39: Why High Achieving Women Find It So Hard To Rest (And What To Do About It)

You know you need to slow down. You want to take it easy for a bit. So why does it feel so uncomfortable? If you’ve been stuck in overdrive for years, slowing down won’t automatically feel good. Tune in to discover the patterns that play out in the background  that keep you in overdrive, and how to teach your body that slowing down is safe.

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Transcript

If you have ever tried to relax, but it was impossible to switch your mind off or you felt guilty for sitting down, then today's episode is for you. Welcome, I'm Tertia, and you are listening to the Beyond Burnout for Driven Women Podcast where we end the cycle of burnout so you can feel more alive, connected, and in control of your life if you are a high achiever ready to move past overwhelm, overthinking and overdrive, and instead drop into your body so you can start living full out. You are in the right spot. Let's dive in. We are going to look at why is it so difficult for us as high achieving woman to rest? What is it that is causing us to always spin into overdrive? And I'm also going to of course, share with you some practical ways to begin to change that. So by the end of this episode, you'll not only understand why it is so difficult for us to race, but you will also have a way to change that.
High achieving women have a natural drive to excel. We have this internal drive for growth. We have this internal motivation to do well and to achieve, and that's a healthy motivation that we have on the inside. But I see that we get stuck in overdrive. We get stuck in these patterns of overwhelm and burnout because this natural drive of excellence has become distorted. So what was previously like a healthy expression of achievement now becomes an expression where we are driven by patterns that run in the background. It's almost like there's a computer app that's running in the background that's forcing you to show up in a way that is not healthy, that is cutting you off from your life force energy and that leaves you feeling out of control, disempowered, and like you don't have a say in your own life. Perfectionism is often conditioned very early in us.
So this is in our childhood when our parents give us positive regard. Whenever we do well, whenever we perform, we receive this approval from our peers, we receive this approval from the people in our lives, and we start to believe that when I do something correct, when I do it right, it means that I will receive the love. And if I fail, then I won't get that love. And so we begin to push ourselves to always do well, to always perform at a certain level and to always be perfect in our output. It also shows up as overcommitting or spending hours on completing a task. The more we get into this habit of being perfect, the more our nervous system begins to operate on this premise that I can't make mistakes, I can't risk this. I have to always get it right. And so it begins to go into a state of hypervigilance.
So this is where you repack the dishwasher after your partner has already packed it because your way of packing the dishwasher is the better way. Hyper responsibility is a second reason that high achieving women find it so difficult to rest. This is where we walk around with this belief that if I don't do it, it won't get done or it won't be done right. When you hyper responsible, it really feels as if the world is resting on your shoulders and everyone's needs become your needs. You're responsible for other people's emotions. You're responsible for other people's happiness. There's a kid at my son's school and he's mom is like this. She is forever getting involved in things that nobody's even asked her to get involved in. And she's forever arranging and organising tasks or projects on behalf of everyone else. One of the big reasons why this happens is that we live in a world where we are conditioned, a society that conditions us to take care of other people, to put other people's needs ahead of ourselves.
And especially as women, we are told that we are the caregivers, we are the nurturers, and we are responsible for making sure that other people are okay. If you combine this with someone who has a natural drive to excel and to do well, as is the case with us as high achieving woman, you can see how this hyper responsibility becomes a problem because of this pressure that we have to always be everything to everyone and to take care of everything less. It doesn't work out. We have this underlying sense of urgency that keeps our nervous system in fight or flight. So our brain interprets everything as urgent and we begin to find it difficult to prioritise and to slow down. Next on my list is busyness as worthiness, where we attach our worth directly to our output. If we don't achieve certain results. If we are not successful, it means that we don't have any value.
We are continuously filling our schedule. We tend to just pile up all of these tasks. And when we have a moment of space, we feel lost and we don't quite know what to do with that. Now, society definitely glorifies busyness. We even have an expression in Afrikaans, which is my mother language that directly translated says that if you're not doing anything, it's the pillow that the devil rests his head on, which means that you have to be busy. Don't just hang around and do nothing but do something. Earn your keep, prove your worth, and we internalise that. And whenever we are then not measuring up to that worth attachment that we have internalised, our nervous system goes into fight or flight, it keeps us again in a stress response. And whenever we are in the stress response, it's very difficult for us to relax and let go.
