When Productivity Becomes the Problem: Burnout, Info Overload, & Breaking The Addiction To Busy

If you're doing all the right things — posting consistently, tracking your metrics, staying current — and still lying awake at 2am wondering why it feels like you're failing, this episode is for you. The productivity rules most women entrepreneurs follow aren't just failing to help. They may be the reason you're burning out.

In this episode, you'll learn:

• Why productivity itself can become a coping mechanism (and what that actually means for your business)
• How information overconsumption is wrecking your ability to think, plan, and follow through
• What "the great unlearning" looks like for women entrepreneurs in 2026
• The physical toll of always-on business culture — and one real-life example that changed everything
• 3 small actions to start breaking the addiction to busy this week

Key Topics Covered:

• Why work becomes an addiction even when you love what you do (00:02:09)
• Mental clutter disguised as ambition: the information overload problem (00:04:16)
• The holiday break that changed how Cara runs her business (00:06:34)
• Which "productive" habits are actually keeping you overstimulated (00:09:18)
• Reset & Reclaim: 3 action steps for this week (00:10:13)

Reset & Reclaim Action Step: This week, try all three: (1) Stop consuming for a real chunk of time each day — walk without earbuds, sit without your phone. (2) Pick one metric you're tracking that doesn't change your behavior and stop tracking it. (3) Ask yourself each morning: Am I prioritizing productivity over my health right now?

Resources Mentioned:

• The Productivity Rebellion (free monthly guide): carachace.com/productivity-rebellion
• Chaos Detox: carachace.com/chaos-detox
• Dr. Mindy Pelz video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q-Lk2bIkXwY

Connect with Cara:

• Website: carachace.com
• Instagram: @carachace
• Email: hello@carachace.com

Love this episode? Leave a review and help other exhausted entrepreneurs find the show.

The Social Media Burnout Cure drops fall 2026. Get on the launch list at socialmediaburnoutbook.com for first look at the introduction, pre-order info, and launch bonuses. 

Transcript

When Productivity Becomes the Problem: Burnout, Info Overload, & Breaking The Addiction To Busy

[00:00:00] You are doing all the right things, posting consistently, tracking your metrics, staying current, optimizing your week, and somehow you're lying awake at 2:00 AM wondering why it still feels like you're failing. Welcome to Ditch the Chaos. I'm Cara Chace, and this is your space to figure out how to run your life and business without running yourself into the ground.

[00:00:21] Today we're talking about something I've been sitting with for a while now. What happens when the productivity rules become the problem they were supposed to solve, and what does it look like to start unlearning them? Let's get to it.

[00:00:35] A few months ago, I came across a video that stopped me mid scroll, which is saying something because I've been intentionally cutting back on how much I consume on my phone.

[00:00:45] Dr. Mindy Pells a health expert with over 30 years in the wellness world. Sat down and told her audience that she's unlearning most of the rules she's been teaching for the last decade, that all the counting, tracking, optimizing, [00:01:00] and constant pursuit of doing health right, was actually spiking her cortisol and making everything worse.

[00:01:07] And I sat there thinking, she's not just talking about health. She's talking about exactly how most women entrepreneurs feel like in their business. I know I do sometimes. What I've been seeing lately in my own life and the lives of the woman I work with is we've replaced one set of impossible rules with another.

[00:01:25] The wellness world says, track your macros, your sleep score, your steps, your fasting window, your protein intake. The business world says post consistently, engage daily, build relationships and dms. Be visible on every platform. And then obsessively check to see if it's working. Refreshing your Instagram insights every two hours, watching your likes tick up in real time, or not ticking up at all.

[00:01:53] Opening your analytics dashboard before you've even had your coffee, because you need to know if that post you agonized over [00:02:00] last night really landed. And somewhere in the middle of all that checking, you're wondering why you still feel like you're falling behind despite doing everything quote unquote.

