens after the nervous system has been pushed too hard for too long.
When the body hits overwhelm, it often seeks collapse.
That collapse can look like numbing out with food.
The body may still be moving.
You may still be chewing, swallowing, reaching, eating.
But internally, you are gone.
Disconnected.
Frozen.
Not fully present.
Trying to shut the whole system down.
From this lens, binge eating is not just a habit to overpower. It is often a nervous system event.
That changes the conversation completely.
Because instead of only asking, “How do I stop bingeing?” you can start asking:
Where am I chronically rushing?
Where am I living in sympathetic dominance?
Where am I treating urgency like a personality trait instead of a stress signal?
Those questions open a much more powerful door.
Speed Is Not the Enemy
One of the best parts of this episode is that it does not demonize speed.
Kayla is very clear: the answer is not becoming sluggish, passive, or anti-ambition.
The answer is not to become “slow” in a way that disconnects you from your natural fire.
The answer is to become trustworthy with your pace.
That distinction matters.
Because speed itself is not toxic.
Sometimes speed is clarifying.
Sometimes urgency is creative.
Sometimes a deadline sharpens focus and pulls out your best work.
The real problem is chronic urgency.
The problem is when everything becomes a race.
When the nervous system never gets to exhale.
When intensity is no longer intentional.
The Higher Expression of Rushing: Constraint as Catalyst
Kayla’s reframe here is gold.
The highest expression of rushing is not endless hustle.
It is constraint as catalyst.
This means using pace, pressure, and deadlines in a clean, conscious way that supports flow instead of frying your system.
In practice, this looks like:
choosing where speed belongs
applying intensity to projects that matter
setting timelines that stretch you without overwhelming you
creating pressure on purpose instead of living under pressure by default
This is where challenge becomes energizing rather than depleting.
Instead of frantic urgency, you get focused momentum.
Instead of chaos, you get clean activation.
Instead of burnout, you get movement that actually serves the bigger vision.
The Challenge-Skills Balance
A powerful framework in the episode is the idea that the best challenges slightly outpace your current capacity.
Not by a mile.
Not by an amount that sends you into panic.
Just enough to stretch you.
This is where flow lives.
If the pace is too easy, you get bored.
If the pace is too intense, you get anxious or overwhelmed.
If the pace is just beyond your comfort zone, you get engaged.
That is the sweet spot.
This matters because not all effort is the same.
Some effort is depleting.
Some effort is energizing.
And the more your life is built around energizing effort, the less you may feel the need to reach for relief in the form of food, shutdown, or escape.
How to Work With This Pattern
This episode offers two beautiful ways forward.
The first is to create your own constraint as catalyst challenge.
Choose one high-value project that matters deeply to you.
Give it a meaningful but realistic timeline.
Break it into smaller micro-deadlines.
Make sure the project is something you have real agency over.
That last part matters a lot.
For example, trying to force a body into a rigid weight loss deadline often backfires because there are too many variables outside your control.
But building a project, writing a book, creating a funnel, launching an offer, or finishing a meaningful body of work can be different. Those goals allow for much more ownership over the process.
The second option is gentler.
If you are already maxed out, the invitation may not be more structure. It may be more safety.
You may need to ask:
What would it look like to only move as fast as the slowest part of me feels safe to go?
That question is tender. And radical.
Because often the most exhausted, frozen, or overwhelmed parts of us are not trying to sabotage us. They are trying to keep us safe.
A New Relationship With Pace
One of the most moving reflections in the episode comes through Haven, who names something many women need to hear:
You do not need to become less powerful.
You do not need to stop caring deeply.
You do not need to give up speed entirely.
You need a pace that your body can trust.
That is what creates sustainable momentum.
Not white-knuckled urgency.
Not constant bracing.
Not trying to outrun your own humanity.
Just a cleaner relationship with intensity.
A more honest relationship with your nervous system.
A more loving relationship with time.
And from there, everything changes.
Because when your slowest parts finally feel safe, your strongest parts no longer have to hijack the wheel.
Links Mentioned:
Transcript
Welcome back to part two of our seven part series where we are covering the main sins of the high performing woman that drive binge eating and burnout. Today we are talking about rushing. I'm gonna share what this looks like in shadow form, why high performing women often get rewarded for it. I am also going to talk about why it drives binge eating and burnout, and I'm gonna do this from a nervous system lens that I do not hear talked about in this particular way.
Then I'm gonna dive into the higher expression of rushing because yes, there is one and it's one of my all time favorites. Finally, I'm gonna share some ways to move from frantic, chaotic, rushing to a form of speed that doesn't end up slowing you down with a crash. Then we're bringing in haven to share his thoughts as well.
