Burnout Prevention for Women: Why Your "Discipline" is Making You Sick

Written By Rhonda Lavoie

Show Notes

Stop treating your body like a machine that just needs a "reboot."

Are you checking all the boxes, grinding through the "bro-culture" rules of productivity, and staying disciplined—yet feeling absolutely terrible? You might be caught in the trap of Toxic Discipline. In this episode, I’m getting raw about my own recent experience with a total nervous system collapse that I tried to bargain away as a simple cold or a physical injury.

We’re dismantling dangerous trends like Polyphasic sleep to talk about the real cost of ignoring your body's "check engine light." It’s time to stop waiting for an "official permission slip" from a virus to finally take a rest. You are more magnetic when you are real and rested than when you are pretending to have all the answers while running on empty.

In This Episode:

  • (00:03) – The "Bro-Culture" sleep trap: Why 4:00 AM isn't the morning.

  • (00:54) – Juggling the mental load: Why these "optimization" trends fail busy women.

  • (02:16) – The Invisible Fire Alarm: Recognizing the whispers before the crash.

  • (04:08) – Defining Toxic Discipline: When willpower becomes a liability.

  • (05:12) – My Story: Shivers, numb feet, and a "torn rotator cuff" that wasn't there.

  • (06:10) – The Bargaining Trap: Trying to schedule your crash for "after the launch."

  • (08:00) – Recap & Your Weekly Challenge: Closing your biggest energy leak.

Resources Mentioned:

  • Concept: The Invisible Fire Alarm — Paying attention to the subtle signs your body sends before a collapse.

  • Tool: The Paced App (Android) — Use the Cooldown Overlay and Walk to Unlock to catch energy leaks.

This Week's Challenge:

Identify one major energy leak this week—like a standard obligation you feel you "should" do—and close it. Choose to listen to the whispers instead of the toxic discipline that tells you to keep grinding.

🔗 CONNECT WITH RHONDA

·       Music for The Rhonda Lavoie Podcast written and recorded by Wade and Tan Fehr.

Transcript

[00:00:05] So I was scrolling the other day and I saw this post about Polyphasic sleep. Have you guys heard about this? It is everywhere in the high performance world right now. Polyphasic sleep is just a fancy scientific sounding way of telling you that you should sleep in 20 minute chunks, so you can work 22 hours a day.

[00:00:30] Can you believe that? 22 waking hours a day. Honestly, that is so dangerous. And let's look at who is pushing this. It is almost always this "bro culture" of productivity. It's men who aren't the ones keeping the household running while they're building their empires.

[00:00:52] All I can picture when I think about this is one of us busy women juggling a million family moving parts and a career falling asleep while bathing our kids, or worse drifting off at the wheel while taking the kids to hockey practice because we're so sleep deprived.

[00:01:12] We're being told this is optimization, but it's actually a recipe for disaster. Look, I love my mornings. I'm usually up at 6:00 AM because that's how I get my head on straight. But 4:00 AM that's not the morning, that's the middle of the night. If you aren't sleeping, you aren't building a business, you are just ensuring that eventually you won't have a business or your health left to keep alive.

[00:01:43] Welcome back to the Rhonda Lavoie podcast. I am your host, Rhonda Lavoie, and I am so incredibly glad you were here with me today. You know, I've had a few conversations with my high achieving women friends lately, and it seems like so many of them are just going full tilt. We're all in that same boat, aren't we Just running at 110%?

[00:02:06] Trying to keep all the plates spinning without letting a single one bobble. But I've been sitting here thinking about that pace, the real cost of it, and I just feel like we need to have a real conversation today. Have you ever had one of those weeks where you're doing everything right, according to the gurus?

[00:02:29] But you feel absolutely terrible. You're checking the boxes, you're grinding, you're staying disciplined, and yet your body is starting to feel like it belongs to someone else. I think we need to talk about what we are doing to ourselves in the name of getting it all done. We're living in this era where wellness has become just another thing to be productive at.

[00:02:54] If we aren't biohacking or asleep or fasting from dopamine, we're told we're falling behind, but I wanna look at the cost of that. Today I wanna talk about the invisible fire alarm. That moment your body finally says, enough, because you've been ignoring the whispers for too long.

