BONUS: Exhausted by Design (Part 2) - Subscriptions You Forgot to Cancel

A foundational bonus mini-series exploring why burnout is a systems issue — originally recorded for YouTube and shared here for context.

This episode delves into the insidious nature of burnout, exploring how stress and exhaustion can accumulate silently and impact one's life. The discussion highlights the misconception that burnout only happens to those who can't handle stress, revealing that it's often a result of handling too much stress for too long without proper recovery. The script emphasizes the hidden fees and auto-payments to our nervous system, stemming from diet culture, poor gut health, and emotional robbers. It advocates for recognizing and canceling these draining subscriptions to build a sustainable, regulated life. Practical tips on maintaining nervous system health and the importance of gut health are also provided to help reclaim energy and wellbeing.

00:00 Understanding Burnout: The Silent Erosion
01:06 The Hidden Costs of Hustle Culture
02:24 Recognizing the Signs of Burnout
05:57 The Impact of Diet Culture on Health
13:47 Gut Health and Nervous System Regulation
18:23 Emotional Bank Heist: Protecting Your Energy
21:34 Reflection and Rebuilding Emotional Wealth

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

That's what burnout does. It doesn't always scream. Sometimes it slowly erases your will to show up. When you're stressed, you need to work out, eat healthy, get out in nature. And I did. I was at that time the best shape of my life. But underneath it all, I was just running on fumes. I was a product of the diet culture. Even from a young age, I never had a great relationship of what it meant to be a healthy individual. I was filling up my body with every supplement, electrolyte, creatine, protein powder, everything you can think of. But you cannot out train a dysregulated nervous system. You can't green juice your way out of survival mode. Looking back now, I can see that my body was certainly trying to get my attention. And I just kept ignoring them in the name of hustle culture and overdrive. Just like ignoring those credit card bills. The longer you avoid it, the louder and redder the statements get. This is Hustle Rebels, a space for people who know how to grind, but are starting to question the cost. I spent years as a firefighter paramedic living in high alert mode, thinking that burnout meant I just wasn't resilient enough. Turns out my nervous system never got the memo that the danger had passed. And I see the same thing in leaders, professionals, and high achievers everywhere. They're successful on paper, but exhausted underneath it. This episode is part of the Hustle Rebels Foundation series, exploring burnout through the lens of the nervous system as an economy and how to stop living in deficit. This isn't about quitting your job or blowing up your life. It's sustainable success. Regulating your system so the life that you've worked so hard to build doesn't quietly drain you. If you're done white knuckling your way through a life that looks good on paper but feels expensive on the inside, you're in the right place. Have you ever noticed that it's not always the big stuff that breaks you? It's the little stuff that piles up until your body finally sends that bill. That's what I mean by the hidden fees. It's the quiet costs, the ones that come out of your energy account without you realizing it. The habits, the coping mechanisms, and the environments that keep auto-charging your nervous system month after month while you're swearing that you're doing everything right. I used to think burnout happened to people that couldn't handle stress. I prided myself on being able to handle a lot of stress. But now, hindsight's 2020, it happens when you handle too much stress for too long without allowing your body and nervous system to cash that check for rest. And the way that it showed up for me, those hidden fees showed up very slowly and compounded on top of each other. For example, I was drinking a lot more than I wanted to admit, not blackout drunk. I wasn't falling apart, but I just wanted to numb a lot of things out. The kind of mentality that I earned this vodka soda and then it turned into three. This nip or shot wherever you might be coming from isn't gonna be a big deal kind of night, which left me feeling a lot worse the next morning. I was snapping over everything. The smallest things were setting me off. Traffic, noise, a text notification, everything just felt way too much. I wasn't sleeping very well. My brain just couldn't shut off even when I did have the ability to rest. I would just lie there scrolling, wide awake at 2 a.m., exhausted, yet still wired. And at that point, I started just pulling away from everything. Conversations were just incredibly draining. Hanging out with people felt like work. Even with the band, which is something that I loved, started to feel more like an obligation. There were even moments where things started to get dark in a passive, quiet way where I just wished I could stop existing for a while. Fantasizing about disappearing, not out of despair, but out of exhaustion, jokingly saying I would swap places with a psych patient being held for 72 hours just for some silence. That's what burnout does. It doesn't always scream. Sometimes it slowly erases your will to show up. And the wild part is that I was doing what I thought was right. They say when you're stressed, you need to work out, eat healthy, get out in nature. And I did. I was at that time the best shape of my life. I was deadlifting 245 pounds. I was hiking almost every single day that I was off shift with my dog. I was eating what I thought was very clean, nutrient-des-dense food, high protein, getting vegetables in, cutting out carbs. But underneath it all, I was just running on fumes. I was a product of the diet culture. Even from the young age of 10, I remember going to weight loss support groups with my mom called Take Off Pounds Sensibly. Oh, Jesus. It was just craziness. As an adult, I'm running on caffeine and constant output. I was an incredible product of the diet culture growing up. Even from a young age, I never had a great relationship