Hey everybody, welcome back to the podcast. This episode is for all of you high achievers, all of us high achievers. Those of us who approach life feeling like it is our job to always do our best. Today, I want to talk about overwhelm and overeating and what happens when doing your best is too much?
What does that mean? Do you have to give up being a high achiever? Do you have to give up the idea of doing your best? Let’s talk about it.
So recently I started working with a new client. This new client definitely fits the mold of being a high achiever. She has had a brilliant career. She’s done amazing things in her life. She is highly confident about her ability to make things happen, solve problems… except as you might not be surprised in that area of her relationship with food and with overeating and with emotional eating.
And we were talking about what it is that she wanted to achieve in working with me and what her goals were for her eating. And she said, “you know what? I think the problem is I just need to stop doing my best”. I said, what do you mean? She said, well, I do my best at everything. I always have to do my best. I hold myself to this standard. And sometimes it’s a ridiculous standard.
But doing my best always. I know it’s led to burnout. I know it’s led to exhaustion. I know it causes me a ton of stress. I know sometimes I don’t get enough sleep because I’m so busy doing my best. And I know that is all tangled up in the pattern of overeating that I am trying to break.
But it’s not that easy because when you are somebody who expects to do your best and is good at doing your best and always shows up and does your best, there are advantages to that. Right?
I mean, this client can clearly see that her amazing professional success came from being the person who always showed up and gave 110 percent. And actually, we were joking, it isn’t even 110%. She is such an overachiever, that she really has become comfortable in an uncomfortable way over functioning in lots of areas of her life.
Over functioning has become her normal. Her a hundred percent, right? I’m going to give it a hundred percent is really most people’s 150 percent. And of course, when you always show up and you always give 150 percent in some areas, you create amazing results.
But you also create an unsustainable reality. Right? You create burnout, you create exhaustion, you create stress. You create coping strategies that are not ideal, like reaching for something to eat in order to keep getting through in order to be able to keep showing up and give that 150 percent to the rest of the world.
There are other disadvantages to being somebody who has that standard of always doing your best. And that is that most of the time, when you have that standard, it is not only impossible to sustain, but most of the time your brain is always going to be telling you not about the amazing job that you have done and all the bests that you have done.
Your brain is usually going to be telling you about how you could be doing more. How you have missed the mark. How your best could really be maybe 155 percent or 160%. The best keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger inside our heads, and we can never catch up.
I see this happening all the time inside Your Missing Peace, which is the program where I work with women to create freedom from overeating and peace with food. I work with a lot of high achievers. And it is so common when women start the program, to have a lot of thoughts that are based on this pressure to do your best.
Thoughts like I’m not trying hard enough. I know I’m going to need to do more. I need to be putting in more time in the program. I’m letting myself down. I’m not doing this right. I should be getting this faster. This should be making more sense to me. I should be getting results right away. Right?
And all that pressure about doing your best and doing, having the best performance and creating the best results again, leads to burnout. It leads to quitting on yourself because what your brain is telling you should be able to do is unsustainable.
It leads to, and this is really important, making promises about things you are going to do because you believe these are the things that you have to do or should do. Making promises that you can’t keep in the long term or for the long term. And that leads to a cycle of feeling disappointed in yourself or feeling guilty or blaming yourself or feeling ashamed.
And you’re probably already hearing this, but this whole idea of doing your best gets hopelessly tangled up with perfectionism. Doing your best so often becomes equated with getting something perfect. And a set of impossible standards that might be possible for that one hour or might be possible for that one project, but are impossible to maintain forever.
Being your best. All the time in all the things, especially when your best is defined in the way I’m talking about now, or certainly when your best is being defined in the way I’m talking about now- is impossible. So, this new client comes to me and she says, I know this is a problem for me. I know this is leading to a lot of stress eating and overeating and mindless eating, because that is my reward after I’ve spent all this energy doing my best and big sigh, she lets out this big breath and she says, I know I really need to stop doing my best.
And she sounds deflated. She sounds resigned. But deflated because this is somebody who doing her best is in her blood. Performing at a high-quality level is really important to her. This is how she shows up in the world. And honestly, doing her best is who she is. Not doing her best is pretty near impossible. And it felt like a big loss for her to be contemplating this.
So, here’s what I want to propose to you. If you are somebody who is always doing your best, who is always showing up, who is doing the things, who is functioning at 150%. What if we reframe this? What if the problem isn’t that you are doing your best? What if you don’t need to relax your standards?
What if we just need to look at it differently? Because here is what I believe. I believe you can continue to do your best. You don’t have to give that up. The problem is that it is so important to be honest about what doing your best really is. And for most of us, we need to redefine what our best is so that it really is our best.
I’ll tell you more about what I mean by that. If you’re putting all your energy or a disproportionate amount of energy into one sphere of your life. And at the same time, you’re ignoring the effects of pulling that energy away from the other areas of your life, that is not necessarily your best. And it is certainly not the best.
Let me give you another way of thinking about this. Imagine that you draw a circle and what you put inside that circle is what needs to be accounted for as you do your best. An error or a mistake that I see all the time is putting one or two things in that circle and then ignoring the impact that focusing on the things in that circle has on everything else.
Women, especially, tend to be very good at leaving themselves and their own needs and their own life outside of that circle.
Here’s another example. If I was the parent of a small child and I wanted to do my best to help her learn how to read, for instance, I could try a lot of things and maybe I would, I might read to her a lot. I might buy books that would interest her. I might take her to the library. I might take her to story hour. I might even hire a tutor.
