Ep 143: How All-or-Nothing Thinking Fuels Burnout (And How to Break the Cycle)

Have you ever had a “Magic Monday” where you’re fully committed to getting your life together… only to feel like you’ve blown it by Tuesday afternoon?

If so, you’re not alone—and you’re definitely not lazy.

In this episode, we’re unpacking all-or-nothing thinking and how perfectionism can quietly fuel burnout, especially for women navigating the demands of midlife. I share why our brains default to extremes, how self-judgment keeps us stuck, and practical ways to shift toward a more sustainable “middle way.”

Instead of swinging between all and nothing, you’ll learn how small, consistent actions can help you rebuild self-trust and momentum.

In This Episode, We Cover:

• What all-or-nothing thinking is and how to recognize it
• Why this pattern often intensifies in our 40s and 50s
• The connection between perfectionism, shame, and burnout
• Why showing up at 60% consistently beats 100% occasionally
• How to use a “low power mode” approach to stay consistent even on hard days
• Why small habits are the key to lasting change

Share Your Win

If this episode resonated with you, I’d love to hear from you!
 Come share your “level two win” with me:

Instagram: @k.a.rivard
Facebook: @KortneyRivardWellnessCoaching
Website: kortneyrivard.com

Resources

Episode 117: Do it Scared: Lessons Learned from Climbing Half Dome

** Work with Me: The Wellness Wakeup **
For just $99, you get a 60-minute lifestyle audit session where we find the "trouble spots" that are keeping you from living the you want. We'll come up with a short-term action plan reaching your goals and getting consistent with habits is a no-brainer.  Click HERE for more info.

