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Welcome to Embodied Writing Warrior, the show where healing gets a book talk upgrade and consistency feels like foreplay.
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I'm Kayla, a writer, recovered white knuckler, wellness math 100 dropout, and the woman who turned her food freedom journey into a Y choose romance with two very opinionated inner archetypes.
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This is where high-performing, deeply creative women stop treating their bodies like a performance review and start treating their lives like the spicy novel they were always meant to be.
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Let's go.
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There are absolutely some people whose lives would change if they put more effort in.
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But if you're listening to this podcast, you're probably not one of those people.
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You're listening to a podcast with Warrior in the title.
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This is a show for high-performing, type A, hard-charging women.
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So you naturally have a lot of fire.
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And that is not a bad thing.
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We talk a lot on the show about this idea that your fire doesn't need dimmed, it needs aimed.
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But aiming doesn't mean adding more gasoline and kindling to an inferno that already exists inside you.
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I mean, unless you want to burn down your entire life.
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That's what this episode is about.
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The paradox for the women that this show is for is this.
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More effort often creates more problems, more burnout, more binge and emotional eating, as well as less consistency and less enjoyment of the journey.
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Manifestation culture, authors, philosophers, polar bears, lessons from my door-building job, and the nervous system all agree on this one.
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When you have that many disparate segments in agreement, you want to pay attention.
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Now, this episode is somewhat applicable to everyone, but I'm going to talk about why it's extra relevant to those of us who have a lot of intensity, ambition, and drive.
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So if you've been in the manifestation world, you've probably heard about the law of reversed effort.
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This is the idea that the harder you try to force something, the less successful you become.
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I first heard about this in the world of Woo, but then I did some digging to find its true origins so I could bring that to this episode.
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I am so happy I did because my research revealed something wildly important about the distinction between wellness math 100 and spicy storytelling 301.
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So one of the first people to
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discuss this law or this idea was Emily Q, and I hope I'm pronouncing that right.
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He wrote, When the will and the imagination are in conflict, the imagination always wins, without any exception.
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Now, is without any exception a wildly strong statement?
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Yes.
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But even if this is true most of the time, it's worth paying attention to.
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And this is so interesting for those of us who have dropped out of Wellness Math 100 because Wellness Math 100 is the class that focuses on will.
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So you are consciously counting calories, burning calories, doing the heroic exercise, no pain, no gain, trying to calculate and force your way into either a body transformation or food freedom or both.
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Then you get enraged when the math doesn't math.
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So you apply more will, which often makes everything even worse.
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Because if the imagination is in conflict with your will, the imagination will win.
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Especially if you have an untrained chaos dragon running around in your brain, writing disaster fanfic, bracing for worst-case scenarios, and telling limiting stories about how because you've struggled with food and eating for so long that you'll always struggle with it.
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On the other hand, spicy storytelling 301 is the classroom where you learn to use your imagination as a force for creating change and for telling new stories that you want to live out.
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And this isn't done using more discipline, pressure, or grinding it out.
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It's done using play and creativity.
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For a high-performing woman who already defaults to more pressure and more effort, play and creativity will do far more for you than another semester inside Wellness Math 100.
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And you can take this class as a self-study step by step inside my book, Food Freedom Fantasy, for$7.99.
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You can go to foodfreedomfantasy.com or grab the link in the description.
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Speaking of storytelling, you know who else talked about the law of reverse effort way back when?
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Aldous Huxley.
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If that name sounds familiar, it's because this is the man who wrote the dystopian classic, Brave New World.
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Just happened to be one of my all-time favorite books.
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It's actually the one that inspired my X-rated dystopian series, The Pleasure Seekers.
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I even quoted Brave New World at the beginning of book one.
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So this man knows things, and he once wrote, The harder we try with the conscious will to do something, the less we shall succeed.
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Proficiency and the results of proficiency come only to those who have learned the paradoxical art of doing and not doing, or combining relaxation with activity, of letting go as a person, that the eminent and transcendent unknown quantity may take hold.
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There's a key distinction in this quote I want to highlight.
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The quote doesn't say do nothing ever.
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It doesn't say don't try at all.
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It doesn't say sit on your couch, eat bonbons, and watch all 15 seasons of supernatural for the third time to see if you missed any prime Destiel subtext.
