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Unpopular Opinion: Burnout Recovery Can Make You More Exhausted · Hustle Rebels: Burnout Recovery for Over-Achievers

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: All I felt was exhaustion, and she said, Stop trying so hard.
• 0:05
  SPEAKER_00: I legit wanted to punch her in the fucking face.
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_00: Just kidding.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_00: Violence is never the answer.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_00: But it did make me stop and think, why as overachievers and hustlers do we always have to burn ourselves to the ground, even in the name of healing?
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_00: This is Hustle Rebels.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_00: I'm Renee, your host, and this podcast is for people who still want to win, but aren't willing to burn themselves down to the ground to do it.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_00: Now, if you've pushed yourself through every kind of tired there is and then hit a wall that didn't quite feel like tired at all, stick with me.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_00: Because by the end of this episode, you'll understand why your body keeps scanning for danger long after the danger is gone.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_00: Why working harder can't fix this particular kind of exhaustion, and what it actually takes to let yourself take your time.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_00: And real quick, if this is already hitting close to home, hit subscribe.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_00: This is how we start to dismantle the hustle culture without opting out of ambition.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_00: So this one's a little personal.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_00: For the last few months, I have been sitting in an exhaustion that I really don't have a name for.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_00: And figuring out where it actually came from cracked open about 10 tiers of patterns I didn't even really know I had existing in the background.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_00: So for the last decade, I trained my nervous system to run on hypervigilance like it was my full-time job.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_00: Anyone who has worked as a first responder has known the drill.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_00: A 24 turns into a 72 because the snow won't stop and neither will the call volume, and people keep calling in.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_00: 10 dunks cold brews deep, running on adrenaline, a little bit of Adderall, and the promise that overtime check is going to look sweet enough to justify it all is the kind of exhaustion I know intimately.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_00: I've really never been a stranger to tiredness.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_00: But this was different.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_00: I went to a retreat, did some real deep inner healing work, and honestly, I expected to come out on the other side lighter, rejuvenated, recharged, even have some business networking, whatever that brochure usually promises.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_00: But instead, I kind of got hit with this crazy heaviness I didn't really have a name for.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_00: Exhaustion that almost felt existential.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_00: I brought it to my coach and walked her through every single thing I've been doing to try to fix it.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_00: And she just paused and said, Stop trying so hard.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_00: And honestly, I wanted to fight her on it.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_00: My brain went straight to how am I supposed to stop being tired if I don't find the root cause to fix it?
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_00: That's how I've solved every problem in my life.
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_00: Find it, fix it, push through it.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_00: But that comment kind of cracked something open for me.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_00: Here's what I began to realize.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_00: For 10 years, I had trained my reticular activating system, that part of your brain that decides what's worth your attention, to constantly scan for danger all of the time.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I still find myself facing the door in any room that I walk into, map out the exits before I sit down.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_00: I'm clocking the drivers on the highway when which one is about to do something stupid and moronic before they even know it themselves.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_00: I'm reading rooms, reading people.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_00: I try to be two steps ahead of a threat that most days is not actually there.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_00: I never let my nervous system stand down, not once, in the last 10 years.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_00: So when I finally felt real relief in my nervous system this past March, for the first time that I can remember, it was honestly like a dam had been broken.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_00: Ten years of exhaustion I had been holding back on pure adrenaline came rushing through all at once.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_00: And then this small moment happened.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_00: I got out of the shower and instead of doing what I think a lot of women listening could actually probably relate to, slapping lotion all over my face and my arms and calling it a day, I actually put lotion all over my body for the first time.
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_00: And I actually looked at it.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_00: This body that has survived a near-death experience that came back from surgeries that should have slowed me down for a very long time.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_00: And the thought that came was take your time.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_00: Three words.
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_00: And it kind of wrecked me a little bit because I realized I had no idea what that actually meant.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_00: Here's the lie that the hustle culture sells all of us.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_00: When you're exhausted, the answer is to do something about it, optimize, biohack it, push through it.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_00: That instinct, the one that says fix it now, isn't ambition.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_00: It's hyper-vigilance wearing a fancy blazer.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_00: We live in a go-go go society that has trained us to forget what it actually means to just enjoy something.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_00: Walking my dogs and actually hearing the birds instead of mentally drafting my to-do list and listening to another masterclass to learn something new.
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_00: Which there's nothing wrong with that, but sometimes it's nice to just enjoy the outdoors.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_00: Driving somewhere without treating the commute like a hostage situation.
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_00: Cooking a meal with whole, real ingredients and actually tasting it with Nick instead of inhaling it standing up.
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I once timed myself eating a full fucking steak and it took me 30 seconds.
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_00: 30 seconds.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_00: Sitting on a patio, I finally felt well enough to clean this weekend.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_00: And just talking.
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe smoking a little joint, you know, you never know.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_00: Not productively, just talking.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_00: And here's what matters from all of this.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_00: Most people think exhaustion is a problem to solve.
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes it's not.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes it's your body finally feeling safe enough to hand you the bill it's been holding for a decade.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_00: What actually changes things isn't more effort.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_00: It's proof.
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_00: Real, repeated proof that you're finally allowed to stand down.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_00: Your nervous system doesn't take your word for it.
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_00: It needs actual evidence that it can.
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_00: And here's the part that I really need you to hear.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_00: You cannot hustle your way out of nervous system depletion.
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_00: Trying harder to rest is still the same type of pattern.
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_00: It's just wearing a wellness costume.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_00: I have fallen victim to it so often.
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_00: I know that was a lot that we discovered, so let's recap a little bit.
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_00: I mentioned a pattern.
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_00: For me, it was a decade of training my body to live in a fight or flight response and never letting it land anywhere else.
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_00: So I want you to ask yourself, where in your own life are you doing the same thing?
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_00: Running on alert and just calling it ambition.
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_00: And I talked about a cost.
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_00: For myself, an exhaustion that no supplement, no sleep, no strategy could even touch.
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_00: Because effort was the disease, not the cure.
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_00: So what have you been trying to fix with more effort that might actually need a little less?
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_00: And then you had the shift.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_00: Safety has to be proven to your body, not argued into it with friction.
• 7:25
  SPEAKER_00: So I'll ask you what I had to ask myself.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_00: What would it actually take to prove to your own body that it's safe enough to stop?
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_00: And once it feels that safety, you get to relearn something most of us never learned in the first place.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_00: How to take your time and just enjoy this life.
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_00: It's a novel idea, but we're allowed to enjoy this life.
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_00: If this episode lits something up inside of you, this is exactly the work that I do inside Burn the Blueprint, which is a four-week identity reset for people who have built a life on hypervigilance and are ready to finally find out who they are without it.
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_00: And right now I'm giving away the first week for free to all the listeners.
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_00: So the link is going to be in the show notes for you to download that for free.
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_00: And if you want more of this, I actually wrote about the patio and all of this shit in this week's weekly recharge newsletter.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_00: So you can read it, subscribe to it, or watch it and listen to it as well.
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_00: And the links are going to be below for that, along with other ways to support the podcast and follow along on the socials.
• 8:31
  SPEAKER_00: Just a reminder you don't need to heal faster.
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_00: You just need to take your time.
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_00: See you guys next week.