249. 7 Deadly Sins Of High-Performing Women That Drive Binge Eating & Burnout | 1. Overworking

Welcome back to Embodied Writing Warrior for the start of a fiery new series: The Seven Deadly Sins of the High-Performing Woman.

In this first episode, we’re tackling one of the most culturally rewarded and personally exhausting patterns of all: overworking.

If you’re the kind of woman who fills every blank space on her calendar, pushes through exhaustion, and confuses pressure with devotion, this one is going to hit. We’re unpacking why overworking gets praised in work, wellness, and everyday life, how it quietly fuels binge eating, emotional eating, and burnout, and what it looks like to alchemize this pattern into something far more sustainable: devoted consistency.

Inside this episode, I explore:

•  the shadow side of overworking and why high-performing women are often rewarded for it 
•  how overworking creates the perfect conditions for cravings, burnout, and rebound eating 
•  the difference between punishing effort and identity-led devotion 
•  why rest is not weakness, but part of the rhythm of real power 
•  how to begin building consistency that actually supports your nervous system, energy, and long-term goals 

You’ll also hear from Haven, who offers a powerful reminder that slowing down is not failure, it’s how your power gathers.

This episode is also extra special because it lands on the one-year anniversary of the Divine Daddies. Rex and Haven are joining me throughout this series as we turn each so-called sin into embodied power.

Links Mentioned:

• Learn more about Food Freedom Fantasy
• Explore the Divine Daddies Audio Storybook
• Grab your free Know Your Hungers audio care package 
• Episode 150: The 7 Types Of Rest Required To Slay & Thrive
• The Power of the Downstate by Sarah Mednick