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Doing and not doing is an art form.
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Combining relaxation and activity is a skill.
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Most high-performing women have not mastered this.
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They're often exceptional at doing, doing, activity, doing, more activity, repeat until they're burned out and face down in crazy bread.
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So when you listen to another podcast that tells you to put more effort in, and then you put more effort in, you're not practicing this art form.
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Instead, you're creating a deeper level of imbalance.
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The harder you try, the more you struggle, either because you're miserable, burned out, or keep numbing out with food because you're so miserable, or all of the above.
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Then you hype yourself up with another fearless motivation speech on Spotify, apply more effort, feel worse, and the cycle continues.
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Then you also have the added challenge that happens after all that effort turns into self-sabotage or burnout.
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So this occurs when you have the off day or the off week.
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Now you're applying all this effort to get back on track.
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You're trying to climb out of the hole and avoid another binge, another setback.
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But the harder you try not to do something, the more focus and attention you're giving that unwanted thing.
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So Daniel Wagner did a study on polar bears, and he reveals what happens when you focus on not doing something.
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He told a bunch of people not to think about a polar bear.
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Suddenly, they were having more thoughts about white bears than they'd had all year.
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Your brain doesn't do negatives.
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If you tell it don't binge, it hears binge.
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Now you're guarding against every craving and compulsion.
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And the more you resist the compulsion to overeat, the stronger it becomes.
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You have to expend even more effort, and the struggle deepens.
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Then there's the fact that overthinking and over-effort often lead to choking in sports, in work, and definitely in your food freedom journey.
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You've probably heard about this in sports.
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So Olympic level or professional athletes will kill it during their practices and lower stakes games, but then they end up fumbling all over the place when the stakes are higher, in tournaments and in championship games, all of those types of things.
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Or maybe they have just one off game, and now that performance is stuck in their head and they're trying to avoid a repeat experience.
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And this is because now their brain is trying to micromanage everything when actually when their bodies have a chance to take over, flow happens.
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It's when we overthink and over-effort that we interrupt that flow, we interrupt our body's natural rhythms, and we start to choke.
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You might have also experienced something like this in your workplace.
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I know I have.
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So maybe you were just sailing along, performing beautifully, until a supervisor walked by.
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Then you're making the most ridiculous mistakes.
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Your supervisor is looking at you like you're an absolute buffoon, and it's very hard to get your rhythm back.
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So I experienced this so often at my door-building job.
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I would be in a flow state, building doors beautifully, until my lead hand walked by.
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Suddenly, I was on high alert because I wanted to make sure I was doing the best job possible.
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And suddenly I'm smearing glue off the components, I'm dropping the styles, I'm fumbling, and I get the look like I'm a buffoon.
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Then, even after the lead hand walked away, I'm still on the struggle bus, watching my every move and making all these mistakes that I wasn't making before.
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And then I got to witness the very same thing happen to all the new people I trained.
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They would be doing great until management walked by.
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Then management would point out what they were doing wrong.
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And then after management left, they would look at me in dismay and be like, I was doing so good until they walked by.
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To which I always said, Yeah, I get it.
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I have been there.
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This has a lot to do with food freedom as well.
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It's why you can go weeks or months being consistent in this really delightful rhythm with your habits until that one off day.
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Now your inner critic shows up and they're like, you idiot, don't do it again.
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And this inner critic watches you, trying to make sure you don't do it again.
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But now all you're focused on is doing it again.
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You're vigilant and trying so hard not to do the thing.
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Being vigilant and trying really hard all happens when we're in sympathetic nervous system dominance, or in what I love to call firebrain.
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Now, some effort, when it's time-bound, chosen, and broken up with moments of rest and recovery isn't a bad thing.
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But when the brain continues to over-exert itself, micromanage performance, and listen to an inner critic that gets noisier by the hour, the nervous system continues to overheat until a crash happens.
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We eventually get to the point of a protective freeze or shutdown.
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I like to call this rock brain.
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This is often where burnout and binge eating live in high-performing women.
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As you can see, more effort equals more problems.
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You end up fighting a losing battle by using your will when your imagination was always waiting to be harnessed instead.
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You lose the critical opportunity to master the art of balance.
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The balance between doing and not doing, between relaxation and activity.
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You end up focusing on what you don't want, which makes the thing you don't want even more likely to happen.