Let's talk about what rushing looks like in a high performing woman's life. This happens a lot with wellness. There's many seductive plans out there offering you 10 pounds in 10 days or whatever else they're promising on the internet right now. And our first instinct might be to eat this up. Because maybe we're uncomfortable in our bodies, frustrated with how we look, so we think I just wanna hurry up and at least lose the first part.
Then I'll feel better. But either the rushing backfires or we do somehow get the result in the short amount of time, but it's unsustainable. Or maybe we realize we're still not happy, so we try to rush to the next milestone thinking maybe this next milestone will finally do the trick. We think faster is always better.
We push too much too fast. We take on so much to get fast results that we overwhelm our systems, and this can also show up in how we live our everyday lives.
Do you often find yourself rushing, speeding through tasks, maybe even speeding on the road to get from one place to another, always in a hurry, because you're also committing to the deadly sin we talked about last week, overworking and cramming your schedule so full that you have to rush. Often these sins are connected, and here's the thing, if you are rushing, you have to be in sympathetic nervous system dominance.
I want you to remember this because we're gonna circle back to it later. Rushing is either going to be fight or flight mode. And I want you to notice as we talk about this, am I more of a fight rusher or a flight rusher, or perhaps a little of both? Let's talk about flight style rushing. This is the version that's like, hurry, hurry, hurry.
There's. Internal buzzing, and you're constantly scanning ahead. You're trying to get things over with. You're trying to get ahead on things, so maybe you can relax later. Spoiler alert. If this is one of your challenges, you won't relax later. And maybe feeling like you're chased even when you're not.
So some examples, speeding even when you're not late. Rushing through tasks just to be done. Feeling this agitation when things are taking too long, and then also maybe needing to stay in motion so you can avoid difficult emotions. Okay. Fight style rushing has more of a force, an irritation, an intensity, this energy of like, come on, come on, hurry up.
And there can be this frustration with slowness, inefficiency, or obstacles, and it can look like pushing the pace aggressively. Examples of this getting snappy when others move slowly or not that I relate to this one at all. Getting frustrated when you're trying to record a podcast and you keep having to press pause because your sweet land shark of a puppy thinks this is the absolute best time to bite ankles.
Maybe it's feeling weirdly angry or frustrated by red lights or traffic. And it can also be this attempt to dominate time to like get out ahead of it. And for a lot of people, it's both. So there's this fight and flight that are braided together, so it can look like flight underneath because you don't feel safe slowing down.
But then there's fight on top, which looks like moving faster, pushing harder, going fast, getting it done. And I'll be honest, I have struggled with this one big time over the years. I used to be a chronic speeder, even though I was rarely running late. I just hated driving and wanted to rush to get off the road.
And I also used to have this habit of trying to cram in as much quality time with myself before leaving the house and going to my personal training job. And I would leave just enough time to drive fast and get there with only a few minutes to spare before my shift started. Then I would hustle through the doors.
And I mean, I was almost never late except for this time. A train stopped on the tracks, on the drive over, but I still got some gentle and. Much needed feedback from my employer. She mentioned how I always seemed to move around, like I was on a mission and maybe I could consider leaving the house five minutes earlier so I didn't rush into the building like I was on fire, which totally fair.
So I course corrected at least until I left the job and moved on to my next place of work. And this new place of work was a job where there were targets, speed was celebrated, and hurry up was one of the main pieces of instruction at the cheer board every single morning. And let's be real. I was stoked about this.
Finally, a place that celebrated my desire to go fast. So I got a bit of a reputation for rushing after just a few months. So at this workplace, we had this cute little ritual where when a song came on that matched someone a little too perfectly, everybody would scream their name. You could probably imagine my dismay when the song I'm in a Hurry and Don't Know Why by Alabama came on.
And two of my coworkers screamed my name, which was rude, but also accurate. However, rushing to hit target was always rewarded. It got you. Pizza parties, if you really went above and beyond, you sometimes got hats or water bottles or other cool prizes. And let's be real. Some of my coworkers were, let's say.
Less enchanted by how seriously I took the words. Hurry up and target pace. But in fairness to me, hitting target was literally part of our job description, just saying, here's the thing, speed gets hyped and rewarded all over the place. One of the main things they tell you in marketing is to promise someone the result as fast as you possibly can, because that's gonna make it more appealing to people every single time.
Cool until trying to get that result destroys someone's inner peace and isn't sustainable anyways. Even in the spiritual world. There's this talk about quantum leaping and collapsing timelines. Now, I love the perspective of doing this from an energetic place and embodying. The future self. You want to be in the present moment, but it becomes a little ick when it turns into I quantum leaped from zero K months to 10 k months in three weeks, and I'll tell you how once you pay me 10 K,
The people promising speed get rewarded.