[00:03:15] And that brings me to this word discipline. We hold it up like it's this holy grail of entrepreneurship, don't we? We think that if we just have enough willpower, enough discipline, we can outrun our own biology. But here's the thing I've realized there is such thing as toxic discipline. Toxic discipline is that voice in your head that tells you to keep going when your eyes are blurry.

[00:03:46] It's that voice that tells you to push through the tension in your neck, or the fact that you've forgotten appointments this week. We think we're being strong, but we're actually just being deaf to our own needs. Everyone out there is telling you that you need more discipline to manage your energy. But what if discipline is actually what's keeping you exhausted?

[00:04:12] What if your discipline is just a tool you're using to ignore the signs your body is screaming at you? And look, I'm not gonna tell you I have it all figured out. I am actively every single day still working on this myself. I still catch myself trying to discipline my way out of being human. Real integrity, what I like to call biological integrity actually feels calm.

[00:04:41] It doesn't feel rushed. It's peaceful. It's that quiet confidence that says, I see the work, but I also see my limits. We've been taught that it's a badge of honor. To ignore our bodies until they break, but I'm telling you, it's a liability. You don't need a runny nose or a fever to justify taking a rest.

[00:05:06] If you're waiting for the official permission slip from a virus to sit down, you've already lost the plot. I wanna tell you something that happened to me recently, and it's a little raw, and to be honest, I'm still processing it. But it's so important that you hear it. Just a few weeks ago, on February 13th, I was heading into my 50th birthday and the official launch of the Paced app

[00:05:35] Two massive milestones right on top of each other. And I'll be honest with you, as I was approaching that date, I knew I was starting to get sick. I could feel it coming on. I had that stuffy head, the brain fog, and I was just... heavy. Then there were my shoulders for weeks leading up to the launch. I was in so much pain.

[00:05:58] I was convinced I had a physical injury. I actually went to the doctor, which is something I don't do that often, and I told him, I think I've torn my rotator cuff. I was so sure of it. We went through the whole process of the x-rays, the ultrasound, because the pain was so real.

[00:06:18] It felt like my body was literally breaking under the weight of everything I was trying to carry. But in my head, I was bargaining. I kept saying, Rhonda, just make it to Friday. Just get through the launch and the party, and then you can crash. And I did. I made it. So when Sunday ruled around and I got sick, I wasn't even surprised.

[00:06:40] I thought, okay, here it is. This is the crash I scheduled. But then something happened I wasn't expecting. It was in the afternoon, and I suddenly got really, really cold. I went upstairs to my room, crawled under the electric throw blanket, but I was shivering so hard. It was actually painful. I was shaking.

[00:07:03] My hands and feet were starting to go numb. I actually panicked because I've never felt anything like this in my life. I called Crystal in and said, please get the thermometer. I must have a fever. But then the numbers came back, nothing. My temperature was totally normal. Now I was starting to worry and spiral a little bit.

[00:07:30] I laid there for 45 minutes to an hour shivering, trying to distract myself by shifting my legs back and forth, just trying to make it stop. My whole body was tense from shivering and almost convulsing, but finally, after a bit, it started to pass, thankfully, and my body started to feel warm and it relaxed.

[00:07:54] The feeling in my hands and feet came back thankfully, but I was so confused what just happened. So I started Googling my symptoms like we all do, and it hit me. It was a stress and panic attack. It wasn't just a simple cold, it was a total nervous system collapse.

[00:08:15] And that shoulder pain, the torn rotator cuff. It wasn't a tear at all. It was just my back and neck muscles being pulled so tight from stress that they were literally pulling my shoulder muscles outta place. I had used discipline to ignore the fact that I was running on empty for weeks, and the worst part wasn't the shivering.

[00:08:39] It was how I was showing up for the people I love. I was snappy with my family. I was cold. I was short. I just didn't have the capacity to be the person I wanted to be because I was internalizing everything. I was so disciplined about the launch that I had no discipline left for my relationships.

[00:08:57] I realized right then I am not invincible. It was humbling. I have limits and I need to start paying attention to those subtle whispers, the tight shoulders, the snappy tone. Long before the shivers start. When I was sitting there after the shiver stopped, it really hit me how we try to use toxic discipline when we are already running on fumes.

[00:09:26] Sometimes we clinging to these trends because we think it is the quick fix. For example, have you heard about blackout Sundays? This is where people are sitting in a dark room for 24 hours to reset a dark room, no devices, no talking, no eye contact, nothing.

