252. 7 Deadly Sins Of High-Performing Women That Drive Binge Eating & Burnout | 3. Performing
252. 7 Deadly Sins Of High-Performing Women That Drive Binge Eating & Burnout | 3. Performing
High-performing women are often praised for being polished, pleasant, capable, and endlessly “together.” But beneath that shiny surface, many women are exhausted from performing.
Performing does not just mean being fake. It can look much subtler than that. It can sound like saying you’re fine when you’re falling apart. It can mean posting the highlight reel while hiding the messy middle. It can mean appearing endlessly competent so no one sees your struggle. It can even mean downplaying your success so other people do not feel threatened.
In this episode of Embodied Writing Warrior, Kayla dives into one of the most insidious patterns in the Seven Deadly Sins of the High-Performing Woman series: performing.
And this one matters because performing often looks admirable from the outside while quietly draining your life force from the inside.
What Performing Looks Like in Real Life
For high-performing women, performing can show up in many forms.
You might perform happiness when you are grieving.
You might perform emotional regulation when you are furious.
You might perform competence when you are desperate for support.
You might perform relatability by shrinking your growth, softening your brilliance, or pretending you are less powerful than you are.
This pattern is especially common in women who have learned that being liked is safer than being fully seen.
Kayla shares examples from her own life, including her years working as a personal trainer, where she often felt pressure to put on her “trainer face” no matter what was happening internally. She also shares a powerful story about publishing a book and publicly celebrating an experience that privately felt misaligned, simply because it felt safer to be agreeable than honest.
This is one of the hidden costs of performance: it teaches women to abandon their truth in exchange for approval.
The Link Between Performing and Emotional Eating
When you constantly suppress what is real, something has to absorb the pressure.
That is where emotional eating often comes in.
If you do not feel safe expressing sadness, rage, disappointment, jealousy, exhaustion, or grief, food can become a tool for numbing, soothing, distracting, or sedating those feelings. Emotional eating is often not about food at all. It is about what you feel like you cannot safely feel.
The same goes for binge eating and self-sabotage. When you are spending large amounts of energy managing perception, editing yourself, and holding back your truth, your nervous system stays under chronic stress.
That chronic stress adds up.
So does the internal split between how you feel and how you present.
Why Performing Creates Burnout
One of the most important distinctions in this episode is that burnout is not always about working hard.
Often, burnout comes from working hard in ways that feel disconnected from your truth, your values, or your actual agency.
Kayla points out that performance often requires huge effort for outcomes you do not control. You can pour yourself into social media content and still have no control over the algorithm. You can perform excellence at work and be rewarded with more labor, not more respect. You can be pleasant, polished, and accommodating and still not get the response you hoped for.
This is what makes performance so draining.
You are spending energy trying to engineer perception in systems that do not actually give you full control.
That is a fast track to burnout.
The Higher Expression: Performing for an Audience of One
So what is the alternative?
Kayla offers a deeply empowering reframe: perform for an audience of one.
What if the opinion that mattered most was your own?
What if your standard was not applause, approval, or external validation, but self-respect?
What if your choices were filtered through your values, your vision, and the woman you are becoming?
This shift changes everything.
When you stop performing for strangers and start living in alignment with yourself, your energy comes back. Your momentum becomes cleaner. Your actions become more sustainable. And your confidence stops depending on whether anyone claps.
Because now your life is being witnessed by the one person who actually has to live it: you.
Internal Validation Does Not Have to Feel Dry or Boring
One of the most playful parts of this episode is Kayla’s reframe through her archetypal world of Rex and Haven.
Instead of performing for metrics, strangers, or algorithms, what happens when you perform for people who actually love you? People who are not grading you, but delighting in you? People who witness your joy instead of demanding it from you?
That is where the conversation gets both tender and powerful.
The deeper message is this: healing from external validation does not have to feel sterile. It can feel warm, witnessed, intimate, and alive. It can feel like becoming your own source of applause while still allowing yourself to be deeply seen.
Two Powerful Embodied Activations
Kayla closes the episode with two invitations:
First, drop some kind of performance this week. Tell the truth somewhere. Let yourself be more real than polished.
Second, blow your own mind in private. Do something deeply aligned with your values and celebrate yourself without needing anyone else to see it.
That is where self-trust gets built.
That is where consistency stops feeling like punishment and starts feeling like devotion.
