251. 7 Deadly Sins Of High-Performing Women That Drive Binge Eating & Burnout | 2. Rushing

High-performing women are often rewarded for rushing.

For moving faster.
 For doing more.
 For squeezing one more task into the day.
 For chasing the result as quickly as possible.

But what if rushing is not a productivity hack?
 What if it is one of the hidden patterns driving binge eating, burnout, shutdown, and nervous system dysregulation?

In part two of this seven-part series, Kayla explores the sin of rushing through a nervous system lens. She breaks down what rushing looks like in shadow form, why so many ambitious women normalize it, and how living in chronic urgency can push the body toward burnout, freeze, and disconnection from self.

Inside this episode, you’ll learn the difference between fight-style rushing and flight-style rushing, why speed can become so seductive, and how to shift into a healthier form of momentum that supports your goals without frying your system.

Kayla also introduces the higher expression of rushing: constraint as catalyst. Instead of frantic urgency, this is intentional intensity. Self-chosen pace. Clean focus. Flow-state effort. The kind of speed that sharpens you instead of scattering you.

You’ll also hear a grounding reflection from Haven on what it means to become trustworthy with your own pace, plus embodied activations to help you work with this pattern in real life.

If you’ve ever felt like your life is always moving too fast, your body never fully exhales, or your binges tend to come after periods of pressure and overdrive, this episode will hit home.

Links Mentioned:

• Get Your Free Gift - Know Your Hungers Assessment Guide
• Learn More About Food Freedom Fantasy
• Get The Divine Daddies Audio Storybook Guide

Transcript

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Welcome to Embodied Writing Warrior, a show for women who refuse to white metal 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 to part two of our seven-part series, where we are covering the main sins of the high-performing women that drive binge eating and burnout. Today we are talking about rushing. I'm going to share what this looks like in shadow form, why high-performing women often get rewarded for it. I'm also going to talk about why it drives binge eating and burnout. And I'm going to do this from a nervous system lens that I do not hear talked about in this particular way. Then I'm going to dive into the higher expression of rushing, because yes, there is one, and it's one of my all-time favorites. Finally, I'm going to 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 want to 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 going to 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 this 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 sweetland 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 driveover, 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 cheerboard 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 going to 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 0K months to 10k months in three weeks, and I'll tell you how once you pay me 10k. 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 going to 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, shutdown, 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 mouths, 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 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. All right, 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 going to want to 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 want to apply this intensity and speed to self-chosen projects or goals that matter to you. When you're choosing your timeline, you want to 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 going to 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 going to 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 NanoRimo 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 ass-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 nanoRimo 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. 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 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. 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. Until now, because that has officially ended. I am leaning into Catalyst as constraint. I am 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. 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 for years. B, it's so aligned with who I am and what I want to 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 I can 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. 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.com slash gift or click the link in the show notes.