Embodied Writing Warrior: Food Freedom, Creativity & Spiritual Reclamation

248. Pressure ≠ Devotion: The Food Freedom Breakthrough High-Performing Women Need

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What if one of the biggest things keeping high-performing women stuck in binge eating, burnout, self-sabotage, and chronic inconsistency is not laziness, lack of discipline, or low standards... but pressure?

In this episode of Embodied Writing Warrior, Kayla breaks down the life-changing distinction between pressure and devotion and why confusing the two can quietly sabotage your relationship with food, your body, your business, and your peace.

You’ll learn why pressure is not the badge of honor our culture makes it out to be, how it creates chronic stress and self-betrayal, and why devotion is the far more powerful path to lasting change. Kayla also shares three practical ways to stop operating from pressure, normalize your manifestations, and begin untangling your self-worth from productivity.

This is the episode for the woman who knows how to chase big goals... but is ready to actually feel safe, present, and happy inside the life she’s creating.

In this episode, we cover:

  •  The difference between pressure and devotion 
  •  Why pressure often fuels binge eating, emotional eating, and burnout 
  •  How high-performing women accidentally turn blessings into burdens 
  •  The danger of putting “salvation energy” onto your goals 
  •  Why normalizing your manifestations creates more peace and sustainability 
  •  How to untangle self-worth from achievement and output 
  •  A creative, embodied approach to healing overactive protector parts 

Links Mentioned:

