High Functioning Is Not Well-Being
Linda Villines 0:00

Being able to handle your life doesn’t mean your life is working. We have glorified the highly functional person at the cost of our bodies. We’re taught to evaluate our lives based on if the work gets done, if the relationship stays together, if the family is taken care of, if the bills get paid, if the emails get answered. If you remain productive and dependable, available and capable, you assume everything is basically just fine. But that measurement of quote unquote life is working, life is fine, doesn’t really include what truly matters. Like, are you happy? Are you healthy? Are your mind and your body and your soul at peace? Or in constant low-grade panic or anxiety or tension? Is your body operating from ease and energy and optimal well-being? Or is your body struggling in stress and hypervigilance and balance, suppressed emotions, and chronic fatigue? You can maintain a functional life while your body is exhausted and perpetually stressed and with very little access to ease or pleasure or joy because you can still function, right? You can still get shit done. You can take care of the adult stuff, like paying the bills and showing up to work and managing your life. And so you don’t think that anything is seriously wrong. Not enough to stop and pause and reevaluate and make changes. But the constant stress and your body’s suffering and depletion have become the cost of you keeping your life together. And we’re conditioned to think that this is normal or commendable, even. This is what I call the everything in life is hard mentality, and it’s just normalized. So if you’re the person that everyone calls on when something falls apart, if you have answered a work email from the bathroom at a birthday dinner, if you have just said, I’m fine, you know, there’s just a lot going on right now. So many times it’s just become this knee-jerk reaction to, how are you? Then this episode is for you. I’m Linda Villines. Welcome to the Simple Source, where we liberate your highest and source self so you can stop striving and start arriving. Now you probably don’t recognize that you’re super stressed because you think stress is for people whose lives are in crisis, right? And your life is fine. You’ve got your daily routine, you’ve got your debt managed, your work is work, family is family, life is life. And you’ve got a vacation plan for the end of year, so everything is fine. And so you don’t see the cost that’s being paid every single day by the one thing that you depend on the most, which is your body. Your life seems to be fine on the surface because your body is the thing keeping you upright and your shit together. But are you distinguishing I can handle this from this is good for me? So I’m a recovering perfectionist. I spent decades trying to appear quote unquote perfect on the outside, but that was all a facade. And a facade that I also denied for many years. Sure, I would cry myself to sleep. Sure, I couldn’t sleep. Sure, I had terrible digestion. Sure, I was always anxious. Sure, I was in pain most of the time. But I didn’t question why until I realized, damn, I am just pretending to be fine when really I feel like shit and I am deeply unhappy and unhealthy. And so then, of course, all of that takes an enormous toll on my body. We’re taught how to measure our lives by these archaic standards that really mean nothing when you take your final breath in this body. And yet we all collectively agree to normalize struggle, to normalize chronic health issues, to normalize aging as some death sentence and stress that never eases, all under this myth that that’s just what happens when you get older. Your body just breaks down. Life is just hard. And everyone around you has the reason just to nod along and say, Yep, that’s life, because we are rewarded for struggling. Our culture admires people who push through, who keep suffering, like who just don’t stop, right? The coworker who answers emails on a vacation and then gets a you’re so reliable from their boss. Or the mom who never sits down at her kid’s birthday party gets a you are such an attentive mom, right? Or the friend who worked even when their back was out gets uh, you’re a powerhouse, yo. So the struggle becomes a compliment. You’re strong, you’re committed, you’re a hard worker, you’re responsible. But every compliment is actually a dismissal of the body that was suffering through all of it, because we’re taught to see the body as this like separate thing, this meat suit, something that’s so easy to take for granted. You know, the thing that is actually struggling the most remains invisible. We only count stress when it’s so severe it takes you out of life, or it’s just like evident in a crisis, like burnout, or you have a panic attack, or there’s an illness that finally puts you in bed for like a week, or you have some emergency of some sort. Those get taken seriously because they interrupt the life you thought was working. But the normal stress and the tension is just called work ethic or ambition or just like being an adult. We have mistaken high functioning and high capacity for no or low cost because we measure whether our lives work by what they produce, like output and what they preserve, like security, all while ignoring what they cost your body, your happiness, your health, your longevity, no matter how tired you are or how much caffeine you need to start your day and to keep going after lunch. But fatigue is actually a clear and immediate signal that you need to learn to trust and respect, like every single time, not just when you’re depleted and barely functioning. So

