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BONUS: Exhausted by Design (Part 2) - Subscriptions You Forgot to Cancel · Hustle Rebels: Burnout Recovery for Over-Achievers

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: That's what burnout does.
• 0:01
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't always scream.
• 0:03
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes it slowly erases your will to show up.
• 0:07
  SPEAKER_00: When you're stressed, you need to work out, eat healthy, get out in nature.
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_00: And I did.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_00: I was at that time the best shape of my life.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_00: But underneath it all, I was just running on fumes.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_00: I was a product of the diet culture.
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_00: Even from a young age, I never had a great relationship of what it meant to be a healthy individual.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_00: I was filling up my body with every supplement, electrolyte, creatine, protein powder, everything you can think of.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_00: But you cannot out train a dysregulated nervous system.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_00: You can't green juice your way out of survival mode.
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_00: Looking back now, I can see that my body was certainly trying to get my attention.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_00: And I just kept ignoring them in the name of hustle culture and overdrive.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_00: Just like ignoring those credit card bills.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_00: The longer you avoid it, the louder and redder the statements get.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_00: This is Hustle Rebels, a space for people who know how to grind, but are starting to question the cost.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_00: I spent years as a firefighter paramedic living in high alert mode, thinking that burnout meant I just wasn't resilient enough.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_00: Turns out my nervous system never got the memo that the danger had passed.
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_00: And I see the same thing in leaders, professionals, and high achievers everywhere.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_00: They're successful on paper, but exhausted underneath it.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_00: 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.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_00: This isn't about quitting your job or blowing up your life.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_00: It's sustainable success.
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_00: Regulating your system so the life that you've worked so hard to build doesn't quietly drain you.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_00: 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.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_00: Have you ever noticed that it's not always the big stuff that breaks you?
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_00: It's the little stuff that piles up until your body finally sends that bill.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_00: That's what I mean by the hidden fees.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_00: It's the quiet costs, the ones that come out of your energy account without you realizing it.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_00: 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.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_00: I used to think burnout happened to people that couldn't handle stress.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_00: I prided myself on being able to handle a lot of stress.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_00: 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.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_00: And the way that it showed up for me, those hidden fees showed up very slowly and compounded on top of each other.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_00: For example, I was drinking a lot more than I wanted to admit, not blackout drunk.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_00: I wasn't falling apart, but I just wanted to numb a lot of things out.
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_00: The kind of mentality that I earned this vodka soda and then it turned into three.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_00: 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.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_00: I was snapping over everything.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_00: The smallest things were setting me off.
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_00: Traffic, noise, a text notification, everything just felt way too much.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_00: I wasn't sleeping very well.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_00: My brain just couldn't shut off even when I did have the ability to rest.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_00: I would just lie there scrolling, wide awake at 2 a.m., exhausted, yet still wired.
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_00: And at that point, I started just pulling away from everything.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_00: Conversations were just incredibly draining.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_00: Hanging out with people felt like work.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_00: Even with the band, which is something that I loved, started to feel more like an obligation.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_00: 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.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_00: 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.
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_00: That's what burnout does.
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't always scream.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes it slowly erases your will to show up.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_00: And the wild part is that I was doing what I thought was right.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_00: They say when you're stressed, you need to work out, eat healthy, get out in nature.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_00: And I did.
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_00: I was at that time the best shape of my life.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_00: I was deadlifting 245 pounds.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_00: I was hiking almost every single day that I was off shift with my dog.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_00: I was eating what I thought was very clean, nutrient-des-dense food, high protein, getting vegetables in, cutting out carbs.
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_00: But underneath it all, I was just running on fumes.
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_00: I was a product of the diet culture.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_00: Even from the young age of 10, I remember going to weight loss support groups with my mom called Take Off Pounds Sensibly.
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, Jesus.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_00: It was just craziness.
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_00: As an adult, I'm running on caffeine and constant output.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_00: I was an incredible product of the diet culture growing up.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_00: 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.
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_00: And so that was just this constant output.
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_00: And then on top of that, my gut was wrecked, my sleep was wrecked, my hormones completely wrecked.
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_00: But I thought I was checking every wellness box and yet still falling apart.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_00: And my blood work, all of it showed completely fine.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_00: I was filling up my body with every supplement, electrolyte, creatine, protein powder, everything you can think of.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_00: But you cannot out-train a dysregulated nervous system.
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_00: You can't green juice your way out of survival mode.
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_00: You surely cannot gratitude journal your way out of chronic depletion.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_00: Looking back now, I can see that my body was certainly trying to get my attention.
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_00: I was withdrawing too much from the bank, and these were the hidden fees that I was not paying attention to.
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_00: The statements were coming in, piling up quietly, and I just kept ignoring them in the name of hustle culture and overdrive.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_00: Just like ignoring those credit card bills, the longer you avoid it, the louder and redder the statements get.
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_00: 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.
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_00: Suddenly I just freed up six gigabytes of space.
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_00: It's really how these hidden fees work.
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_00: 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.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_00: These things seem small on their own, but they all add up until your system just starts lagging, crashing, glitching out.