Transcript

Magic Monday Trap

0:51

Hey everyone, and welcome back to Real, brave and Unstoppable. I'm your host Courtney Kortney Rivard, and thank you for joining me for episode number 143. Today, I wanna start out by asking you a question. Have you ever had one of those"Magic Mondays", the ones where you wake up, you've got the green juice, you've got the color coded planner, and you've decided that today is the day you finally get your act together. You're gonna be the woman who meditates for 20 minutes. You're gonna hit the gym, you're gonna drink 80 ounces of water. You're not gonna snap at your spouse or your kids. You're totally all in. And then Tuesday afternoon happens. Maybe a meeting ran late. Maybe you got a call from your kid's school. Maybe you're just tired. Let's be honest, being a human woman over 40 is exhausting. You miss one workout or you eat a handful of chocolate chips over the sink at 4:00 PM If you're like me, maybe it's with some peanut butter... and suddenly a voice in your head says. I blew it". The day is ruined. I might as well just have pizza and drink all that wine tonight and I'll just try again next week or next month or whatever. If that sounds familiar, you are not lazy, you're not a failure. You might just be stuck in the all or nothing thinking trap. And today we're gonna talk about this. We're gonna talk about why your brain is doing this to you and how to finally break that cycle without needing more willpower In our forties and fifties. Why does this hit us so hard now? I think for some of us, it's always been with us, but in our twenties, we could pull an all-nighter or we could go all in on a fad diet and our bodies just bounced back. But in our forties and fifties, we're dealing with what I call the"midlife squeeze". We've got career pressure, we've got the sandwich generation stress, which is taking care of parents and kids, and we've also got hormones that frankly are doing whatever the fuck they want. Super inconvenient. So given all of this, all or nothing thinking, it's not just a habit, it's a survival mechanism. When life feels chaotic, your brain wants certainty. Human brains are amazing, but they're very lazy. Our brain wants a yes or a no. It wants perfect or failure. The"middle way" that which is the space where we're just okay or consistent, but messy, actually feels dangerous to an overstimulated nervous system. So here's what we're gonna think about today. I want you to think about your energy like a light switch. For a lot of years you've been taught that. You're either on or off. If you're not performing at a hundred percent, you might as well be at zero. But from a biological standpoint, the truth is your body is not a light switch. It's like a thermostat. So when you try to force yourself into all mode, when you're outside temperature is already at 90 degrees, for example, meaning you're stressed, sleep deprived, hormonal. You blow a fuse. That nothing phase, that's not a lack of discipline. That's your emergency brain shutoff valve. It's trying to protect you from burning out completely. So we need to find that middle ground. Remember the thermostat. We can adjust it. We can adjust it between zero and 90 to all the degrees in between. We wanna start teaching our brain to think along that continuum. But anyway, there's also a sneaky psychological reason why we do this all or nothing thinking, and it's what I call identity protection. If we go all in and give our best and we still don't see the results we want, that can feel like a personal failure. That can hurt. But if we go into nothing mode, if we just quit or don't try something, we can tell ourselves, I didn't fail. I just stopped trying. Or I just didn't wanna do it. I could have been great if I stayed with it. So we use the nothing to protect our egos from the reality of being quote unquote average. But what I want you to hear today, the average version of you, the one who shows up at 60%, for example, every day, is the one who actually changes her life. So earlier I talked about the Monday morning trap or Magic Monday scenario. But let's go deeper into why we set those impossible traps for ourselves in the first place. It comes down to one word: perfectionism. Some of you might really identify with that word, and some of you might hear that word and think, I'm not a perfectionist. My house is a mess and I haven't finished that project in three months. But the truth is that perfectionism isn't about being perfect. It's about the shame that we feel when we're not. Think about the way you talk to yourself when you fail at a goal. I don't really like to think about there being failure at a goal, but you know, let's, let's air quote it, fail. If a friend told you she was too tired to go to the gym, you'd say, gosh, yeah, I get it. I'd take a nap. But when you do it, the internal dialogue is you're so lazy, you never stick to anything. This is why you feel the way you do. And this self-judgment is actually a form of control. We think if we beat ourselves up enough, we can shame ourselves into being better next time. But science tells us the exact opposite. Research shows that. Being kind to ourselves is actually a lot more motivating than beating ourselves up. Shame shuts down the prefrontal cortex, the part of your brain that you need for planning and execution.'Because we get really stuck in the, the emotion of it. And then we have a, a story about the emotion and we kind of spiral from there. So we're not really thinking logically when you judge yourself for being. Quote, unquote, nothing. You weren't motivating yourself. You're actually paralyzing yourself. You're making the all feel even further away and even more intimidating if you think about it. If one day you just allow yourself to show up at 60%, maybe even 50% or 40, a hundred percent is a lot easier to reach. So how do we stop the judgment? We have to change the goal of the game. Instead of seeing your life as a grand opening where everything has to be perfect and I'm just gonna start it all at one time, I want you to start seeing it as a beta test. So in the tech world, a beta test is a version of a product that is supposed to have bugs. The engineers aren't mad when the app crashes. They say, oh, interesting. It crashed when we did X. Let's tweak the code. What if your failed diet or your skipped meditation wasn't a moral failure, but just data? For example, data Point: I realized that if I don't prep my lunch by 10:00 AM I'm too tired to make a good choice. By 1:00 PM data point: I realized that 6:00 AM workouts make me resent my entire family. So when you look at your life as a beta test, there's no room for judgment. It's just curiosity. And curiosity is the one thing that can bridge the gap between all and nothing. So now that we've lowered the volume on that inner critic of ours, we can finally talk about the"middle way". I love the concept of the middle way in so many things. As far as when we think about emotional regulation, we can think of the middle way as being like our wise mind, where on one end of the extreme we have something called emotion mind, where we're just totally giving into our emotions all the time. We're reacting to them. And on the other side of things as logic mind, where we're just no emotion at all. We're being planners and organizers and totally in the analytical part of our brain. Both of those sides have pluses and minuses. For example, in financial decisions, emotion's not really helpful. And then in contrast, if somebody experiences a loss and they are in grief, if we're just in Logic mind and like, Hey, well you know what? Do X, Y, and Z and then you'll get over it. That's not really helpful either. Like those people are