[00:02:09] Right. Dr. Mindy called it the great unlearning. I'm calling it the thing that might save your business and your sanity if you're brave enough to do it. Dr. Mindy said something in that video that was vulnerable and honest. She admitted that work had become an addiction for her.

[00:02:27] That the dopamine hit of a productive day crossing things off, watching your output have impact, producing something you can point to, became the thing that she chased at the expense of her relationships, her sleep and her health, the very things that she teaches people to protect. Does that sound familiar?

[00:02:46] It certainly does to me. I've had weeks where I collapsed into bed on Friday night having accomplished a genuinely impressive amount of work and felt, nah. Or worse, I felt anxious about everything I still hadn't done. [00:03:00] I've had seasons where I prioritize the launching over sleeping content creation over connection, being on and working over, being present with my kids.

[00:03:09] And the thing about productivity addiction is it doesn't look like a problem from the outside. It looks like dedication. It looks like being a good business owner. It looks like hustle and heart and doing what it takes. People praise you for it. Your revenue hopefully reflects it. Your inbox might be clean.

[00:03:29] Your project board and your planner are color coded and your content is scheduled weeks out. But. Your nervous system is shot. Your body is keeping score even when your brain hasn't caught up to it yet. There's a gap between looking productive and being truly calm and healthy, and what Dr. Mindy helped me put words to is this, the productivity itself can become the coping mechanism.

[00:03:57] You're not just overworked. You're using the [00:04:00] work to avoid sitting with the discomfort of slowing down. And that is a different problem and it needs a different answer than what we've been hearing from influencers, gurus, and course creators. So what is the thing to give up that will start to turn this productivity addiction around?

[00:04:16] The thing we need to name is over consumption of information. Dr. Mindy described herself as a highly curious person who put a podcast on during every walk, reached for her phone at every stoplight, and filled every gap between calls with more research, more input, more stimulation, until her brain started waking her up at 2:00 AM demanding more problems to solve because it had no idea how to rest and be quiet anymore.

[00:04:45] I heard that and I thought about every woman entrepreneur I know, myself included, who has 47 browser tabs open, three half finished courses. She's paid for a podcast queue that's become a source of guilt and a notes app [00:05:00] full of brilliant ideas captured at 11:00 PM that she hasn't looked at since.

[00:05:04] We call it staying current. We call it professional development, and we call it research. But what it really is, is mental clutter disguised as ambition. I talk about mental chaos as one of the core things that destroys your ability to plan your week and follow through. It's all the open loops, the half consumed content, the constant distraction of someone else's strategy that makes you question your own.

[00:05:31] And it's sneaky because it feels productive. You're learning and you're growing, and you're staying ahead, except you're not ahead of anything. You're drowning in input with no space to actually think about what you're taking in, let alone take action or implement on any of it.

[00:05:49] Dr. Mindy said she's shifting towards going deep on one subject at a time instead of staying shallow across everything, and that's exactly the shift I've been making in my own business [00:06:00] this year. Inside Chaos Detox, we really dig into this, figuring out what you'll actually have room for and decluttering the mental chaos so you're not running your week from a place of constant overstimulation.

[00:06:12] If you're interested, I'll drop the link in the show notes. So how has this shown up in my own life? I wanna tell you what happened to me over the holidays because it's the clearest example of what we're talking about, and I've mentioned this in a few episodes at this point because it was a huge moment for me that brought so much clarity and permission to pull back from social media marketing.

[00:06:34] I took a real break during Christmas of 2025. Not a, working from the couch break or just checking email once a day break. Like an actual two weeks off, no social media, not even stuff I scheduled ahead of time. No content planning, no client work. Just being with my family, cooking and reading and letting my brain be bored for the first time in months and my body started healing.

[00:06:59] The food reactions [00:07:00] I'd been dealing with real physical inflammatory responses started disappearing. I felt so good. I was sleeping great and things were shifting with my energy in a way that I couldn't explain, but I was noticing. And then the Friday before I was supposed to get back online, I started thinking about work.