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_00: And by the time you finally notice your system is just totally out of storage, don't let that be your nervous system economy.
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_00: 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.
• 8:53
  SPEAKER_00: Speaking of subscriptions that you forgot to cancel.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_00: 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.
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_00: For me, it was the constant need to prove that I was fine and capable.
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_00: This need to people please and prove my worth.
• 9:17
  SPEAKER_00: That unspoken, I can handle it subscription that renews every time you say yes when you really mean no.
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe it's a relationship running on expired terms or a job that drains you.
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_00: Perhaps it's even a coping mechanism that started as a lifeline and now has turned into a leash.
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_00: The nervous system loves familiarity.
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_00: Even when something is unhealthy, if it's predictable, we will stay.
• 9:51
  SPEAKER_00: 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.
• 10:05
  SPEAKER_00: So you keep auto-renewing things that you should have canceled a long ass time ago.
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_00: You had these stress memberships, drama subscriptions, guilt packages.
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_00: Every time you replay an old story about not being good enough, it's just another renewal.
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_00: Every time you say, I don't have time for rest, that's another renewal.
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_00: Every time you check your email during dinner, that's another renewal.
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_00: And what's wild is that the body doesn't even need to be in physical danger to be burned out.
• 10:44
  SPEAKER_00: Just the anticipation of stress alone costs the same amount of energy as the stress itself.
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_00: Your nervous system doesn't even know the difference between this is happening and I'm imagining that this is happening.
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_00: It still pays out.
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_00: That's the wild thing.
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_00: So the subscriptions just keep running in the background, draining your energy like too many apps that are just running all at once.
• 11:13
  SPEAKER_00: Canceling them means getting honest about what actually serves you.
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_00: Not what looks good on paper, not what people expect from you, but what genuinely makes your system feel safe.
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_00: That's your new definition of success.
• 11:34
  SPEAKER_00: Nervous system safety.
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_00: Looking back now, I can see how many of those subscriptions were running my own life.
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_00: 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.
• 11:54
  SPEAKER_00: I told myself that these were virtues, it's resilience, it's discipline, it's selflessness.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_00: They were really just invoices in disguise.
• 12:06
  SPEAKER_00: My body was sending me warnings, but I filed them under later, and later became never.
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_00: Your nervous system doesn't forget the bills that you ignore.
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_00: Trust me, just like a credit card company, right?
• 12:25
  SPEAKER_00: They will never ever get the bills that you ignore.
• 12:28
  SPEAKER_00: It just stops sending polite reminders and just starts shutting down your services, right?
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_00: First its focus, then sleep, then joy until all that is left is function.
• 12:44
  SPEAKER_00: And even that runs on borrowed energy.
• 12:47
  SPEAKER_00: 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.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm gonna switch gears a little bit.
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_00: This is one that I'm actually super passionate about because I ended up having a huge wake-up call.
• 13:09
  SPEAKER_00: 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.
• 13:25
  SPEAKER_00: Because of this, I realized the importance of eating clean foods, actual clean foods, not just diet clean foods, right?
• 13:37
  SPEAKER_00: The ones that were sold to be known as healthy.
• 13:41
  SPEAKER_00: So, with that said, I want to talk about the biggest hidden fees of gut debt, the stress you eat.
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_00: 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.
• 13:59
  SPEAKER_00: The gut and brain talk constantly through the vagus nerve.
• 14:03
  SPEAKER_00: 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.
• 14:12
  SPEAKER_00: 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.
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_00: So no matter how healthy you eat, your system isn't absorbing properly.
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_00: 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.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_00: 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.
• 14:49
  SPEAKER_00: And there's also the hidden cost of eating shit all the time.
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_00: 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.
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_00: Trust me, I'm guilty of it.
• 15:09
  SPEAKER_00: Which again brings me to another point: the actual food.
• 15:14
  SPEAKER_00: There's the hidden costs of eating that shit all the time.
• 15:18
  SPEAKER_00: And like I said, I don't just mean the drive-throughs and the hangover pizza.
• 15:22
  SPEAKER_00: 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.
• 15:36
  SPEAKER_00: 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.
• 15:53
  SPEAKER_00: They don't just make you bloated or tired, they break down the gut barrier itself.
• 15:58
  SPEAKER_00: It's that thin lining in your intestines.
• 16:01
  SPEAKER_00: It's supposed to act like a security guard, letting in nutrients and keeping toxins out.
• 16:07
  SPEAKER_00: But when you're in chronic stress, inflammatory foods then punch holes through that barrier.
• 16:14
  SPEAKER_00: When that happens, proteins and toxins start slipping through into that bloodstream can lead to something called leaky gut syndrome.
• 16:23
  SPEAKER_00: Your immune system freaks out, inflammation skyrockets, and suddenly your nervous system is fighting fires 24-7.
• 16:30
  SPEAKER_00: But really, that's something that started in your gut and then it became a systemic problem.
• 16:36
  SPEAKER_00: Brain fog, fatigue, random body aches, even autoimmune diseases that are rampant.