People buy this stuff because it's hot. It's deeply appealing and also deeply destructive. Because all those examples of hurrying and rushing send some disastrous messages, messages that there's nothing worth slowing down for no reason to enjoy the present moment, the message that you're not allowed to enjoy where you are because there's somewhere else to rush to.
And then it might also make you ask the question. Are you even worthy? Unless you're keeping up with everyone else's frenetic pace. Let's now talk about why this leads to binge eating and burnout.
We do an entire training around it inside Food Freedom Fantasy, but I'm gonna give you the cliff notes. So we've talked about how you have to be in flight or fight to be rushing in the first place and being in this state can actually be helpful in small contained doses.
We're meant to dip in and out of sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system dominance throughout the day, but this sin drops into its shadow when everything is rushed, when everything is urgent, and our pace is chronically fast. We never give ourselves time to go back into our parasympathetic nervous system state.
So what happens is the intensity from the rushing keeps escalating until it reaches this peak. And when you get to a certain peak, this is where collapse happens. Shut down, freeze where our body goes. I'm done. I need to tap out. And our bodies will often do this in one of two ways with burnout and deep fatigue, or with binge eating because binge eating often happens in this freeze state.
We're not present to the food we're eating. We're numbed out. We might be making small movements. The food is going into our mouth. We're chewing, we're swallowing. But we're doing it from this place of freeze and disassociation. So instead of trying to willpower your way out of your binge habit, a much more powerful strategy is to start noticing your tendency to rush to stay in sympathetic nervous system dominance too long.
And then watch how that work changes the intensity and frequency of your binges. Seriously, this changes everything. And like I said, we go deep into this somatically and creatively in inside Food freedom fantasy, and the link will be in the show notes. Inside this particular container, your inner sanctuary archetype is the one who helps you do this deep nervous system harmony work.
On that note, here is a word from my inner sanctuary haven. He has some thoughts about this topic. So he says, I think this is the part a lot of women miss Baby girl. Rushing can look so normal from the outside, responsible, ambitious, efficient, on top of things, but in the body it often feels completely different.
It feels like bracing, like gripping, like there's no room to exhale because everything is urgent and nothing can wait. And when that becomes your normal pace, your system starts to forget what safety feels like. You stop noticing how tense you are, how fast your thoughts are moving, how much pressure you're carrying.
You just call it being productive, being driven, being someone who gets things done. But the body knows the difference between devotion and distress. It knows when you're moving with intention and it knows when you're running because some part of you is scared to stop. Okay, so if this episode is hitting home, I don't want you to hear this as I need to become slow, soft, and less powerful.
That is not what this is about. The invitation is to become more trustworthy with your own pace, to realize that speed is not the enemy, but that chronic urgency is the invitation is also to learn that you can move quickly, work hard. Care deeply and still stay connected to yourself while you do it,
because when your slowest parts feel safe, your strongest parts don't have to keep hijacking the wheel. Alright, so let's talk about the highest expression of this sin and it is not moving around like a sloth on downers. It's not the opposite of rushing because when you tell a high performing woman to slow down and chill out, she probably is just gonna wanna punch you.
And moving fast is not a toxic trait until it becomes too much. Too chronically and without intention. The highest expression of rushing is constraint as catalyst, because sometimes a little urgency can be creative and clarifying and motivating. It brings intensity in this healthy, powerful way. So here's what this looks like.
You choose where you apply intensity and speed. Not everything in life needs to be a race, and turning everything into a race is what creates the harmful rushing. So you wanna apply this intensity and speed to self-chosen projects or goals that matter to you when you're choosing your timeline. You wanna think about the challenge skills, balance.
So this is the idea that challenges you give yourself should slightly outpace your current skills. So we're talking about 4%. So this is enough to create focus and healthy pressure without causing anxiety. So you can apply this to your own constraints by choosing timelines or deadlines that feel like they'll stretch you by about 4%.
And I don't want you worrying so much about the exact 4%. You turn this into a math problem. Think of it like this. If your timeline or pace is too easy, you'll feel bored because you're not challenged. If your pace is too intense and overwhelming, you'll feel stress and you'll often put yourself right into the free state.
Being in the sweet spot of the challenge skills balance is instead going to put us into a flow state, which gives the nervous system an entirely different relationship to effort. Some of the key reasons for burnout are chronic overload, medium mismatch, and prolonged work stress. So flow requires effort.
But it's usually not the same thing as friction, fragmentation or forced output. So more flow could mean more effort that energizes you and less that depletes you. And this is gonna lower your burnout risk, even if you're still putting a lot of effort in. And while there's no science, I was able to find that backs this up.