Transcript

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Welcome to Embodied Writing Warrior, a show for women who refuse white knuckle wellness and crave food freedom built for real life, where your fire gets pain, not dead. Fall in blessed with your own momentum and enjoy pleasure-led creativity. Because healing was never meant to be a full-time job. I'm Kayla, writer and help coach God Row. Now let's make consistency feel like foreplay. Welcome back for a very special series on the podcast. We are going to be tackling the seven deadly sins of the high-performing woman that drive binge eating and burnout over the next seven weeks. If you are a type A growth-oriented woman, get ready to be read like filth for this series of podcast episodes. However, we are not doing this from a perspective of you are wrong, these are problems to be solved, because your fire does not get shamed here. It gets alchemized into its highest expression and then aimed. That is the goal of this entire series. I'm taking the seven most common traits I've seen after working with hundreds of high-performing women over the years, the ones that really lead to self-sabotage and inconsistency. For each episode, I'm going to share the sin in its shadow form. I'm going to talk about why high-performing women get rewarded for it, and then also how it contributes to binge eating, emotional eating, and burnout. But we don't stop there because this is not Shame Your Fire Radio. I'm going to be sharing the highest expression of each sin. Because yes, each sin has a highest expression, unless you're trapped in some kind of dogmatic cult. Take the original seven deadly sins, for example. So there's lust. Pretty sure your partner is going to have no complaints about you lusting after them. And sexual energy in general is our creative power, which can absolutely be used as a force for good. Then there is rage. Sacred rage can be catalytic and deeply productive. It can spark massive change both personally and culturally. And even gluttony. Being able to extract deep pleasure from the food you're eating, that's going to make you defiantly powerful, especially in a world where appetite in women is often shamed or suppressed. This series will give you embodied practices to translate each sin into its highest expression, so that instead of the sin being deadly as in it's killing your progress and energy levels, it makes you deadly in the best way. And Rex and Haven will be joining us with their thoughts for this entire season because today, April 14th, is the Divine Daddy's one-year anniversary. This was the day I first created them, and it ended up being one of the most unexpectedly life-changing creative moments of my entire life. So this day will always mean something very special to me. Since this series begins on their anniversary, there was no chance I wasn't bringing them along for the ride. And if you're newer to this world and wondering what on earth I'm talking about, I will link the entire Divine Daddy's audio storybook page in the show notes. And then finally, I'll share a little bit about how we alchemize these sins into power inside my program, Food Freedom Fantasy. Find details for that in the show notes as well. Okay, let's start with sin number one: overworking. Probably one of the most recognizable sins in today's world where hustle culture is still glorified in many circles. The shadow side of this one looks like filling every white space on your calendar, saying yes to every commitment because you don't want to seem selfish or lazy, creating a daily to-do list that would function more realistically as a weekly to-do list, then getting frustrated that you never get everything done. It can look like squeezing in one more task during the block you'd promised yourself you'd rest, take a nap, or go for a leisurely walk for. It can look like using excessive amounts of caffeine, willpower, and mindset work to just do it, no matter how tired you are. And then rest often doesn't feel restful. It can feel destabilizing, more anxiety-inducing than work. And this can be where a lot of the compulsions to emotionally eat actually come from. Working can also become a way to avoid difficult emotions or pretend certain challenges don't exist, at least for a little while. This is one of those sins that high-performing women definitely get rewarded for. One of the inspirations for this series was my previous episode on confusing pressure with devotion. And in that episode, I talked about how I had thrived so much at the store-building job. Then I was unpacking a recent dream I had, and I realized, damn, the structure of that job deeply rewarded most, if not all, of these deadly sins I'm going to be covering over the next few weeks. Embodying these traits meant you got gifts, praise, opportunities, better raises, pizza parties, all the things. So this helped me see something. These sins are not random personal flaws. They're actually these adaptive strategies that get deeply celebrated in certain environments. That doesn't make them bad, doesn't necessarily make the environments bad. It just means we want to learn the difference between their shadow form and their sacred form. This also explains why it was so jarring to move from an environment where those traits were deeply rewarded to a new environment where it felt like those traits weren't creating any change or external validation whatsoever. So overworking got rewarded at my previous job. Do all the overtime. And don't just hit target, surpass it by 30%, or it doesn't even count. And I think this is incredibly common for many workplaces. And this is why you often see these talented, hardworking, dedicated women absolutely slay their 9 to 5 gig, but can't seem to stop the 7-Eleven snack runs on their way home from that gig they just slayed at. And this does not mean that they're evil, bad people, or that they want you to burn yourself out in order to overserve them. It just probably means they've become accustomed to it and they reap the benefits, even if this dynamic is more of a subconscious thing. This sin is going to drive binge eating and burnout in two ways. First, if you don't give yourself a chance to rest and recover from work, your brain is going to be activated and fired up constantly. And we are not meant to be activated and working every second of every day. When you don't actively bring in moments of rest and recovery, your body will find ways to force you to recover. And this can come in the form of burnout or in the form of intense cravings to eat. Our bodies know if we eat enough food, we have to drop into our rest and digest state to actually process all the food we've eaten. The second one is we often take this tendency to overwork in our jobs or businesses or creative pursuits. And then we also take that tendency right into our wellness journey. We think that the harder we work, the better our results will be, and the faster we'll get there. This is especially true if you're combining this in with some of the others coming up. So rushing, operating from pressure, and destination addiction, as a few examples. So we aim for more calories burned, more restrictive diets, more workouts, a more intense habit stack to keep ourselves in line. And it always backfires because all that intensity and pressure eventually snaps. And this is often what creates the rebound response of overcompensating with food. Back in my early 20s, I genuinely believed I could outwork my binge eating. I treated everything like a numbers game. If I had eaten too much, I just needed to burn more, push harder, override my body a little bit more. There was this one stretch during university where I pulled this all-nighter to finish assignments, then went straight to the gym at 6 a.m. for my usual cardio session. No sleep. That