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You have this belligerent inner critic eyeballing your every move and losing their mind every time you make a mistake.
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And you're overheating the nervous system, making crashes, self-sabotage, and emotional numbing far more likely.
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I'm sharing all this with you because I get it on this deep visceral level.
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One of the things that inspired this episode was a message I received from a mentor I'm working with.
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So I was sharing my personal situation.
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Nine books, over 270 podcast episodes, hundreds of reels on social media, so much effort and discipline, and the consistency over time that everyone promised would compound and lead to success one day.
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And the outcome hasn't really felt like it's matched the level of effort yet.
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I shared all this with her and added, so I feel doubt sometimes, but I believe doubt can absolutely be outworked.
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This mentor replied with something that
hit like a gut punch.
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Their response.
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And you have absolutely outworked everyone.
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My guess is the work was never the problem.
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Asking was.
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By asking, she was referring to asking for the sale, which might be part of it, sure, but that is not the topic of this week's episode.
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And it was this first part of what she said that honestly had me spiraling for a few days.
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It was someone holding up a mirror, pointing out the years and truckloads of effort, and saying, girl, if more work and effort was going to solve your doubt, I probably would have done so by now.
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The idea of letting go of the comfort that comes from just working harder has been deeply uncomfortable.
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Because when things haven't worked, I've just always worked harder.
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And that's what so much of this year has been.
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And all that effort has absolutely created more problems.
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So more frustration, more disembodiment, and very few of the results I'd been hoping for.
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I finally had to be like, okay, doing the same thing repeatedly, applying more effort is throwing gasoline on an inferno.
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I don't need more gasoline.
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I need a hearth, a stronger container for that fire.
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And you don't create that through more effort.
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You create it through presence, you create it through softening your grip.
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This is why my food freedom framework is earth and water, then fire.
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Earth is that initial pause button.
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You notice how much effort am I exerting?
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And how is this level of effort feeling in my body?
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Also, is it working?
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Or is more effort making me more frustrated, tired, and disenchanted?
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Then water is honoring how your level of effort is making you feel.
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Maybe you have to stop after listening to this episode and think, damn, I've tried so hard and I haven't outworked anything except my own zest for life.
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And that sucks.
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Then you let yourself feel the sadness, the disappointment, the grief.
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Feeling these emotions is often the secret key that unlocks a deeper level of food freedom.
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Water is also reclaiming your right to rest, to lean back, to slow down, and to ask for support when you need it.
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It's realizing that you're worthy of having both the relaxation and the activity.
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It's deciding that your worth is not contingent on always producing and contributing.
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Your worth is inherent, period.
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And if an inner critic or an inner pusher part is screaming in protest, then you want to give them some love.
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That's part of water as well.
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They've been trying to keep you safe because overworking and over-efforting has become comfortable.
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And what is comfortable is survivable.
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So then you want to give these parts moments where rest and non-effort feel safe.
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Show these parts that they are still loved, still safe, still enough as they rest.
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That's your embodied activation this week.
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Practice relaxation and non-doing.
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Maybe you do watch an episode of Supernatural and delight in the Dean and Castel moments.
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Put something on your calendar.
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And when you're doing the non-doing, if that's even a thing, you know what I mean.
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Notice when it feels weird in your body and you're just noticing the discomfort.
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And then you can take some deep breaths.
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And over time, with these little reps of non-doing, you'll build the capacity for the discomfort until resting stops feeling so uncomfortable and unnatural.
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And as a bonus in bodied activation, go listen to Worth Ethic by Tony Jones.
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You're welcome.
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As we wrap up this episode, one thing you might be worried about, you might think, but if I stop trying so hard, if I stop using so much effort, then I'll become a couch potato.
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But my friend, the very fact that you have this worry tells me that you are absolutely not going to become a couch potato.
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We're not dimming your fire, we're not dousing your fire, we're just aiming it.
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And we're also no longer adding too much of a good thing.
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Enjoy the art of non-doing this week, and we'll connect again in a future episode.
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Ready to stop outsourcing your worth and crack your own code?
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Grab Know Your Hungers.
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Two free assessments that uncover the real block behind your food struggles, plus a customized audio care package based on your results.
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You're not broken, you're just misdiagnosed.
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Link is in the show notes.