I'm also going to make an educated guess that the more time you spend in energizing effort, which makes you feel good in the moment versus depleting effort, the less likely you'll be to reach for food to get some comfort or relief, because you're not gonna need the same amount of relief from energizing effort.
Another powerful way to use constraint as catalyst is to create micro deadlines within a bigger macro deadline. This is one of the reasons why National Novel Writing Month works so well for many people, in my humble opinion. So first, it's using a catalyst as constraint. Let me give you a quote straight from the Nano Rmo Manifesto.
No plot, no problem. What you need to write, a novel is of course a deadline. Deadlines are the dynamos of the modern age. They've built every city, won every contest, and helped us pay our taxes reasonably close to on time for years and years. Deadlines bring focus, forcing us to make time for achievements we would otherwise postpone.
Encouraging us to reach beyond our conservative effort of what we think possible. Helping us to wrench victory from the jaws of sleep. A deadline simply put. Is optimism in its most ass kicking form. It's a potent force that when wielded with respect, will level any obstacle in its path. I love this so much, especially the optimism in its most as kicking form part, but the key here is wielding with respect.
It's not giving yourself four projects with deadlines all at once. Then we move back into overworking territory. It's giving yourself a deadline for one high value, high importance project, one that you have agency over, and you set this deadline not from a place of proving or pushing or forcing, but because you know you operate better when there's a deadline.
And you respect the deadline by choosing it with the challenge, skills, balance in mind. And then you break this into realistic micro deadlines. This is another place where nano Rmo shines. So when you hear about writing a book in one month, you might think, no, that is impossible. Until you think about the math, which is about 1,667 words per day for 30 days, that will give you a 50,000 Word book in one month's time.
For many writers, that will be doable in one to two hours a day, especially if they're allowing that first draft to be messy and not doing a bunch of editing as they go. Okay, so one of your embodied activations is to create a constraint as catalyst challenge for yourself. So you pick a high value, high importance project, find a timeline that gets as close to that 4% stretch zone as you can.
And yes, you will have to guess, and that's okay. An approximation still gives you something to work with. And then you're gonna break that project into micro deadlines. And one of the things I cannot stress enough here is making sure you have agency over the project. And this is why so many weight loss deadlines fail because we can't fully predict the pace.
Our body will be ready to release weight. Not perfectly anyways because there's so many factors here. You could have a highly stressful life si situation that sets you back two weeks, or you could have another life situation take priority and you're not able to move your body as frequently. So many factors.
So here's one of mine, so you can see what this looks like. I have wanted to build a book funnel for almost four years now. I invested five figures into this book funnel program back in 2022, and it has lived rent free in my head for all these years. But every time I think about building it, I get these messages internally and externally that it's too complicated, too advanced, just post on social media instead, all the things.
And this has stopped me from fully deciding. Until now, because that has officially ended, I am leaning into Catalyst as constraint. I'm giving myself the next four to five months to finish the entire book funnel. The stretch target would be September 1st, but September 30th gives me that extra month of wiggle room.
Okay. This is definitely going to stretch me because there's a lot of moving parts, a lot of tech, but it's gonna stretch me in a good way because A, it's something I've wanted to do four years. B, it's so aligned with who I am and what I wanna build. And C, this deadline might be the only thing that's gonna keep me from showing up on the podcast two years from now and being like, so.
I'm still trying to decide whether or not to do that book funnel I wanted to do for the first time in 2022, and we're not here for that. I have also made this even more enticing by making the promise to myself of, okay, we make the deadline. If we make the deadline, we book the February retreat in Costa Rica next year that I am dying to go to.
Not because I'm not worthy of the trip regardless, but because when you put some kind of exciting prize on the line, your agency and desire increases even more. Another important note here, the deadline is not a race to get X number of clients or to triple my podcast audience. Some of that falls more outside of my control because there's many factors.
But creating a book funnel that links back to my podcast and creates more visibility in general that I can control. There's how I'm embodying this in my own life. Now you get to decide how can I leverage the highest expression of speed so I can finally make my biggest dream a reality. A second activation in case you're in a season where you're like, no, I am maxed out.
I am going through a lot. The first activation might not be the play, so I'm also gonna leave you with two bonus songs as well. The first one is you Can't Rush Your Healing by Trevor Hall. Title says it all, and the other song is this beautiful one, a fellow dance alchemy sister introduced me to, it's called Gentle with Myself by Karen Drucker when she sings this part and I will only go as fast.
As the slowest part of me feels safe to go. If that doesn't hit you right in the feels, do you even have a pulse? So maybe you put on one or both songs and ask yourself, what would it look like to only move as fast as the slowest part of you feels safe to go. What might change about your pace? I hope you're enjoying this series so far, and I'll see you back here next week for part three.
Take care.