was the mentality I lived in for a few years. No matter how exhausted, dysregulated, or broken down I felt, the answer was always more effort, more work. And I wasn't exercising from devotion. I was exercising from fear, punishment, and this desperate hope that if I just worked hard enough, I could finally fix myself. And I will never forget the one time this trainer approached me on the elliptical. And she was like, Hey, I see you in here all the time, and you're killing your workouts. But she trailed off. However, her implication was obvious. Something like, you're working this hard and it's clearly not working. Then she tried to sell me a personal training package. I left humiliated. And on the way home, I absolutely bought binge food. All that hard work led to the same place, numbing out with food because I was so overstimulated and under-recovered. That's one of the worst things about overworking. It often has the opposite effect of what we want in our wellness journey, no matter how beautifully it might appear to serve us elsewhere. So that's the dark side of this sin. But that doesn't mean the solution is to sit around on your couch eating bonbons and watching desperate housewives all day, either. Because here's the thing about high-performing women. And it can almost be a kink for some of them. So let's talk about what it looks like to indulge this kink in a way that creates more energy and more stability instead of less. In its highest expression, overworking becomes devoted consistency. This is going to differ from overworking in some important ways. Devoted consistency means you're operating from your identity, your values, and your aspirations. You're not forcing yourself to churn out work because you should, or because everyone else is doing it that way, or because you need to prove you're good enough. If you value things like work ethic and integrity, you'll still show up and work hard at your job, but not at the expense of your health or well-being. So this could look like only doing overtime shifts when you have the energy and capacity for them, or maybe when you're saving up for a trip where the extra money is really gonna come in handy instead of feeling this obligation to do every single one, or you're a bad employee. It is called overtime for a reason, my friend. And devoted consistency also prioritizes rest as part of the process. Devoted consistency is about longevity, not just about the temporary output. Devoted consistency realizes that it's just as important to be intentional and disciplined about recovery, because this gives us the ability to do higher work over a longer period of time without crashing. And that is so important. Devoted consistency is exactly what we build inside food freedom fantasy. Not creating some massive habit stack or building the most intense routine. It's about creating rituals and practices that you choose. No external pressure or should energy. Just choosing the most important levers that will give you the most impact. More importantly, you learn how to build them so you can execute even on your most chaotic days. And you also learn how to get your own hot archetypes to help you follow through when it feels hard. Not because they're demanding you overwork, but because they're helping you turn steady momentum into a love language. And before one of our daddies, Haven jumps in, I want to share a quote from the book The Power of the Downstate, where Sarah Mednik talks about how important the downstate is for our capacity and our power. She writes, If you think about an ocean wave crashing on the beach, the crash doesn't happen without the drawing in and the preparatory part of the wave. And that's the downstate. That time where the ocean draws back into itself, builds its own motion, its own power, its own strength. Then, once it's built up enough, then it crashes out, and that's the upstate. Love that quote. And as we're starting to talk about oceans, let's hear what our ocean daddy himself has to say about this conversation. So Haven says, I think this is the part so many high-performing women miss, baby girl. The drawing back is not a failure. It's not the weakness. It's not the proof that you're falling behind. It's the part where your power gathers. A lot of women have been taught to only trust themselves when they're visibly producing, when they're checking things off, hitting targets, proving they're disciplined. But if rest makes you anxious, if stillness feels almost unbearable, that usually means your nervous system has learned to associate slowing down with danger. And that's why overworking can feel so seductive. It gives you the illusion of safety, the illusion of control, the illusion that if you just keep moving, you won't have to feel what's underneath. But the body keeps score, sweetheart, and eventually it starts asking for recovery one way or another. Through cravings, through exhaustion, through resentment, through that heavy feeling where everything that used to feel meaningful starts feeling like too much. So if this episode is hitting home for you, I want to say this gently: rest is not something you earn by running yourself into the ground. Rest is part of the rhythm that allows you to stay in relationship with yourself. You are allowed to build a life where recovery is not an emergency break, it's part of the design. That's what devoted consistency is. Not abandoning your fire, loving it enough to protect it. Now that we've heard from Haven, you have two embodied activations this week. Choose one, not both. We are not overworking in a podcast about overworking. So your first choice is to do a devoted consistency audit. So look at your commitments, your obligations, the demands on your time, and ask yourself: which of these do not align with my identity and values? What can I let go of? Speaking of which, you may have noticed there was no guest episode last Friday. That was not a glitch. It was me practicing exactly what I'm preaching here. There was a time when I thought two episodes a week would help the show grow faster. It did not. It mostly just doubled the work. And over time, I realized I was saying yes to some conversations, more out of obligation instead of genuine alignment. And I want to love these conversations. I want you to love these conversations. I want the guest episodes to feel fresh, valuable, deeply resonant, not like another box to check off or another commitment I made because I felt bad saying no. So, you'll still get guest episodes just less often and with more intention. This is what devoted consistency looks like for me in this season. The second activation you can choose is to build rest into your life more intentionally. And there are actually seven different types of rest: physical, mental, emotional, social, sensory, creative, and spiritual. I did a deep dive into this on an older episode of the show, so I'll link that for you as well. Or I would absolutely recommend The Power of the Downstate if you want a full on book club challenge. Finally, if you want to learn more about food, freedom, fantasy, head to embodiedwritingwarrior.com or click the link in the description. Registration is open. This is now every Green program. You can join anytime, go at your own pace, have lifetime access to the content with the opportunity to receive live support for the journey. Okay, I am wishing you a beautiful week filled with devoted consistency, and we'll see you again next time. Take care. Ready to stop outsourcing your inner knowing and crack your own code? Grab my free gift, Know Your Hungers. Discover the five hidden blocks behind your food struggles, and get a customized audio care package based on your results. You're not broken, you're just misdiagnosed. Visit embodiedwriting warrior.comslash gift or click the link in the show notes.