When Struggle Becomes a Compliment
Linda Villines 6:00

exercise physiologist Tim Noakes says tiredness is a signal that your brain creates to protect you. And it shows up before anything is actually wrong. It’s a very intelligent early warning system. It’s your body saying, yo, you are at capacity. Let’s chill while there’s something still left to protect, right? So every time you push through being tired, being depleted, you’re overriding like the wise and loving system, your body, whose job it is to keep you safe and well. And we praise people for doing this, for pushing through, for ignoring when their bodies say enough. When was the last time you stopped because your body asked you to, and not because the work was completed? For many people, you’re going to be traveling a long as time back into your memory until you were probably a kid, and maybe not even then. But so often rest is what happens at the end of the day when you get home and you’re off the clock and you think that bottle of wine is what you deserve. Rest is the reward. Rest is the luxury. When every email is read, when your inbox is cleared, when every item is checked off, when all the bills are paid. That’s when you can rest. And so you mentally decide when you’re done and you just ignore your body that has been screaming at you for who knows how long. And you continue to say that life is fine because your body is not a part of how you measure if your life is working. And sure, you know, there are extenuating circumstances. People have to survive, but there is always a cost to that, and your body pays that cost. So I’m also a recovering overachiever. I’m a generator in human design. So when I want to do something, I have a fuck ton of energy to get shit done. And get shit done, I do. And I was praised for this my whole life. Gosh, Linda, you work so fast. Gosh, Linda, you can do so many things at once, or you’re so good at many different things. And all of that is true. But you know what else is true? I got so burnt out a couple of years ago that it took me nearly a year to recover. The depletion was so severe that the recovery took a long fucking time. And I refused to call it stress or burnout while I was just like chugging away all that time because I was doing what I loved. And my mind had made up its mind about getting the project done by a certain date. And so I just decided my body would just be along for the ride and just handle it. But that’s not how it works when you don’t respect your body, because your body will tell you every single time when it needs your attention. And when you don’t listen, when you ignore that signal, at some point it’ll be the thing that overrides you. And unfortunately, at that point, that’s when you don’t have a choice but to listen. That’s when the body has had enough and there’s nothing left but depletion. I spent a whole year saying to myself, I should have just listened to my body. And those months when I couldn’t work, I couldn’t create, because I was so brain dead, I was so depleted, I can’t get those months back. So the cost was paid, but it was not a cost that I wanted to pay. What’s ironic though is that other people are getting paid by your depletion too. It’s true, it’s fucked up, but it’s true. The people in your life benefit from your exhaustion. And that’s part of why you just keep overriding the stress signals from your body. All of those signals that your body is telling you all the time, hey, let’s pause A, let’s take a moment, let’s rest. It doesn’t need to get done right at the second. Some part of you knows that if you just stop the managing, the tending, the whatever you do that keeps your life functioning, that something in someone else’s life would be affected. Because your workplace is paying your exhausted self at the same rate as your energized self. Your household is not in shambles because your nervous system is keeping it together through depletion and resentment. And your relationship isn’t in conflict because you’re the one keeping the peace by avoiding tension and suppressing your needs. So you’re the one who keeps the peace. You’re the one who keeps the appointments and makes the plans and makes the budget and maintains the calendar, and you’re the one who shows up even when you’re tired and everyone else benefits. And you do sense how you’re making their lives better, how you are being like a quote unquote good employee or a coworker or a good mom or a good friend or a good partner. And so you just keep thinking that life is working out and you’re handling your shit like an ace. And even on top of that, you’re getting paid for your work, right? You’re getting approval, appreciation, some level of respect, a sense of security. And then all of that feels validating and all of that is real, but again, at what cost? The reward shows up immediately as a raise or as a new client, or maybe a quieter household in the interim, or more stable relationship on the surface. But the real cost is paid when your body stops functioning the way that you want it to, or stops looking the way that you want it to. And then bringing it back to health and vitality isn’t as quick, is not as easy as you would like. Psychologists call that temporal discounting. When you weigh the immediate benefit over the long-term cost and you value the reward today. That’s why when that day comes, you’re just gonna blame it on age, you’re gonna blame it on your work, you’re gonna blame it on your relationship, and you’re gonna point fingers because it’s easier to direct shame and resentment outward than to be accountable for the state of our own bodies. But if you have been ignoring your body’s place in your life all this time, are you really gonna understand why it developed that