of what it meant to be a healthy individual with food and nutrition and working out. And so that was just this constant output. And then on top of that, my gut was wrecked, my sleep was wrecked, my hormones completely wrecked. But I thought I was checking every wellness box and yet still falling apart. And my blood work, all of it showed completely fine. I was filling up my body with every supplement, electrolyte, creatine, protein powder, everything you can think of. But you cannot out-train a dysregulated nervous system. You can't green juice your way out of survival mode. You surely cannot gratitude journal your way out of chronic depletion. Looking back now, I can see that my body was certainly trying to get my attention. I was withdrawing too much from the bank, and these were the hidden fees that I was not paying attention to. The statements were coming in, piling up quietly, and I just kept ignoring them in the name of hustle culture and overdrive. Just like ignoring those credit card bills, the longer you avoid it, the louder and redder the statements get. When I needed to clear space on my iPhone, I started deleting random apps that I never use, a few megabytes here, a few there. Suddenly I just freed up six gigabytes of space. It's really how these hidden fees work. Each little thing, overthinking, the lack of sleep, a skipped meal, the I'm fine when you're not, saying, no worries, I can do it when you can't. These things seem small on their own, but they all add up until your system just starts lagging, crashing, glitching out. And by the time you finally notice your system is just totally out of storage, don't let that be your nervous system economy. If this resonates with you, I would love if you hit that subscribe button so that you don't miss out on more tips on how to stay sane and regulated in this crazy ass hustle culture. Speaking of subscriptions that you forgot to cancel. These are the energy auto payments that you've been sending out for months, sometimes years, without even realizing how much they are costing you. For me, it was the constant need to prove that I was fine and capable. This need to people please and prove my worth. That unspoken, I can handle it subscription that renews every time you say yes when you really mean no. Maybe it's a relationship running on expired terms or a job that drains you. Perhaps it's even a coping mechanism that started as a lifeline and now has turned into a leash. The nervous system loves familiarity. Even when something is unhealthy, if it's predictable, we will stay. That's why people stay in jobs that wreck them, relationships that drain them, or routines that leave them empty, because the body thinks predictability is equal to safety. So you keep auto-renewing things that you should have canceled a long ass time ago. You had these stress memberships, drama subscriptions, guilt packages. Every time you replay an old story about not being good enough, it's just another renewal. Every time you say, I don't have time for rest, that's another renewal. Every time you check your email during dinner, that's another renewal. And what's wild is that the body doesn't even need to be in physical danger to be burned out. Just the anticipation of stress alone costs the same amount of energy as the stress itself. Your nervous system doesn't even know the difference between this is happening and I'm imagining that this is happening. It still pays out. That's the wild thing. So the subscriptions just keep running in the background, draining your energy like too many apps that are just running all at once. Canceling them means getting honest about what actually serves you. Not what looks good on paper, not what people expect from you, but what genuinely makes your system feel safe. That's your new definition of success. Nervous system safety. Looking back now, I can see how many of those subscriptions were running my own life. People like the belief that I had to be strong, the pressure to keep showing up no matter what, the guilt of wanting a break when other people had it worse. I told myself that these were virtues, it's resilience, it's discipline, it's selflessness. They were really just invoices in disguise. My body was sending me warnings, but I filed them under later, and later became never. Your nervous system doesn't forget the bills that you ignore. Trust me, just like a credit card company, right? They will never ever get the bills that you ignore. It just stops sending polite reminders and just starts shutting down your services, right? First its focus, then sleep, then joy until all that is left is function. And even that runs on borrowed energy. The hardest part isn't realizing how much you've spent, it's realizing how long you have been bankrupt, and you still show up like everything is fine. So I'm gonna switch gears a little bit. This is one that I'm actually super passionate about because I ended up having a huge wake-up call. Because a few years ago, my own product of being the diet culture and eating diet foods, I ended up needing an emergency surgery that destroyed my intestines. Because of this, I realized the importance of eating clean foods, actual clean foods, not just diet clean foods, right? The ones that were sold to be known as healthy. So, with that said, I want to talk about the biggest hidden fees of gut debt, the stress you eat. You've probably heard that your gut is your second brain, and it's true in a way, about 90% of your serotonin is produced there. The gut and brain talk constantly through the vagus nerve. But when you're living in fight or flight mode, digestion gets pushed to the bottom of the priority list since that's derived through the parasympathetic. Your body reroutes blood away from the gut and into the muscles because it thinks it's actually preparing for battle while you're in the sympathetic drive. So no matter how healthy you eat, your system isn't absorbing properly. That's why people who do everything right still feel like garbage, because it's not just what you're eating, it's who you are when you eat. If you eat every meal in a rush, scrolling, anxious, multitasking, you're literally just training your nervous system to see nourishment as another job