SPEAKER_00

Welcome to Embodied Writing Warrior. A show for women who refuse white medical wellness and create food freedom built for real life, where your fire gets pain, not dead. Call it blessed with your momentum and enjoy pleasure-led creativity. Because healing was never meant to be a full-time job. I'm Kayla, writer and health coach got rogue. Now let's make consistency feel like foreplay. Welcome back, embodied writing warrior. Today we are talking about the breakthrough that high-performing women everywhere need if they're gonna break through binge eating, emotional eating, burnout, self-sabotage, all the things. This conversation does pick up where we left off on our last solo episode. In this episode, you're gonna learn the difference between pressure and devotion and why people often mistake the two. You're gonna learn why this confusion can lead to binge and emotional eating, burnout, and inconsistency. And then I'm gonna share three ways you can stop confusing pressure with devotion. This work is going to change so much. It's gonna help you become someone who doesn't just get good at achieving and manifesting. It's going to help you become someone who can actually live inside the life she's created. Because there is a massive difference between creating the dream and then letting yourself live peacefully and happily inside that dream once it's here. High-performing women are often exceptionally good at that first part, and they're also often deeply challenged by the second. So I'm gonna start off by admitting something. I have had something very wrong for the last year or so. Sometime last year, I read Getting to Neutral by Trevor Moad, and there was this line in the introduction that always stuck with me. Once I heard it, it became a mantra that got me through a lot of tough moments. That mantra was pressure is a privilege. When I first heard this, it felt like pure fire. It felt like this way to rewrite the struggle that often comes when you're chasing big goals or pursuing something you've never done before. It landed in the same place that Elizabeth Benton's line did for me. Primal Potential podcast, this was something I heard years ago. And she said, I refuse to turn my blessings into burdens. Pressure is a privilege. Had that same energy of, I don't have to chase this thing. A privilege to have enough hope and ambition and possibility in me that I'm willing to stretch, even when it hurts, even when it's uncomfortable. But I was wrong all along. Pressure is not a privilege. Devotion is a privilege. And they are not the same thing. Not even close. When you look up synonyms for pressure, do you know what you get? You get coercion, force, duress, oppression, even harassment. Pressure is the voice of an inner bully saying, I must continue succeeding, achieving, moving the goalpost every time I hit a target, or else I might get hurt, even though you're already hurting yourself. This voice is terrified of being rejected, abandoned, or judged. So it whips itself into this frenzy of achievement in hopes that maybe if it achieves hard enough, nobody can hurt it because it's too successful. It believes there's this imaginary milestone they can hit where they'll be beyond criticism. Next, I'm gonna share some key distinctions to watch for when you're looking for pressure in your own life. First, pressure feels like it's coming from outside of you. It's an attempt to appear a certain way to the external world so that you can prove yourself. And it's also coming from a desire for safety and protection more than it feels like an intrinsic desire. Pressure feels like contraction in your body. So it's often a tightening in your throat and a pressure in your solar plexus. And the thing about pressure is it rarely releases when you hit a certain goal. Actually, it often intensifies because with every milestone, you feel like there's more to prove. When you achieve something, there's this pressure to not only keep the thing, and also to prove you deserve to have the thing in the first place. And then the pressure builds because you got the thing that was supposed to release the pressure, which can feel like anxiety, unease, or chronic unhappiness. And then it doesn't. So you think, okay, it wasn't that thing. It must be this next goal. So you put more pressure on your next pursuit, and you repeat and repeat until you feel like an instant pot with a malfunctioning release valve. The other nasty thing about pressure is that it can often intensify to the point you abandon yourself. You push so hard for a goal that you sacrifice your health, your relationships, your happiness, your peace. Because pressure doesn't care about your well-being. Pressure just wants you to keep moving, even if it's at your own expense. So that's pressure. What about devotion? Very different synonyms for this word. We're talking loyalty, faithfulness, fidelity, dedication, fondness, love. You go from cruelty and even violence with pressure to the highest forms of self-honoring when you make the shift to devotion. Devotion is when you are pulled to something because you know it's meant for you. And you know it's meant for you because you want what's best for you. This isn't about what anyone else thinks. This is for you first and foremost. This doesn't mean it won't provide value and service to the world, because often we're devoted to something because we know it's going to help others, whether that's a community we're part of, our spouse, our children, our friends, our clients. But the biggest difference here is that any connection this has to the outside world comes from an open heart and a deep desire to make things better for the world. When something comes from pressure, your heart is closed because you're trying to keep yourself safe from others through your achievements versus wanting to serve from a place of feeling internally safe and resourced. It would be more painful to abandon the pursuit than to keep it going when you're devoted, because your heart knows you're meant to have it. This doesn't mean there won't be discomfort as you work towards the thing, but it's this labor of love and you know it's worth it. The desire for what you're creating is going to be coming from within, from this place of vision and self-worth and purpose. Devotion is tied to your highest values and your identity versus what the world tells you that you should prioritize and care about. Devotion also feels very different in the body. It feels lighter and open. You can also exhale deeply. And it's much easier to get into a flow state where you can spend hours on a project or dedicate yourself to something that might be challenging, but you barely notice the time or the effort because you know this thing is meant for you. And perhaps most importantly, devotion does not require self-betrayal. It doesn't ask you to sacrifice what else matters to you in order to make it happen. There's more steadiness and gentleness in the pursuit. So those are the distinctions. The problem is pressure and devotion can often look the same from the outside. One person can be pursuing a body transformation because they've been bullied for their weight since they were young, and they think if they just hit their goal weight once and for all, then they'll be safe. Then no one will ever say another nasty thing about them or their body ever again. Another person can also be pursuing a body transformation. And maybe they're doing it because they're struggling with low energy, they're sore all the time. And they want to show their children an example of what it looks like to start taking amazing care of themselves because they know their children are always watching. And they're excited about getting to take better care of themselves and feel the physical and emotional benefits. Both of these people can be doing the same workouts, meal planning, getting