Fatigue as an Early Warning
Linda Villines 11:40

condition or that disease or that symptom? Probably not. You’re gonna have this story, like my job is killing me, my family is exhausting, I’ve just never been good at relaxing. You have just told yourself those stories for years. And so they feel true, and maybe there is some truth in it, but the truth to your body is very specific, actually. If you’ve been doing the work but still feel stuck, like no matter how much healing, manifesting, or personal growth you invest in, or spiritual practices you try, something just isn’t clicking. You’re not alone and you’re not failing. The truth is, most teachings and approaches are outdated and only scratch the surface. My book, Unconditional, You Are Perfect as You Are, helps you understand exactly why things haven’t been clicking and how to resolve the root of why you’re struggling. Unconditional self-love isn’t just a nice idea if you truly want to be free. It’s the missing piece and the foundation for everything you desire. And you don’t have to do or figure everything out on your own. You deserve clear, comprehensive, and empowering step-by-step guidance in self-love, self-healing, and spiritual growth. The Source membership gives you daily support and transformative tools to actually start living your healthiest and happiest life today and every day. 100% of members who follow the program improve their mental, emotional, and physical health by over 50% in one year alone. Real mind, body, soul transformation is possible and you can achieve it with joy and ease instead of stress and struggle. So, as a thank you for being a listener, you can get 75% off your first month of membership with the code podcast promo. Your links are in the show notes. Now, let’s get back to the episode. You know, you could be completely at ease two hours into focused work doing your job and then totally tense and brace the moment a certain task arrives, or the minute a particular type of meeting begins. And you would call your job stressful, but your body only knows the stress during that task or that meeting. And you can say your whole family overwhelms you when the truth is your body tightens around one person during a specific type of conversation or exchange. And you can swear that you can’t relax. However, ease actually shows up every time you’re alone in the car, listening to show tunes on your own, right? But then it disappears the second you walk through that front door into that disorganized, chaotic household. That’s why a relationship with your body, built on respect and awareness and loving curiosity, is going to tell you everything that you think that you know, but you’re actually guessing or making assumptions about. Most of what you believe about your stress is a projection that you have just been repeating. So researchers reviewed like a bunch of studies and they compared how stressed people say they felt with what their bodies were actually doing, like their cortisol levels, their heart rate. And what they observed over and over again is that those two things often did not match, right? What a person said stressed them and what their bodies were actually doing. And psychologists found that stress isn’t like this global trait that blankets your entire life, meaning your nervous system doesn’t react the same way, regardless of the situation. Every situation affects your nervous system differently, like whether you’re sitting on the couch or eating dinner or opening your inbox. Your body isn’t stuck in one mode. We often hear the body is stuck in survival mode, and that’s a generality, right? It’s in a predominant state of survival. But the thing is that people forget that there are these moments of safety in their bodies and ease in their bodies, and they are completely unaware of that. Your body responds to the exact conditions inside specific situation. It operates on an if-then rule. So if you enter this specific room with this specific person making this exact ask, your body braces. But if you change the room, you remove that person, your body responds completely differently. So your body’s information comes with that level of specificity, right? Where are you? Who are you with? What are you doing? Where are you tight? Where are you soft? And when you put together all of that information over enough of your, you know, normal days, you’re gonna see something that no projected story is gonna reveal to you, which is exactly where your life is costing you and exactly where it is not. You know, when I realized that I was chronically stressed, at first I thought it was because I was easily stressed, which was in a way true because of how much unresolved trauma I was carrying and thus how easily activated I would get with everything. But when I began my real healing, meaning when I started to do the deep inner work, developed unconditional self-love so I could heal all of that trauma authentically, holistically, I realized that actually, no, life was not just stressful. And I wasn’t just easily stressed. It was specific situations, people, conversations, words, emotional circumstances, memories, wounds, beliefs, and patterns that resulted in mental, emotional, physical, or spiritual stress and tension or agitation. And only when I made the connection between what my body responded to in real time with specificity and with pattern recognition, could I determine, okay, this is that trauma response. And that is that trauma response. And that is activating that wound, and that’s why I’m feeling this way and why my body is braced in that way, and my jaw is tight like this right now. There were no more blanket assumptions, no more generalities, no more projected stories. There was knowledge, there was self-knowledge, there was data, there was information that I could use in a meaningful way that allowed me to then transform myself and my body and my life, and ultimately why stress is just a non-issue for me in the way that it used to be. That’s what happens when you develop a real relationship with your body and you include it as a primary aspect of your life and not just like some afterthought or some separate thing from you or your life, right? The inclusion of your body doesn’t actually add more stress, friend. It relieves it. Your body has spent years, decades adjusting itself to your life. It learned to sleep less, to eat on the run, to eat quickly, to skip meals, to hold in all that anger, to stifle your needs, to breathe shallow through those meetings,