[00:09:48] My first thought was, who has time for that? And it sounds glorious, but not really. How is sitting in the dark, the fix? It's just another extreme. If you're already feeling shame about using your phone to numb the stress, seeing a ridiculous extreme solution like that just makes you feel more shameful because you have no interest in doing it.

[00:10:14] But now you feel shame because you can't do that either. We don't need extreme deprivation. We need to stop treating our bodies like machines. We can just reboot these subtle signs. The snapping at your family being short and cold. These are your warning lights. If you ignore the check engine light, eventually the engine is going to seize.

[00:10:39] That's what my shivering fit was. Think about it this way. My body was sending me pings for weeks. The stuffy head was a ping. The torn shoulder was a loud screaming ping, but because I didn't see a fever or a cough, I told myself I was fine.

[00:11:00] I use my discipline to keep the engine running at a hundred miles an hour when I should have been at the shop for a tuneup. We internalize so much as women. We think if we just keep it inside, if we don't complain, then we're being strong. But it's not strength to hold it all in until you snap at your kids or your spouse.

[00:11:23] That's shortness. That shortness I had with my family. That was the overflow. My tank was so full of stress that there was no room for empathy, no room for a normal response. And that's the part that hurts the most when you're a high achiever. The realization that your drive for success might be making you someone you don't actually like to be around.

[00:11:46] This is why I'm so passionate about Paced. We aren't trying to give you another extreme solution like sitting in a dark room. When I was in that stuffy head period at the launch. I would be using my phone to numb out because I was too tired to actually rest.

[00:12:01] I'd just sit there and scroll, ignoring the signs. But thankfully now I have the Paced app. You know that feeling when you're tired, you can't even think about what to do next, so you just pick up the phone. That's the danger zone. That's where the energy leak turns into a flood.

[00:12:20] The Paced app, we use the Cool Down overlay,. The standard Cool down is one hour. That one hour cool down can be the exact reset. Any one of us needs to get out of the trance and back on track. To refocus, it's the sign or the symptom. We need to see that we need to rest.

[00:12:39] It's the check engine light that tells you to pull over before the engine seizes. It forces you to put your phone down. Check in with yourself. How do my shoulders feel? Am I being snappy right now? Do I need a glass of water? And the walk to unlock a hundred steps reduces the cool down by three minutes.

[00:12:58] It's a way to get out of that numbing state and back into your body. It's about catching that energy leak before it becomes a flood. It's teaching yourself that when things get fuzzy, we move. We don't just sit and numb out until we're shivering under a blanket.

[00:13:13] So here's my challenge for you this week. I want you to look for the subtle signs before the shivering fit happens. Are your shoulders tense? Are you being snappy with people you love? Are you internalizing everything instead of communicating? Identify one major energy leak this week and close it. Maybe it's saying no to a standard obligation, even if it feels like you should do it.

[00:13:42] Choose to listen to the whispers instead of the toxic discipline that tells you to keep grinding. Give yourself permission to rest right away so you aren't out of commission for days. There is so much power in being the person who is brave enough to listen to their body, especially when the world expects you to just keep grinding and settle for being exhausted.

[00:14:07] You are more magnetic when you are real and rested than when you are pretending to have all the answers while running on empty. If you wanna dig deeper into the invisible fire alarm or any of the resources we talked about today, you can find all the details and the show notes over at rhondalavoie.com.

[00:14:26] If you're on Android, go grab Paced on the Google Play Store. Let it be your check engine light. Let it be that check engine light that helps you clear the noise so you can focus on the next big thing without hitting a wall. And if you're on iOS, hang in there. We are in the trenches building it right now, launching this summer.

[00:14:45] If this episode resonated with you, it would mean the world to me if you would share it with a friend, maybe someone you know who is going full tilt right now and needs a reminder that they aren't a machine. And if you have a spare moment, please leave a five star review on your favorite platform. It really helps us reach more women who need to hear this message.

[00:15:07] Also, I love hearing from you, so please reach out to me on Instagram at Rhonda Lavoie. I'd love to hear which energy leak you're closing this week. Let's stay real together. As always, keep it real and get it done. I'll talk to you next week.

Rhonda Lavoie
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Overcoming Imposter Syndrome: Why High Achievers Feel Like Frauds