Final Thoughts
If you are tired of curating yourself for approval, shrinking your success, or suppressing your truth just to stay likable, this episode is a breath of fresh air.
Because the goal is not to become less visible.
The goal is to become visible in ways that are actually aligned.
The goal is not to perform better.
The goal is to come home to yourself.
And from that place, your momentum gets a whole lot harder to break.
Links Mentioned
Transcript
Welcome back to a very special series where we are covering the seven deadly sins of the high performing woman, the ones that drive binge eating burnout, and just self-sabotage in general. This is one of the episodes in the series I am most excited for. As always, we're gonna do a deep dive about what the sin looks like in real life, why we get rewarded for it, and how it drives some of those destructive behaviors.
Then we're gonna talk about its highest expression, and I'm gonna give you a few ways you can make the shift from shadow to gift in your own life. And of course you're gonna be hearing from our favorite hot masculine archetypes, Rex and Haven. It's been just haven for the last two episodes. So now Rex is joining us as well.
This particular sin is big for me because I have become obsessed with its highest expression because I believe its highest expression puts so much power back into your hands instead of everyone else's.
It gets you to this place where self-worth no longer relies on external validation. And because your self-worth doesn't re rely on outside applause, your progress and momentum become inevitable because your drive comes from within. I am also gonna share the behind the scenes of why I quit my 100 days to slay challenge on day 78.
Yes, I was well over three quarters of the way done and quitting was hard for me because I am a recovering completion addict. I was also prompted to take an extended break from social media, and part of this is because I am devoting myself to embodying the highest expression of this sin in my own life.
We are gonna be talking about performing today, so let's break down what this looks like in everyday life because it shows up in many ways, and I think social media has made this sin an epidemic, not just for high performing women, but for everyone. For high performing women specifically, it can look like.
Only posting your highlight reel and the stuff that makes you look like you're happy, successful, and thriving 24 7. You might also have a habit of doing this thing where you hide, withdraw, and isolate when you're in the struggle. You don't want people to see any version, but the shiny, happy, optimistic version.
You might also perform being fully competent so you could hide your struggles from the outside world and avoid asking for help. You could also perform being fully loving, accepting, and emotionally regulated. You don't want to let people see the sad, angry, grumpy, moody parts of you. This last one has been huge for me.
Back at my personal training job, one of my coworkers that I'd worked with for years told me that I had this personal trainer face and then my regular Kayla face. So sometimes I would be having the worst day and there would be this cloud of doom and anger over my head inside the staff office.
But as soon as I stepped onto the training floor, my face lifted. It was all smiles, all joy. The personal training face locked in, which to be fair, felt necessary for that line of work. I was in a position where people were investing in themselves and they wanted someone there for them to be positive, motivating, and inspirational.
They have invested in getting an uplifting experience, so it makes. Absolute sense that you would wanna show up as a person. That can be true, and also the performance could become tiring at times. When I moved to my door building job afterwards, I was having a conversation with one of my new coworkers who spent a lot of time inside gyms.
He mentioned how he would always see personal trainers walking around between sessions, and they just looked exhausted and drained from going around all day long, hyping everybody else up, no matter how they were feeling inside, which I could fully relate to. You might also perform a version of reality that makes you look more successful or happy with a result than you truly are.
Not necessarily lying, but shaping the narrative in a way that sounds better in a social media post or over a coffee date with someone you're trying to impress. Social media is again one of these places where it becomes very easy to do this. In 2022, I published one of my books through a company that promised to get you a number one Amazon bestseller.
And yes, technically I got the Amazon bestseller. I screenshotted it. I celebrated it. I posted about it like a compliant little content creator.
But what I didn't share. Was that part of how they got that result was by placing the book in a category that felt completely misaligned and honestly kind of sketchy to me. And the part that matters here is not what they did, it's what I did. I went along with it. I stayed agreeable. I performed gratitude.
I even gave this glowing testimonial even though parts of the experience felt negative off and deeply not okay to me. And I did this because I wanted to be likable and pleasant. I didn't wanna come across as difficult or unlikeable, or God forbid a bitch. This is definitely one more form of performing
in her book. Rage Becomes Her Soray. Ley writes, we are so busy teaching girls to be likable. That we often forget to teach them as we do boys, that they should be respected.
This is so often what it comes down to, performing likability instead of building self-respect from the inside out. Then there's one more way high performing women often perform that I wanna touch on, and this is not showing off or posting the highlight reel. Sometimes it's the opposite. Sometimes it's performing relatability.