[00:07:19] My inbox, my social media content strategy, the posts I needed to create, the B roll I needed to gather. And the food reactions came roaring back. Nothing else had changed. The only thing that had changed was my nervous system processing. The thought of getting back online with social media marketing in that moment, in that realization, it changed everything for me.

[00:07:42] It confirmed what I'd been suspecting. The way we work online as entrepreneurs isn't just mentally exhausting. It has real physical consequences and the rules. We follow the post consistently, engage daily track everything. They're actually a significant part of the problem. So [00:08:00] I made a decision. I put a giant pause on social media content creation.

[00:08:04] I started writing more blogs, the book I'm working on, deep thinking and I stopped pretending that a business model requiring me to be plugged in every waking hour was one that I even wanted. So what does the great unlearning look like for you? It doesn't matter if you're not a multimillionaire doctor.

[00:08:23] Running a huge business like Dr. Mindy, she's not some burned out person rage quitting the internet. She's a clinician with 30 years of experience who looked at the evidence, including evidence from her own body and said, the rules I've been teaching aren't working anymore. They're creating the exact problem they were supposed to solve.

[00:08:44] It was bold, vulnerable, and honest. And that's what I see happening in the business and productivity space too. The rules sound reasonable. Batch your content, block your calendar, track your metrics, optimize your funnel, [00:09:00] systematize everything. And that's not exactly wrong, but when you layer all of that on top of a woman who's already carrying the mental load for her family, running a business mostly alone and operating on a nervous system that hasn't had real rest in years, those rules don't help.

[00:09:18] They become one more set of expectations. She's failing to meet. The great unlearning isn't about throwing out every system you've ever built. It's about asking yourself an uncomfortable question, which of my productive habits are actually keeping my brain overstimulated and my weeks feeling like a hamster wheel, even when the to-do list gets done.

[00:09:40] Maybe it's the daily metric checks that start your morning with anxiety. Maybe it's the podcast on every walk instead of letting your brain rest and enjoy the scenery. Maybe it's the content calendar that demands consistency at the expense of your sanity and your time.

[00:09:55] Maybe it's the belief that if you're not tracking, optimizing and producing at all [00:10:00] times, you're falling behind. I think it's worth asking. So I'm not gonna tell you to delete all your apps and move to a cabin in the woods. You have a business, you have people counting on you, but here's your reset and reclaim action step for the week.

[00:10:13] This week I'm giving you three small ones because they really do build on each other first. Stop consuming for a real chunk of time every day, not five minutes, more like an hour or more. Not replace the podcast with meditation. Just stop and put the checklist down. Walk without earbuds. Sit without your phone.

[00:10:35] Drive without music. Let your brain be bored and see what it does with that open space. That's where your actual best thinking bubbles up. Second, pick one metric that you've been tracking that really doesn't matter or doesn't change your behavior and stop tracking it. If you check your Instagram insights every day, but never actually change what you post based on the data, [00:11:00] you're not doing strategy, you're chasing a dopamine hit or giving yourself a cortisol spike.

[00:11:06] If the data isn't informing a specific decision that you need to make, let that practice go. And third, ask yourself this question at the start of every workday. This week it's Dr. Mindy's question. Am I prioritizing productivity over my health right now? Not am I working too hard? That's too vague. I specifically mean am I choosing this task over moving my body, eating a real meal, or having a real conversation with someone I love?

[00:11:35] If the answer is yes, something needs to shift. So that's it. Just start there.

[00:11:41] If this resonated, come join me inside Productivity rebellion. It's my free monthly guide for women who are tired of holding everything together with duct tape and coffee, one email a month, zero overwhelm. It's like tucking into your favorite magazine on Sunday morning. Sign up for free at carachace.com/productivity-rebellion [00:12:00] and thanks for listening this week.

[00:12:03] If it helped, please leave a review. It helps other women find the show. I'm Cara Chace reminding you to keep questioning the rules and making your own.