BONUS: Why Building a Business Feels So Lonely (Especially for High Achievers)

BONUS - Audio of the Weekly Recharge Newsletter - SUBSCRIBE HERE

This week’s Weekly Recharge is a little more personal.

After a month of feeling off, I kept trying to diagnose the problem — hormones, winter, motivation, burnout. But the real signal my nervous system was sending was something much simpler: loneliness.

For years my work meant constant interaction with people. Now, building a business in an online world filled with content creation, social media, and “visibility strategies,” I realized something surprising — the more I pushed online, the more disconnected I felt.

In this episode, I talk about the hidden loneliness many high achievers experience while building a business, how hustle culture encourages us to override our nervous system signals, and why listening to those signals can completely change the direction we take.

We also talk about:

• Nervous system regulation and the early warning signs of burnout
• Why hustle culture and online business pressure can increase isolation
• The role of community and in-person connection in mental health
• How to start listening to your body before burnout hits

If you’re a driven professional, entrepreneur, or high achiever questioning the cost of hustle culture, this episode will likely feel familiar.

Transcript

  Hello and welcome back. This is the Audio of the Weekly Recharge Newsletter, and my name is Renee Mansfield, the founder of Wayward Wellness Coaching. If you have come across this through my podcast, hustle Rebels,

I Welcome you to subscribe to the weekly Recharge newsletter that comes out every Wednesday where you'll be able to listen to a audio or you can read it in your email and I will have the link in the show notes. Otherwise,

enjoy the audio version of the weekly recharge

when your nervous system is trying to tell you something. The problem isn't always discipline, motivation, or productivity. Sometimes you're just lonely. Some of the things we'll cover this week are why pushing harder online sometimes makes loneliness worse. How your nervous system sends alarm signals long before burnout.

The hidden cost of losing real life connection in community, and a simple body scan to help you listen to what your system is actually asking for.

If I'm being honest,

i've been feeling pretty off this entire month

for most of February. I kept trying to figure out kind of what was wrong. Maybe my hormone levels were off. Maybe it's just the middle of winter. Maybe it's because Massachusetts feels like a frozen tundra this time of the year, and the sun just disappears for months, which this year feels especially difficult for some reason.

Yeah, all reasonable theories, but none of them actually explained this current feeling. You can call it seasonal depression, but honestly, I'm familiar with that. I mean, I'm buffalonian I, but this is different. It feels deeper. It's more like a feeling of misalignment. That sense that no matter what I do with the business, nothing really seems to move the needle.

Almost like fishing with great bait, the worms are good, the setup is right, and every once in a while you feel a nibble, then another nibble. But when you reel the line back in, the worms are all gone and somehow there's still nothing to show for it. So like a good business person in 2026, I did what we're told to do.

I pushed harder online, more posting, more content, more LinkedIn activity, more trying to get my face out there, because apparently that's the formula. Now, if you want to succeed, you must create content, build a personal brand, stay visible, show up online every day. So I tried to push through it, and the strange thing was the harder I pushed online, the worst I felt, not because the work itself was hard.

It's just posting online when you're used to a physical job. Posting content as a job just sounds ridiculous, but because every time I logged off, the same feeling was just still there, and I guess I just didn't want to admit that this is what it was. Overwhelming loneliness, and this is the realization that I didn't want to admit.

It finally hit me this week for most of my adult life. I was surrounded by people when I worked at the fire station. Every shift meant meeting new humans, sometimes at their worst moments, sometimes in chaos, sometimes in situations that none of us really asked for, to be honest. But there were always people.

Faces, voices, energy in the room, stories to share. And over the last year, especially the last seven months, that disappeared. Now, most days, the only beings I see in person, at least until Nick gets home are my dogs, which to be fair, are fantastic company. I love them, but they are not exactly known for deep philosophical conversations.



Here's the interesting part. Your nervous system usually figures things out , long before your mind catches up. Mine had been sending signals for weeks, fatigue, back pain, creeping back in low motivation. That vague sense of something being off, and I kept trying to analyze it logically, but my body had already figured out the problem.

I just wasn't listening. It was missing community.

Real people, real conversations, real energy, not just comment sections and notifications. So this week I stopped trying to optimize the feeling and instead I listened. I went back to boxing. Despite the back pain, I ironically kept putting off boxing because of I started getting outside again.

I reintroduced some of the routines that used to make me feel like myself. even after that massive snowstorm that we got last week and something shifted just in a matter of a few days, nothing dramatic. Just better, more grounded, more energized, more like my nervous system had finally exhaled.

So just lean in with me for a second. Your nervous system has an alarm system. It's not always loud at first. Sometimes it whispers. It sounds like fatigue, tension, restlessness. A sense that something just isn't right. Most of us try to override it because that's the logical thing to do. Push harder, work more, distract ourselves.

But those signals aren't random. They're information. Your body is trying to tell you something about what it needs, not what productivity culture says you should need. What you need. So here's a simple place to start.

If you wanna get better at hearing those signals, start with something simple. A body scan, just a few minutes of actually paying attention to what your body is feeling instead of powering through it. I had recorded a short one for you that you can try here. The link is in the email.

You might be surprised and honestly don't question what your body might be trying to say. For me, it had been telling me to start my day with bone broth and a grapefruit, go back to boxing a few days a week and prioritize more in-person connection, along with a few other things like listening to my intuition more.

Since I started doing those things, it has made a world of difference, so consider it and experiment a test. See what your body has to say. Notice the first things that come up. Write 'em down. Try them for the next few weeks and just see how you feel.

That is the first step in building that nervous system regulation trust between your mind and your body. And if you missed my latest podcast episode, I talked about the recent Massachusetts snowstorm and something bigger underneath it. How hustle culture and burnout conditioning quietly train high achievers to push through situations that probably should have been a collective pause, so you can go back and listen to my latest episode.

Burnout, productivity and Power. Why High Achievers are Still expected to work during a Blizzard? As always, I appreciate you guys and I'm always here If you have any questions or even a chat, if you have resonated with this newsletter, please feel free to reply back. I'd love to hear what you guys are going through and if I can help in any way, share the weekly recharge with a friend so that they can also be regulated just like you guys.

See you guys next week.