their steps in, and both look like discipline. But the pressure-fueled pursuit is going to be filled with chronic stress. It's going to feel miserable most of the time. And when those states go on for long enough, the body will start to look for relief, often in the form of food. Then the pressure increases because now they've quote unquote undone all their hard work. And the cycle often continues and gets worse over time because every binge or overindulgence raises the pressure. The more the pressure mounts, the more miserable life becomes, and the stronger and more frequent the compulsions to escape with food are going to become. Meanwhile, the person who's devoted to setting a loving example for her kids, she's going to feel a lot better. She's going to have a more gentle approach to her journey because she's not going to want to set an example where she's bullying and forcing herself into change. Not when her kids are watching. And because she genuinely wants to feel better, she'll create the conditions where the journey does feel good. Her thoughts are different, her pace is gentler. Yes, she still might have off days or setbacks, but they don't create the same cycle of deepening frustration and impatience. She shakes it off with much more ease. So if you truly want food freedom, one of the most powerful things you can do is eliminate pressure from your life. And not just from your wellness journey, but everywhere. Because even if the pressure comes from your career, your relationships, your creative pursuits, or anything else, you're going to face the same pattern of pressure leading to misery, which leads to compulsions to numb out with food, which leads to more unhappiness, which deepens that cycle. And now you might wonder, okay, but how do I stop operating from pressure when that's been my default for decades? I'm going to share three of the things that have helped me the most. First, you want to get deeply intentional about building the skill of holding your achievements and manifestations. This is moving from proving and pressure to get the next thing into a place of gratitude and presence. And this isn't something you do once and then forget about. Enough financial relaxation where I didn't have to work a nine to five, I wasn't letting myself enjoy it. Not really. Because as soon as we moved and got settled in, my inner bully went, okay, now we're not working. Now you have no excuse. Now you have to build the social media following, build the business, prove you can actually do this after all the failed attempts. That pressure has created so much unnecessary suffering for six solid months. The abundance didn't feel like abundance. It felt like a test. It was turning a huge blessing into a burden that required earning, proof, and performance. So it has taken a lot of intention and practice to keep coming back to gratitude. And this is something I want you to think about with a recent achievement or manifestation you've created. Or maybe you save this episode for the next big milestone you achieve. Instead of turning that achievement into a test or worrying about keeping it or putting pressure on yourself to get the next thing, what would presence and gratitude look like? For me, it's looked like, wow, I get to go on hour-long walks every single day. And then working on being present for those walks, breathing deeply, noticing the surroundings, letting myself be in the moment. It's looked like eliminating the tasks and practices that created pressure and trusting that the things that align with my values and identity are what will serve me best in the end. It's also looked like slowing down and not turning my business into a courtroom where my self-worth is on trial. So as you think about doing this for yourself, start looking for number one, where can you practice micro reps of appreciation and presence for what you have created? And more frequent micro reps are better than trying to sit in gratitude about something for an hour at a time. Giving yourself more opportunities to practice is more powerful than intense but less frequent practices. Number two, where can you eliminate tasks and practices you're only doing because you feel like you should do them? To either keep the thing or to get ahead faster, even though deep down they don't actually align with you. And finally, can you slow down? Can you take a pause between achievements to just let yourself savor what you've created? This doesn't mean you stop making any forward movement. It just means that you don't let such an intense focus on forward movement stop you from building the skill of appreciating where you are right now. The second way you can turn pressure into devotion is to start normalizing your manifestations. This one is going to go a long way towards diffusing the pressure. Because sometimes, as a high-performing, intense, deeply emotional woman, we can put a lot of weight and intensity on the thing we're calling in. We could even load the achievement with this salvation energy, thinking this will be the thing that solves all my problems, makes me feel okay in my skin, this is the thing that fixes every single wound and problem I've ever had, and I'll be happy forever. Maybe it's the goal weight, or the soulmate relationship, or the new job, or debt freedom. This type of magical thinking is gonna hurt you for two reasons. First, it is a myth. There is nothing in the world that will take away all of your pain or shortcomings or hard moments. And when you put that expectation on something, and then you get the thing, and you still have bad days, get sad, or feel like something's missing, now you don't get to appreciate this beautiful thing because you've turned it into a disappointment. And as if this wasn't bad enough, this salvation energy is going to put so much pressure on the thing you're creating. Of course, something is gonna have pressure baked right into it if you think it's gonna solve all your problems. And then, of course, it's going to feel stressful, loaded, and intense. And it doesn't have to. So let's talk about what this distinction looks like in a practical example. I've already shared how much pressure I put on my business success when we moved to our new hometown. But do you want to know where I didn't put pressure? You know what I didn't infuse with a bunch of salvation energy and this, oh my goodness, yes, this will solve all of my problems type of mindset. My door building job. And let's be real, was that job perfect? No. Were there things that frustrated me at times? Absolutely. But you know what else? It was also the best job I've ever had for so many reasons. And I also literally manifested it 10 minutes after doing a manifestation meditation to call in a new job. Seriously, I did the manifesting practice, and 10 minutes later the phone rang with the job offer. But here's what was different about that versus my business building endeavor. I didn't hang my identity on succeeding there. Yes, I still showed up and I put effort in, but I didn't make it mean something when I built doors wrong or made a mistake when I was learning. I didn't expect it to solve all my problems and save me from myself because this was the job I was only supposed to work at for a year so that I could honor the non-compete clause from my previous job. So it was just the place I went to earn a living. And then I wondered why I was happier and more peaceful there than I had been in over a decade. And the reason was because this was the first time in years where I worked somewhere that didn't come with this self-imposed pressure, a compulsion to perform, and the painful belief that my body needed to be my business card. The difference here was not making this job so magical and precious that it was going to change my entire life. And this was very different from how I treated most of my