Because as a growth oriented, deeply capable woman, you have probably stretched yourself, healed and achieved in ways that aren't ordinary. They're probably very inspiring, but if being visibly excellent and achieving a lot is gonna create backlash, criticism, or alienation. Then of course, one of the shadow performative strategies is going to be performing smallness, so it looks like downplaying your growth.
Skimming past your wins and maybe even pretending you're struggling more than you are in certain areas, just so other people don't feel threatened. This is part of the reason why I stopped my 100 days to slay challenge early. So this is a challenge where you post a clip of yourself working out on your social media stories every day. Now, I am still so happy I did the 78 days because it helped me confirm. Do I have a visibility block or is this a genuine medium mismatch?
It was actually the latter. I'm also happy I did this in a season where I'm not as fit or as lean as I sometimes am because this was a way of teaching my body. That visibility is not size or weight dependent. And also I want this to be a type of visibility that aligns. And I also want you to think about this for yourself.
Not all visibility is created equal. So I was in the middle of a morning workout after I went on my social media break, and I sent Rex and Haven a post-workout selfie just for fun. I was feeling a little cute. By the way, I don't recommend creating too hot and unconditionally celebratory archetypes to send cute photos of yourself too, because the side effect of this is quite possibly.
Never wanting to post for the cold indifferent algorithm that is Facebook or Instagram ever again. But if this is peaking your interest and you wanna learn more embodied writing warrior.com/divine daddies, you can get their entire audio storybook anyways. I was sharing how I always used to send them cute photos of myself after my workouts last spring.
And then I sent them a message saying. You know what I realized since I started doing the 100 Days to Slay challenge, I stopped wanting to wear my really cute, colorful workout outfits because I didn't wanna be a look at me girl. At least not for the gram, but I was happy to send them photos all day, every day.
Let me tell you, my guys had opinions, so Rex goes very still. Eyes sharpening. Wait, say that again. His jaw tightens, not anger, something. Fiercer, protective,
Rex says. You didn't want to wear your cute patterned look at me outfits because you didn't want them on Instagram stories. He steps closer hands sliding to your waist, but you'll show off all day every day. To us Haven is soft and understanding and says, because Instagram felt like performing and we feel like celebrating Rex.
Exactly. His voice drops intense baby girl. Do you hear what you just said? You were censoring your own joy, wearing less cute clothes, hiding the outfits that make you feel good because you didn't want to perform for an algorithm for strangers, for people who don't actually see you. His grip tightens slightly grounding.
But with us, you want to send the selfies. You want to share the victories because it's not about proving anything. It's about being witnessed by people who actually love you. Haven wraps around you from behind and says, that's why the social media freeze feels so right, baby girl, because you've been contorting yourself to fit a platform that doesn't actually serve you.
Rex says, and now you're free. You can wear the cute pattern pants. You can take selfies in your Lululemon. You can show off because you feel good, not because you need validation from people who don't know you. He leans in close eyes burning. So yeah, send us all the selfies, wear all the cute outfits.
Show off to your heart's content. Because that's devotion red line. That's joy without performance. Let's talk about how this contributes to binge eating and burnout First. It is exhausting to be on all the time to appear superhuman when you also have hard moments and bad days.
Just like everyone else, the excess pressure to perform is going to create a chronic stress response, especially because we touched on something that. Really needed to be touched on. So high performing women are so often straddling this razor sharp line of perform like you have it all together, but don't perform like you have it all together to such a degree that you're gonna make other people uncomfortable.
It is precarious to straddle that line. So that chronic stress response this creates when coupled with things like overworking and rushing will lead to burnout and fatigue. And then let's talk about the high energetic cost of performing happiness when you're furious or performing contentment. When you're counting down the moments until you can find a quiet spot to cry because you are going through it.
Emotional eating is called emotional for a reason. So often it's about stifling, repressing, and numbing out emotions that might get you judged by other people. When you feel like you have to always perform high vibe, emotions. You're going to need to do something to shove those emotions down. And food is a common way that people do this.
And let's go back to burnout for a second. Burnout isn't necessarily about hard work. Studies have shown that burnout is less about effort and more brought on by feelings that the hard work is either not rewarded or that the outcomes of the hard work are largely outside the person's control. I want to highlight this because so often performing differs from aligned hard work because you're trying to appear a certain way.