• 16:44
  SPEAKER_00: Half the time it's not these issues or mental health, it's your body in full-scale inflammatory response.
• 16:51
  SPEAKER_00: So when I say that you can't regulate a dysregulated gut, I mean it quite literally.
• 16:57
  SPEAKER_00: You can't build calm on top of chemical chaos.
• 17:01
  SPEAKER_00: You can't ask your brain to feel safe when your gut is screaming danger at the molecular level.
• 17:10
  SPEAKER_00: My version of healthy used to be control and falling into this diet culture: perfect macros, prepped meals, caffeine is breakfast.
• 17:21
  SPEAKER_00: Even though my body looked strong, my gut was completely wrecked.
• 17:27
  SPEAKER_00: When your gut's inflamed, your vagus nerve gets the same signal it would during stress, which is danger.
• 17:35
  SPEAKER_00: That keeps your nervous system stuck in that sympathetic overdrive.
• 17:39
  SPEAKER_00: You can't regulate when your gut's screaming that you're under attack.
• 17:44
  SPEAKER_00: Remember, it can't tell the difference.
• 17:46
  SPEAKER_00: Your body's not asking for kale, it's asking for calm.
• 17:51
  SPEAKER_00: The cost of constantly eating in a stressed-out state with highly processed shit foods covered in preservatives and chemicals is massive.
• 18:02
  SPEAKER_00: Inflammation, brain fog, anxiety, poor sleep.
• 18:07
  SPEAKER_00: These are all symptoms of a body that doesn't feel safe, digesting life, digesting foods.
• 18:15
  SPEAKER_00: Gut health isn't just a diet trend.
• 18:18
  SPEAKER_00: It's literally a nervous system strategy.
• 18:22
  SPEAKER_00: 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.
• 18:35
  SPEAKER_00: 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.
• 18:47
  SPEAKER_00: Perhaps the family dynamic where you're the only peacekeeper and everyone else gets to explode, those are emotional robbers.
• 18:58
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes you're the one that's actually holding the door open for them.
• 19:05
  SPEAKER_00: That's the crazy part.
• 19:06
  SPEAKER_00: 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.
• 19:26
  SPEAKER_00: 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.
• 19:53
  SPEAKER_00: That's the emotional equivalent of someone cleaning out your bank account while you're still trying to.
• 20:00
  SPEAKER_00: Make deposits, eventually you start guarding yourself, shutting down, numbing out, overcompensating with perfectionism and people pleasing.
• 20:10
  SPEAKER_00: That's not personality, that's protection.
• 20:14
  SPEAKER_00: So the question becomes who has access to your energy account?
• 20:21
  SPEAKER_00: And do they deserve it?
• 20:24
  SPEAKER_00: Because you can't build wealth in an environment that keeps robbing you.
• 20:30
  SPEAKER_00: Looking back now, I can see how many withdrawals I let happen in silence.
• 20:36
  SPEAKER_00: How many times I just smiled through discomfort.
• 20:40
  SPEAKER_00: How many times I made other people's comfort my priority and called it strength.
• 20:48
  SPEAKER_00: 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.
• 21:02
  SPEAKER_00: Every symptom was a message.
• 21:05
  SPEAKER_00: Every shutdown was self-preservation.
• 21:09
  SPEAKER_00: And my body wasn't broken.
• 21:12
  SPEAKER_00: It was doing exactly as it was designed to do.
• 21:16
  SPEAKER_00: Protect me when I refused to protect myself.
• 21:21
  SPEAKER_00: The nervous system doesn't speak in words, it speaks in signals.
• 21:26
  SPEAKER_00: And ignoring these signals is the most expensive fucking bill you will ever pay.
• 21:34
  SPEAKER_00: So here's your reflection for the week.
• 21:36
  SPEAKER_00: What subscriptions are you still paying for?
• 21:39
  SPEAKER_00: Emotionally, mentally, physically, that no longer serve you?
• 21:43
  SPEAKER_00: What foods, people, habits, or coping mechanisms keep auto-charging your nervous system?
• 21:50
  SPEAKER_00: And what emotional robbers have access to your calm?
• 21:55
  SPEAKER_00: What would happen if you finally just changed your password?
• 21:58
  SPEAKER_00: Remember, calm isn't a reward.
• 22:02
  SPEAKER_00: It's a baseline.
• 22:03
  SPEAKER_00: You don't earn regulation by achieving more.
• 22:08
  SPEAKER_00: You reclaim it by canceling what's been costing you your peace.
• 22:13
  SPEAKER_00: Burnout isn't a sign of weakness, it's a collection notice from your body.
• 22:19
  SPEAKER_00: But the good news, you can rebuild that wealth.
• 22:24
  SPEAKER_00: Just one small deposit at a time.
• 22:27
  SPEAKER_00: 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.
• 22:42
  SPEAKER_00: Because you don't need to keep proving your worth through exhaustion.
• 22:48
  SPEAKER_00: You just need to start living like your energy is currency.
• 22:52
  SPEAKER_00: Because that's what it is.
• 22:53
  SPEAKER_00: 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.
• 23:03
  SPEAKER_00: See you next week.