that it just needs to get through. And there's also the hidden cost of eating shit all the time. And I don't just mean fast food, I mean frozen dinners, energy drinks, the healthy protein snacks loaded with chemicals that your body just literally doesn't recognize. Trust me, I'm guilty of it. Which again brings me to another point: the actual food. There's the hidden costs of eating that shit all the time. And like I said, I don't just mean the drive-throughs and the hangover pizza. The health food that's been sold to us, that's actually been stripped and processed and sprayed and stabilized until your body literally doesn't even recognize it as food anymore. These foods, the ones that are packaged with refined oils, preservatives, synthetic ingredients, the ones that are sold as sugar-free, fat-free, but then replaced with chemicals that literally our body doesn't even know what it is. They don't just make you bloated or tired, they break down the gut barrier itself. It's that thin lining in your intestines. It's supposed to act like a security guard, letting in nutrients and keeping toxins out. But when you're in chronic stress, inflammatory foods then punch holes through that barrier. When that happens, proteins and toxins start slipping through into that bloodstream can lead to something called leaky gut syndrome. Your immune system freaks out, inflammation skyrockets, and suddenly your nervous system is fighting fires 24-7. But really, that's something that started in your gut and then it became a systemic problem. Brain fog, fatigue, random body aches, even autoimmune diseases that are rampant. Half the time it's not these issues or mental health, it's your body in full-scale inflammatory response. So when I say that you can't regulate a dysregulated gut, I mean it quite literally. You can't build calm on top of chemical chaos. You can't ask your brain to feel safe when your gut is screaming danger at the molecular level. My version of healthy used to be control and falling into this diet culture: perfect macros, prepped meals, caffeine is breakfast. Even though my body looked strong, my gut was completely wrecked. When your gut's inflamed, your vagus nerve gets the same signal it would during stress, which is danger. That keeps your nervous system stuck in that sympathetic overdrive. You can't regulate when your gut's screaming that you're under attack. Remember, it can't tell the difference. Your body's not asking for kale, it's asking for calm. The cost of constantly eating in a stressed-out state with highly processed shit foods covered in preservatives and chemicals is massive. Inflammation, brain fog, anxiety, poor sleep. These are all symptoms of a body that doesn't feel safe, digesting life, digesting foods. Gut health isn't just a diet trend. It's literally a nervous system strategy. And then you have the emotional bank heist, the environments, relationships, the systems that rob your nervous system of calm without you even realizing it. Those people who leave you feeling drained after every single conversation, or that workplace where your body tenses the second you walked through the door. Perhaps the family dynamic where you're the only peacekeeper and everyone else gets to explode, those are emotional robbers. Sometimes you're the one that's actually holding the door open for them. That's the crazy part. The emotional bank heist happens anytime your body gets robbed of regulation, when safety gets replaced by vigilance, when connection gets replaced by performance, when authenticity gets replaced by approval. I used to think that burnout really came specifically by workload, but it wasn't until I sat back and realized that mine came from leadership betrayal, from being told to keep going when I was already running on fumes with zero appreciation, I might add, from being made to feel replaceable while I was literally breaking myself to serve. That's the emotional equivalent of someone cleaning out your bank account while you're still trying to. Make deposits, eventually you start guarding yourself, shutting down, numbing out, overcompensating with perfectionism and people pleasing. That's not personality, that's protection. So the question becomes who has access to your energy account? And do they deserve it? Because you can't build wealth in an environment that keeps robbing you. Looking back now, I can see how many withdrawals I let happen in silence. How many times I just smiled through discomfort. How many times I made other people's comfort my priority and called it strength. I can see how my body tried to warn me through exhaustion, irritation, cravings, and gut pain, and how I labeled it all as weakness instead of communication. Every symptom was a message. Every shutdown was self-preservation. And my body wasn't broken. It was doing exactly as it was designed to do. Protect me when I refused to protect myself. The nervous system doesn't speak in words, it speaks in signals. And ignoring these signals is the most expensive fucking bill you will ever pay. So here's your reflection for the week. What subscriptions are you still paying for? Emotionally, mentally, physically, that no longer serve you? What foods, people, habits, or coping mechanisms keep auto-charging your nervous system? And what emotional robbers have access to your calm? What would happen if you finally just changed your password? Remember, calm isn't a reward. It's a baseline. You don't earn regulation by achieving more. You reclaim it by canceling what's been costing you your peace. Burnout isn't a sign of weakness, it's a collection notice from your body. But the good news, you can rebuild that wealth. Just one small deposit at a time. Next time, we're going to dive into the emotional credit rebuild, how you can earn back trust with your own body and create a nervous system that doesn't just survive chaos, but stays calm through it. Because you don't need to keep proving your worth through exhaustion. You just need to start living like your energy is currency. Because that's what it is. If this resonates, hit that subscribe button to keep getting some weekly tips, really how to stay sane in this fucked up world that's trying to steal your energy. See you next week.