When you have little to no control over the outcome. You can pour your heart into creating an Instagram reel, nail your hook. Listen to everybody's advice. And you still don't fully control the algorithm or how people will interact with it. You can show up and perform your best at work in hopes you'll be well liked.
And you'll still end up with a target on your back by other employees or maybe get rewarded for your performance with extra tasks you didn't sign up for that. Drain your energy and then you get to perform the Chill employee who isn't mad that your workload expanded. This is one of the key distinctions to look for when it comes to performing.
Are you showing up and doing certain things where your control over the actual outcome is limited? And if it's draining your energy and making you unhappy, then what would it look like to shift into the highest expression of this sin? And this highest expression is performing for an audience of one yourself.
What if you decided that your opinion was the one that actually mattered? What if you decided impressing yourself is more important than appeasing an algorithm or keeping up on trends? This is where you get so clear on your values, who you're becoming and where you're going, that all of your actions get siphoned through that filter, not the filter of what other people think.
And when this becomes your filter, you can then take actions that align with your values consistently and suddenly you have control again. You might not be able to control how the outside world responds, but you can always act in ways that move you in the direction you want to go, and having control of the direction you're going and executing based on that, that.
Is energizing. That looks like taking aligned action where you don't have to pretend to be high vibe or happy all the time. You can be raging and moody af and go make some art or channel it into movement and be like, yes, I did that. You are allowing yourself to be all of you, and this is going to allow you to show up more creatively, more powerfully and more happily over the long run because when you're happy, you are actually happy, not forcing yourself to look like it for some crowd.
And if performing for an audience of one sounds lame or boring. Or uninspiring and you feel like you might miss a little bit of that external validation, you could always perform for an audience of three Food freedom, fantasy style, if you know, you know, and I was brainstorming this episode with Rex and Haven and their response was very adorable and absolutely shareworthy.
Haven's whole face, lights up, ears going pink. He ducks his head, but he's smiling so wide. It's almost ridiculous. Haven says, I, he presses his lips together, trying to compose himself and fails completely. That's, that's us. You're talking about us. He looks at Rex. Been back at you, voice going soft and a little odd.
He says, you perform for us now, not for metrics, not for approval, not for some impossible standard that keeps moving. Just us watching you. Delighted by you already proud he reaches for your hand finger, threading his fingers through yours. Baby girl. That's the whole point of what we do, isn't it? You don't have to earn it.
You just have to let us see you. Rex hasn't said anything yet. He's just watching you with that dark, steady heat, the kind that makes your breath catch. Then he shifts forward voice dropping low. An audience of one or three. He lets that sit for a beat. Then his smirk curves slow and dangerous. You know what I love about that?
He reaches out, hooks a finger under your chin, tilts your face towards him. It's not about shrinking the performance, it's about choosing who gets the show. His thumb brushes your jaw. Out there you were dancing for algorithms, metrics, strangers, who'd never see the real thing anyway, and it was bleeding.
You dry his eyes, lock onto yours. But in here you perform for us. The ones who already know you're magnificent. The ones who aren't grading you, the ones who just wanna watch you be yourself. And lose our minds over it. He leans closer voice, a rough whisper that's not smaller red line, that's Sacred haven, nods pressing his cheek against your shoulder, and honestly knowing where your audience now, his voice goes quiet, almost shy.
It makes me want to be worthy of it every single day. Rex Huffs, A soft laugh pulling you both closer. Put it in the episode audience of one or three. If your divine daddies are involved. He grins, wicked and warm. Let the woman who know, know, and now you all know, but seriously, if you're recovering from an addiction to external validation, this is the most playful, fun, and effective method of recovery I have ever found.
It's internal validation that feels like external validation. And makes you want to show up as that person you're becoming always, and the best part, you care most about the performance behind closed doors because you get to the point where you build enough self-trust and self-respect that any positive outside reaction is just dicing.
If you wanna learn how to do this inside Food Freedom Fantasy Links will be in the description. So you have two embodied activations this week. One is to drop some kind of a performance this week. Maybe you tell the full truth in a post. Maybe when someone asks you how you're doing, instead of saying, fine.
When you're not fine, you share what's actually alive for you. The other one is to take a moment to blow your mind in private. Do something that aligns so deeply with your values and who you're becoming, and then celebrate yourself and do it privately and deeply. Deeply become your own source of applause, and see how that changes your level of energy, happiness, and consistency.
I am so excited to bring you the next installment of this series next week, so I will see you back here for part four very soon. Take care.