gonna need some empathy, some compassion. Emotion is helpful there for us to be able to support the people that we wanna support in a way that's helpful. So there's this middle way at what we call Wise mind, and it's sort of looking at like, what do I need from each of these to be effective? And this also plays into our middle way when we consider our thinking, because a lot of times. The thinking that we have in response to something is to avoid emotions. So I talked earlier a little bit about how our brain is just trying to protect us. It's an identity thing or it's a, you know, let me be hard on myself so I can be better. But that's sort of an emotion mind way of handling things. It's not logical, when we look at the middle way, we're turning down the volume on that inner critic, that emotional thinking, if that makes sense. Most of us have been taught that if we aren't doing the level 10 version of a habit, like the 60 minute workout, or the perfectly healthy meal, it doesn't count. I'm here to tell you that in your forties and beyond, and really any time, the level two version is actually the most important version. Why? Because the level two version, which could be that five minute stretch, or the rotisserie chicken from the grocery store, is what keeps you from quitting. It keeps the habit muscle alive without draining your battery. It allows you to stay consistent, even when life is throwing its worst at you. Have you ever said to yourself, when I go on vacation, it throws off my whole routine? And then when I come back, I have the hardest time restarting. I have been there too. And that's because we go to level Zero and then we beat ourselves up about it as like, oh, on vacation. Or maybe we don't, but on vacation I never stick to anything. And now we're beating ourselves up over being out of our routine and never being able to get back on it. If that's ever happened to you, just raise your hand. I'm raising mine. So when we go on vacation, for example, if we were to say, you know what, I'm gonna do a little five minute exercise every day, or I'm just gonna make the best choices I can, but I'm still gonna have fun. Like we're still in the habit of thinking that way. So when we get home, we just up the level a little bit, we turn up the volume on the habits we want to keep going. So we've looked at the biology of why we swing between extremes, and we've also looked at how perfectionism and self-judgment keep us stuck in the"nothing" phase. And now I wanna give you a tool that you can use now, and we're gonna call it the"low power mode menu". So think about your phone when the battery hits 10%. It doesn't just explode or shut down immediately. It asks you if you wanna go into low power mode, right? It dims the screen, it stops the background apps. It focuses only on the essentials, making calls, sending texts, and it does less so it can stay alive longer. So we need a low power mode for our lives. All or nothing thinking says that if you can't go to that hour long, high intensity spin class, for example, you should just stay on the couch. Low power mode says, I have 10% battery today. What is the essential version of movement? Maybe it's five minutes of stretching in your pajamas. Maybe it's one lap around the block. Well your coffee brews. Maybe your level, your battery level's 50%. So maybe that's a little bit more, maybe it's a 30 minute. A Peloton ride or something like that. I just did that yesterday. My battery was probably at 60 or 70%, and so I did a Peloton ride that was 30 minutes. Felt doable in terms of time. And it was a, an effortful 30 minutes, But from a time perspective, my battery was at, you know, maybe 60%. So I adjusted and it felt really good. Felt a lot better than doing nothing. If you're"all" for nutrition is a perfectly prepped organic meal. Your low power mode might be a rotisserie chicken and a bag of pre-washed salad. It's a pretty good option, right? Is it perfect? Maybe not. Is it nothing? No. it's the middle way. So it's that choice that keeps you from feeling like you failed and it pre preserves your energy for tomorrow. So here's a truth bomb for you. Every time you choose low power mode instead of nothing, you're winning When you do five minutes of yoga, instead of skipping it entirely. AKA zero minutes. You're telling your brain, I am a person who takes care of my body even when I'm tired. You're building self-trust and for women like us who have spent years breaking promises to ourselves because we couldn't keep the perfect ones, Building self-trust is the best thing we can do for ourselves. Consistency isn't doing the same big thing every day. Consistency is doing something every day to show up for yourself. Big difference. So as we wrap up today. I wanna leave you with a formal permission slip. I like these. Brene Brown introduced this concept in, I think it was the gifts of imperfection, or maybe it was maybe it was daring greatly. I can't remember. But one of those books. I think it was the Gifts of Imperfection. But when I say permission slip, sometimes I think when we formally give ourselves permission, we, we name that. That can be really powerful. And it's something that we can hold as tangible, like, oh yeah, remember, I'm giving myself permission to do this. So when that inner critic voice says,"oh, you know what, you're not doing enough". You're like, Nope, here's my permission slip. I'm giving myself permission. See, here it is. And sometimes it can even be helpful to like. Write one out and stick it on your wall or something. Just a little thought for you. But you have permission to be messy this week you have permission to aim for a B minus in your habits. You have permission to let go of the version of yourself that should be doing more, and start loving the version of yourself that's actually here-- Doing what she can and that doing what you can might be different every single day. So if you've been stuck in a"nothing" phase for a while, maybe you haven't worked out in months or you've completely given up on that creative project, I have a challenge for you. Don't try to go back to"all", don't try to be a level 10 tomorrow. Just gimme a level two, two minutes of cleaning, two minutes of breathing, two minutes of starting. When you do this, it's really about building the habit again. Once we get in the habit of doing something, then we can add to it and like I said, your level of the day, like what you have available, some days it might be a level two, some days it might be a level six. Some days it might be a level 10. You gotta work with yourself there. I work with a lot of people who attach productivity to self-worth, and it's really become part of their identity. Like I'm somebody who is productive. And if I'm not being productive, like if I'm sitting still or if I'm not doing something that I deem productive, like that's not okay, but you're worth a lot more than your productivity. You're worth more than your all mode. You're a human being. You are not a light switch. And if your level two today is just putting on a clean shirt or taking a shower, friend, I am cheering for you. So that's all I have for today. Friends. Thank you so much for spending this time with me. If this episode resonated with you, I'd love to hear what your level two win is today, or level five or six or 10. Whatever you got, I'd love to hear what your win is. So come find me on social media on Instagram. It's k dot a dot rivard, and on Facebook, it's Kortney Rivard Wellness Coaching. And on my website, you can find me at kortney rivard dot com and you can share your win that way. And we can celebrate this middle way together. Alright, friends, thank you again for tuning in and I will talk to you next week.