This fear of letting go is actually a fear of surrender. We are afraid of what will happen, will the world fall apart if we are not in control at all times and letting go feels unsafe? It feels unsafe in our nervous systems, and our fight or flight response gets directly activated. So where does this come from? Well, it's clear that trauma can cause us to shift into these patterns of perfectionism or people pleasing or vigilance, hyper responsibility, always keeping busy in order to stay safe. If you were constantly criticised as a child or if you experienced chronic emotional or mental neglect, this can also cause you to fall into these overdrive patterns. And then if you layer on that conditioning that tells us women need to work extra hard to prove themselves, and we have lost touch with our own natural rhythms, we don't honour the seasons that we are in the seasons of our life and even the season of our energy, our body, our menstrual cycle, because this is not the norm.
Then it becomes clear why it can feel so impossible for us to race and why we are always stuck in overdrive. So I want to just tap lightly on the nervous system. When I was experiencing burnout, my nervous system was stuck in fight or flight. And embodiment helped me to get out of this fight or flight mode, which had become a habit for me and access my vitality, access my aliveness, and access my passion, which was not available to me when I was stuck in fight or flight. So the high level overview of our nervous system, because this is not an episode about the nervous system, is that we have the two states, right? We have survive, which is fight or flight, and then we have thrive, which is rest and digest. And ideally, we want to have access to both of these states in order to live a well-rounded life.
If you or someone who struggles to rest and relax and let go, it's not because you are doing something wrong. It is a default state. It's a habit that you have developed. And so when these four patterns are running in the background, it just makes sense that we are stuck in overdrive. We are unable to switch off. Now, rest is not about sitting still, it's not about clearing space in your calendar, and it's not about having spa days. It is about rewiring the limiting beliefs around what makes you worthy, what makes you lovable, and what makes you enough. And it is about coming back into your body and healing the patterns that keep you stuck in overdrive so that you can thrive from the inside out so that you can become and connected and balanced in your life, your relationships, and your work. So what can you begin to do if you have recognised any of these overdrive patterns running in yourself?
If you are constantly struggling to slow down, switch off and rest and you're ready to begin to change that, I have some practises that I'd love to share with you. The very first practise is to become aware. You cannot change what you don't know. So it's important for us to begin to notice when these overdrive patterns are playing out. When this conflict arises, for example, whenever you rest, when you sit down where you don't have anything to do, what are the conversations in your mind? What are you thinking and what are you feeling? Begin to notice what is playing out in the background. What is the pattern that is busy showing itself here? And once you've started to identify that, you'll begin to notice that there's a common theme, a common thread through this. Now, the final practise that I want to share with you is the practise or the skill of coming into your body because it's a skill.
It's something that we could do when we were kids, but we, most of us have forgotten how to be in touch with our inner world, our internal felt sense. And so it's a skill that we can, again, begin to develop. And we want to do this so that we can start living from the space that holds our intuition and our pleasure and our vitality instead of living only from the mind. Now, to support you with this, to help you with this, I have a guided audio that you can download from my website. I'm going to leave the link for you below in the show notes so that you can go and grab that download. And this will help you tap into your body wisdom so that you can get clear on your next steps and begin to develop that sensitivity of coming back into your body.
I have two mantras, which I have adopted over the course of my own journey with breaking free from burnout and creating my life on my terms. And the first mantra is good enough, is good enough. And the second mantra is that I celebrate progress and not perfection. So you are welcome to take these mantras on for yourself. Good enough is good enough and celebrate progress, not perfection. I'd love to hear from you. Which of these four patterns is more prevalent in your life? Which ones show up the most for you? Send me a DM or even an email via my website. I would love to hear from you. Thank you so much for tuning in, and I'll speak to you in the next one. I.