How Others Benefit From Your Depletion
Linda Villines 18:30

to function on too much caffeine, on too much processed food, and hold all of that tension until you got home and then numbed it. It did all of that for you to keep you intact, to keep you whole. And if you’re like most people, you’ve spent your entire life taking that for granted. A relationship where one side takes advantage of the other is not healthy because it’s not reciprocal love. My husband died of cancer at the age of 39. Before he was diagnosed at 37, you would have looked at him and you would have thought he was healthy because he wasn’t overweight, he didn’t have like some sort of obvious condition that made itself visible. But at 37 years young, to quote the radiologist, there was too much cancer in his lungs to count. And his left kidney was basically all tumor. And it was not genetic. Like the vast majority of cancer is not genetic. In fact, the vast majority of all diseases are not genetic. And if you do have a gene that predisposes you, oftentimes it’s still not a hundred percent guaranteed that you’re gonna develop that condition or that illness. You know what the biggest determinant of your health and longevity is? Your life, how you live, the people you spend your time with, what you do with your time, where you live your life, the quality of your joy, your ease, the relationship you have with yourself, which includes your relationship with your body, and most importantly, your relationship with stress, because chronic stress is the common denominator in all diseases, whether that’s mental, emotional, physical, or spiritual, the body accounts for and it has to adjust for all of that stress because any stress is stress to your body, and stress is what breaks down your body over time. And we continue to live in a society and culture where stress is normal and we measure our lives not by our holistic mind, body, soul, health, but how well we manage what is deemed normal stress in daily life, like through jobs, career, bills, finances, households, the relationships, the output, the facade. You know, I asked a friend of mine recently how his wife’s health was while we were like catching up after a stretch of not being in touch. Because the last time I saw her, she was having like health issues. But the question like totally caught him off guard, like it was like out of left field or something, because I guess it’s unusual to ask about a person’s health when they’re in their 40s and everyday conversation. But I think that is what should be normal, not the grind, not the exhaustion, not the stress and the tension that people think is just like part of life, but how healthy we are. And of course, like after he got over the question, then he started telling me about his health, like with all sorts of enthusiasm and detail as if no one had asked him. And he started to like confide in me. You know, talking about our bodies should be a part of normal conversation. How’s your health? Should be as common as how are your kids, or how is your new client, or how is your project. But so many people have no relationship with their bodies unless something is wrong. So many people are scared of their bodies and thus just choose to ignore their bodies. And so you live your life with no input from your body, no relationship, and no consideration except for your fears and your worries or your obsession about how you look, which isn’t your body, but your appearance. And because your body isn’t a part of your life in a meaningful way, you continue to make choices that don’t take its health and its preferences or its options. Well-being into account. And so you continue to be stressed. You continue to manage symptoms. You continue to manage fatigue and poor sleep and digestive issues, skin issues, irritability, anxiety, hormonal stuff, whatever stresses you. And so you may think that leaving your body out of your thinking and your decisions is going to save you stress. But actually, neuroscientists studied people with damage to the part of the brain that connects body signals to decision making. And those people could still reason fine. You know, they passed the tests that they were given, they could explain themselves. But when it came to decisions about their own lives, repeatedly neuroscientists discovered that those people made poor choices that resulted in significant issues in their lives because the body’s input, the body’s signals were missing. Including your body is part of good judgment, friend, because your body is not separate from your life. Excluding your body is when problems arise. And that’s why I built my app, finally paying attention. It’s a seven-day interactive self-assessment that catches your stress patterns while you are actually living. And then it shows you what your body has been telling you about why you are stressed. So what happens is a few times during your normal day, the app just checks in with you for like 15 seconds, asking you, what’s your body doing right now? Where are you holding tension? Are you at ease? What are you feeling? Where are you? What are you doing? Not how stressed you think you are, not the story that you would tell about your day at the end of the day, but what your body is actually doing in that exact moment. So you get to connect, you develop awareness of that same data that your body has been recording and adjusting to all along your whole life. And there are no scores, there are no streaks, there’s no routine to keep up with. You’re not trying to calm down, you’re not trying to make your body behave or relax for once. You’re just simply paying attention to your body while your real life happens. And then over seven days, those small