I could do a lot of things to fall into that sphere of I’m doing my best to help her learn how to read. But I definitely wouldn’t spend so much time on all those things that I stopped taking care of my child’s basic needs. I wouldn’t spend so much time and energy on teaching her how to read that I stopped feeding her. Or I stopped making sure that she wore a warm coat when it was cold outside. Or making sure that she slept. Making sure that she was clean.
It would not occur to me to ignore those things. And I would absolutely believe that I was doing my best to help her learn how to read. Because at the same time I wanted to do my best at helping her learn how to read, all my parental responsibilities, all the care that she needed to live a healthy, well life would automatically fall inside the circle of what needed to happen while I was doing my best at teaching her how to read.
It might not even occur to me to write those things down inside the circle because they are so non-negotiable. No matter how important it would be to me that I teach her how to read, all that other stuff absolutely needs to be there too.
We don’t tend to treat ourselves the way we parent. And so many smart women leave very important things outside of their circle when they define doing their best.
Somehow it becomes okay to pour 150 percent of yourself into work and to skip nourishing yourself, nourishing your body and your spirit. How many times have you been so busy doing your best that you skipped lunch or you grabbed something from the vending machine instead of taking time to feed yourself? And what did that lead to as the day and the evening wore on?
It is so tempting to be so focused on doing your best on that one thing that’s inside the circle and completely neglect your need for rest and sleep and the very human need for downtime.
Or to ignore managing your physical needs that have to be taken care of if you are going to avoid stress and burnout. Or to completely override your need for connection and social time, because you’re so busy doing your best for other people or other people’s agendas or for work or for something else.
Doing your best might be a part of your DNA. That’s fine. But if it is leading to stress and overwhelm and burnout that is lasting more than a few hours, it probably needs reframing.
Now, I want to point out, I am not talking about doing your best during a crunch time or during one short period of your life where some things may fall by the wayside or you may have to have a plan B or a different set of non-negotiables for going through that short period of time.
I’m talking right now about that chronic ongoing expectation that I’m somebody who shows up and always does my best and I can’t let anything slide because that wouldn’t be good. Except, as I’m pointing out, the anything that you’re unwilling to let slide tends to be the few things that are inside the circle. When in reality, the way that you are attending to those things and giving 160 percent is that you are letting all sorts of other things slide that actually are what’s required for you to be at your best.
Doing your best has to include you. and your needs. Doing your best shouldn’t kill you. It shouldn’t shorten your lifespan. That is not the best use of you. Doing your best shouldn’t result in habits that you are using to numb the pain or to get through, like overeating. Right?
Grabbing something to eat because it is the only nice thing that you did for yourself all day long. Or grabbing something to eat so that you can give yourself a little break as you plow through the next project. Or grabbing something to eat because you’re miserable. And this is the thing that gives you some kind of solace so that you can keep going, quote unquote, doing your best.
Your best, doing your best, except possibly on very rare occasions, that should be sustainable. And in those rare exceptions where doing your best is clearly not sustainable, but you’re telling yourself, I just need to get through this thing. In those rare exceptions, I would also recommend that you are at least thinking about how to make it sustainable or about how to take care of yourself.
Because self-care needs to be a part of doing your best. And if it’s not, there will always be pushback or fallout. Which is also likely to include finding yourself in the pantry or at the drive thru with a deep craving to eat all the things.
Doing your best needs to include you inside that circle. And the self-care that you need inside that circle.
There’s one more thing that might be helpful about this concept of doing your best and what really is your best. Most of us have an idealized version of ourselves that is actually incredibly unrealistic.
We tell ourselves that if we were really Attaining our ideal, if we were really our best selves, then we’d be able to do all the things and we wouldn’t need so much. If we were really at our best, we would be able to do all the things and we would need less. We wouldn’t suffer from doing our best and ignoring ourselves. Because, and here is the really big lie that is so important to pay attention to. If we were at our best, we wouldn’t need all the things that human beings need.
The lie is that this idealistic version of ourselves at our best wouldn’t need the rest. Wouldn’t need the stress relief. Wouldn’t need the connection. Wouldn’t need the self-kindness. Wouldn’t need the time to decompress. Because somehow, we would be superhuman.
Our brains tell us the lie that if we were perfect, we could quote, do our best end quote with all of the things. And we could ignore ourselves because we wouldn’t have needs and we would just not overeat. We could do our best. We could ignore ourself. We wouldn’t have any needs and we wouldn’t overeat. This is not how it works.
Your brain is lying to you. You were not made to be superhuman. It is not possible. And if you ignore yourself, there will always be consequences. This is true for everyone. If it’s not overeating, it’s going to be wine, or it’s going to be weed, or it’s going to be spending or sex or overworking or being an irritable tyrant or something else.
You are not superhuman. And if you ignore yourself, there will always be consequences.
I’m going to give you an inside tip about something that we spend actually a lot of time on inside your missing piece because believe it or not, I think it is a fantastic goal to want to be your best. We just have to be clear on what that really is.
Here’s the tip that unstoppable self that you are aiming for. She is not a perfect Stepford wife. She’s not a superhero. She’s unstoppable and she’s free from overeating because she knows what doing and being her best really involves. She knows what it means to do your best when it’s a bad day or a good day. Or when she’s faced with a seemingly impossible task that she wants to do her best at.
Doing your best and being your best and creating freedom from overeating means getting real about who you really are. and what you really need and what it really takes to show up for yourself. And making sure those things are inside the circle when you think about you showing up and being your best.
So, take some time after this episode and literally draw that circle. And then start adding what doing your best includes. No guilt, no self-blame. Be curious. What does being your best, doing your best, what needs to be inside that circle?
And what have you been leaving out of that being your best circle?
And most importantly, what are you willing to start adding back in?
I’ll talk to you soon.