manifestations, whether they were health-related, career-related, or relationship-related. When something stays really special in this intense and all-consuming way, it's going to stay pressurized and attached to your identity in a way that really hurts. So you're going to grip it harder, you'll fear losing it, and your entire body will stay braced and vigilant as you try to hold on to the thing. This is why normalizing your manifestations has the power to change everything. You might have some resistance to this idea. And I won't appreciate it as much when I get it. I am here to tell you that as a deeply emotional, high-performing, growth-oriented woman, you're not in danger of caring too little or not working hard enough. Quite the opposite. Normalizing doesn't mean you stop caring. It doesn't mean you stop being grateful. It means you stop expecting every next achievement to save you from yourself. And when you stop the magical thinking and release the excess pressure, your body starts to feel safe enough to let your manifestations stay and be felt. So let's give a few examples of normalizing your manifestations. Let's start with a body transformation because this is a big one for many women. And I can't take credit for this idea, but it has lived rent-free in my head for over a decade. So in her book, Loving What Is, Byron Cady was talking about the weight we can put on creating our health transformations. And for what? She basically asked, why the pressure? Why the hurrying? Because at the end of the day, you're still gonna sit, stand, or lie horizontal. This is the perfect example of normalizing a manifestation. Yes, you'll have more energy. Yes, it might be easier to stand for long periods of time. But you'll still just sit, stand, or lie horizontal. There's no pressure there versus the mentality of when I hit this health or body transformation goal, then I will be loved. Then I will be confident, then I will get the relationship, the job, the money, as if a number on a scale is the reason you don't have those things. And then let's use business as another example. I've started to ask myself, what if I treated my business the same way I did my door building job? I still have my targets for the week. I still show up and put the hours in, but no matter what happens inside those hours, I still get to make peace the baseline. I don't have to tie my identity to how many clients sign up one week or how many podcast downloads I get or any other metrics. Just like if we missed target at my door building job, I didn't put myself worth on trial on the drive home and make it mean I was a bad person, a failure, a loser, or doomed to never hit target again. It would have been silly then. And it's equally as unnecessary in this season of life. So one of your embodied activations is to find something you've been working towards that maybe you've put too much pressure, too much salvation energy around, and start trying to normalize it. What if it's not going to be the answer to all your problems? You can still appreciate it, but now you don't make it the reason you're delaying the feelings you want to feel in the present moment. If it's a body transformation, what if you remember, cool, I'm still gonna sit, stand, or lie horizontal? If it's a relationship or career goal, what if you remember, even after I get this thing, I'll still have bad days. I'll still have places to grow. Yes, this will be a life upgrade, but then there will be other life upgrades. Then watch how this changes the level of pressure you feel. The third recommendation I have for you is to continue the journey to untangle your self-worth from productivity. You are not what you create, and your worth does not depend on your output. And for a high-performing woman, this can still be an ongoing journey. I will be honest, I still don't have all the answers quite yet, because I first started talking about this on the podcast as early as 2024, and it's still something I work on. I can share what has helped me more than anything else, because it's taken this idea and concept and it's turned it into something creative, relational, and embodied. This has been using my food freedom fantasy method and specifically working with Rex. If you're new and don't know who this is, you can get the entire audio storybook at embodiedwritingwarrior.com slash divine daddies. But all you need to know for context here is that I have two masculine archetypes that I've used to transform my relationship with food, consistency, and self-worth. One of them is fiery, passionate, growth-oriented, basically your typical masculine energy. So that's Rex. The other one is nurturing, gentle, safe, and loving. What you'd generally consider more feminine energy, but I wanted two masculine archetypes, so here we are. And Rex shares the same core wound and harmful beliefs that I do. Because this is creative parts work, so of course he does. So he started out believing he was only useful if he was doing things. At one point, he actually said to me, I'm always the weapon. Sometimes I wonder if you even want me here when you're not in crisis. That line made my heart hurt because I recognized this protector part inside me that only knows how to prove themselves by doing. And here's the thing: we all have some form of this protector part inside us. Maybe he doesn't have leather pants and a paddle that says consistency is foreplay. Maybe his name isn't Rex, but I promise you, they exist inside you. And honestly, this can be where so much pressure comes from, especially in high-performing women who have these overactive protector parts. These parts want to be included. They love us and they want a job. And this can be why when good things happen, we create pressure. Because that pressure feels like a crisis. And then this part feels useful again. This is why when it was just me and Rex to start, we were constantly self-sabotaging, whipping ourselves into chaos, even when it was totally unneeded. We've often said that Haven, the other archetype, is the glue because he stops us from letting our fire burn us out. Haven stabilizes the fire and reminds us that yes, pressure is one option, but devotion is a better choice every single time. So often we heal through story, not through being told, oh, just stop basing your worth around your productivity. Conquer the internalized capitalism, okay? This creative work has helped me more than anything else. So now I have started being able to take a nap without turning it into a moral failing. And then when Rex is like, you and Haven go nap, I'll stand watch. I can scream and say, I'm not napping in these conditions. And then Rex and Haven will be like, oh my god, what happened? Did the puppy bite your face? Are you okay? And then I'll remind Rex that we want him for the soft moments too. Then he comes and naps with us, and both of them roast me for being dramatic. Yes, this has actually happened. So, one scene at a time, I'm creating a new narrative around worth, rest, and productivity. One storyline at a time, I get to make the shift away from pressure and towards devotion. So I'm hoping this episode gave you some insights and some practical ways you can start to move from pressure into devotion inside your own life. And if you're curious about the food freedom fantasy method, I'll include a link in the show notes. I am wishing you a week filled with loyalty, fidelity, and devotion to your wildest dreams. No pressure necessary. Take care, and I will see you in a future episode very soon. Ready to stop outsourcing your inner knowing and crack your own code? Grab my free gift, Know Your Hungers. Discover the five hidden blocks behind your food struggles and get a customized audio care package based on your results. You're not broken, you're just misdiagnosed. Visit embodiedwriting warrior.com slash gift or click the link in the show notes.