The Long-Term Cost of Chronic Stress
Linda Villines 24:00

check-ins accumulate and they start revealing the patterns underneath your stress and what changes when you respond to your body instead of managing it. And then on day eight, you get this whole map made entirely from your own answers, where your stress lives, what tends to surround your stress, how your body responds when you finally listen to it, when you give it attention, when you meet it with presence instead of trying to fix it. You know, almost every single tool out there measures your body from the outside, right? Tells you what to do to your body. Like a wearable will tell you what your heart rate did. A journal is going to tell you what you remember. A regulation app is gonna tell you how to calm down through breath work, meditation, visualization. But finally paying attention reveals what it’s like to live inside your body through a normal ordinary day by revealing your own data from your own real life, because you can’t accurately and appropriately respond to a stress pattern that you have never actually seen with context and specificity. Stress is not something outside of you. Even when you think a person or a situation makes you tense, when you feel stressed, it’s because your mind, your body, or both are not at ease in some way for some reason, right? There’s tension, there’s bracing, there’s fear, there’s anxiety, there’s an unprocessed emotion, there’s excess, there’s deficiency, an imbalance, something causing your otherwise optimal normal baseline to be off kilture. And people pay attention to everything else instead of their bodies when that stress accumulates, right? The partner, the finances, the other person, the job, the budget, the household, the circumstance. Meanwhile, your body is the vessel where that stress is experienced, where that stress is held and accumulated in you and in your life. That means your body should be a primary factor when you measure how well your life is working. But the body is like so rarely a part of that definition, outside of how much you weigh and how you look on the surface. But the truth is, if your career succeeds, yet your body deteriorates under the conditions required to sustain it, that fact belongs in your definition of success. If your relationship remains intact, yet your body remains chronically braced inside that relationship, that fact belongs in the definition of how well that relationship works for you. If every obligation is met, yet you can’t access ease anywhere in an ordinary day without force or manipulating or pretending, that fact belongs in the evaluation of the life that you have built. Well-being has become the sum of like professional status, financial status, relationship status, adulting skills. But true well-being isn’t equal to a life that seems to be fine on the surface because you have your shit together on paper. If your body is carrying a lifetime of unresolved stress and suppressed emotions and bracing patterns that deteriorate its vitality, life does not exist without your body. And when you

Stress Is Specific Not a Global Trait
Linda Villines 27:00

move through the day, ignoring that fact, the cost of your life on your body is not something you want to pay. So please love your body now. Give it attention now. When it comes to your body and your life, function follows form. Thank you so much for being here today. I hope this episode awakened you, inspired you, and reminded you of what’s possible when you love, heal, and free yourself, and reclaim your highest truth and power. If this show has transformed or enlightened your self-love, growth, and healing journey, please like, save, and share this episode and leave a positive review on Apple or Spotify. And subscribe to be reminded of new episodes. Your support is deeply appreciated and truly helps this show so much. And if today’s episode resonated with you, don’t stop here. Go deeper. My book, Unconditional, You Are Perfect As You Are, expands on these teachings and gives you the missing framework about self-love that no one is talking about. So get your copy today to start reading and loving yourself more. And if you’re ready for the ultimate healing journey with daily instruction and guidance from me, I’d love to see you inside the Source membership. The only holistic and comprehensive step by step self healing program that is proven to work. Remember, you were never meant to struggle or wait for what is already yours. It’s time to claim everything you want and more. All the links are in the show notes. I’ll see you next time.