38: High Functioning Does Not Mean Healthy

What happens when the vacation you desperately needed becomes the moment your body finally breaks down? Daffney shares the moment a panic attack forced her to confront a hard truth: high functioning does not mean healthy. Beneath the constant productivity, people-pleasing, and pressure of “holding it all together” was a nervous system running on fumes. In this episode, Daffney identifies the three daily “energy sucks” silently draining driven professionals and eventually showing up as anxiety, brain fog, burnout, and emotional shutdown. Through practical tools and powerful mindset shifts, she shares simple ways to reconnect with yourself, regulate your nervous system, and stop living life in survival mode before your body forces you to slow down.

→ Feeling exhausted, overwhelmed, or like your body is waving a red flag? Take the Free 2-Minute Quiz to uncover what may be holding back your health, energy, and performance.

In This Episode:

• (01:00) Panic attacks and the breaking point behind “doing it all”
• (03:00) The hidden “energy sucks” draining you daily
• (07:40) Reclaiming your 30%
• (14:10) Endurance over sprinting: a new definition of success

Connect with Daffney:

The Game-Changer Consult → This 60 min deep dive offers you clarity and insight into what’s possible for your next 60 days. Leave this consult feeling full of possibility and with the energy of purpose!

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

When a vacation ends in a panic attack, it's time to get honest about your focus. We all do it. We feel the need to keep pace, never put anything down. And it is the biggest energy suck and failed investment that you've been conditioned to believe. It's a trap, a trap that keeps you from a life of health that you're working towards. High functioning does not mean healthy. Welcome to Don't F and Shrink, the podcast, where we stop playing small and start showing up big. I'm your host, Daphne Allwine, and I'm here to cut through the noise, ditch the self-doubt, and get honest about what it takes to live and lead with unapologetic confidence. Each week you'll hear unfiltered conversations, powerful stories, and in real life strategies to help you take up space in your life, your work, and your world. So buckle up because shrinking is not an option here. Let's dive in. For me, it started with a panic attack. Well, it started with a vacation, a vacation that we've been looking forward to for quite some time. You know, vacations are one of those things where we feel like we work so hard, we deserve an opportunity to be separate from that stress, separate from those things that are causing us to not sleep or not eat well or just physically feel out of our own bodies and our own pace. And vacation feels like something deserved. But for me, it just added to my stress level. I really had bought into the conditioning that I could do it all, keep it all going, and then also try to fit it all in, but I failed. What's a panic attack? Well, maybe a few of you have experienced this, or maybe you are not sure. But it literally is a manifestation where your body can no longer take on the pace and the stress, and it can feel and manifest in an emotional display, an actual fogginess and disconnect from being able to use your own brain and a real general feeling of unhealthiness and grief and sorrow. It manifests differently for other people, but maybe you're already starting to feel some of those symptoms. Maybe you're already feeling like your body is stressed. You can't clearly think or even emotionally connect with the people around you. And as a result, it creates anxiety and very heightened sense of anxiety that there is something wrong. Let me tell you about some of those energy sucks that all of us are facing and what we can actually learn and glean from an experience where we deserve a break. We deserve to step away from some of those responsibilities. And I'm going to give you some real tools to do that as vacations approach for many of us. Energy suck is something that happens that we don't even recognize is happening in our bodies throughout the day. And those are things like dread of what's ahead of us. So, so recognizing or even starting with a mindset where we need to armor up for our day. So when we wake up in the morning and anticipate with a mindset that we have to take on resistance. So anticipating a struggle, that's something a lot of us do. It's one of those things I notice a lot with clients when I talk about or we have morning sessions or early morning sessions. I notice that a lot of clients start their day with a sense of dread or already anticipate a struggle, whether it's from their children or their coworkers or the traffic ahead. So one of the things I love to address with clients is focusing on that mindset of why are we dreading something that doesn't exist yet? We're already anticipating that we're going to have a struggle with kids in the morning. We're already going to anticipate a struggle with emails or a coworkers or situation. Instead of starting the day fresh with the idea that anything is possible and starting with the mindset that it could go well. We've heard that a thousand times. What if it goes right as opposed to trying to be five steps ahead, anticipating a struggle? This is a huge energy suck. This is literally you starting the day already armored up, already wearing 30 pounds of gear, and in some cases 100, depending on your responsibility and your load. So one of the things I love to talk about with clients is actually starting the day armor-free. Starting the day without that mindset that things will be a struggle, because you have no idea how much that stress and that energy pull from you is limiting your ability to actually think clearly and move forward. The second suck is also the facade. If we're already starting with having to take on a persona or having to hold a level of energy where we are telling ourselves that we need to show up perfectly every single morning with the same smile, the same costuming, the same level is a lie we tell ourselves. We don't need to show up every single day as a caricature of ourselves. But the idea that we do, that we need to costume, we need to create facade in order to make everyone else around us feel comfortable is an incredible waste of energy on our part. What if we just allowed ourselves to show up the way we feel in that moment? What if we just allowed ourselves to operate at whatever we are feeling in that moment without suppressing it or creating a vacuum of how we are actually feeling in our bodies that day? And the third thing that may seem really personal to you is all about the performance. We waste our energy giving a performance. Now, with our kids, sometimes we need to show up as the cruise director and always make them feel like they're being stimulated. That is a big energy set for us, right? We need to constantly be directing and controlling and performing in a way. But if we just trusted our environment, trusted ourselves, and didn't need to perform, we could regain and recapture all of that energy and actually move forward, actually gain traction. Because when you're starting with armor, with a facade, with the need to be performing for everybody first thing in the morning, you're giving away such a valuable piece of your energy that could be invested into a more efficient, a more joyful and more health-directed opportunity that day. If this sounds like you, and it sounds like this for most of my clients, we're about to recapture that 30% that you've already lost this morning right here. When we talk about that 30%, that 30% of armor, performance, facade that sucks the energy out of our day. And we don't get any of that back. We very rarely get any of that energy back. And instead, take that 30% and invest it back into ourselves. We are paying dividends. So think of this as your energy portfolio for the day. When you start your day, sometimes you need to start 30 minutes earlier. I know we have kids, we have responsibilities, we have emails. But what I mean by that is when we choose to invest our time into ourselves first. Now, what that means is before you pick up that phone in the morning and start replying to those emails, before you start making lunches for the day or starting plans or checking your stocks or your stats or your bank accounts, I'm gonna ask you to give 30 minutes to yourself. It is amazing what a 20-minute walk can do for your brain and for your body. 20 minutes of breathing, 20 minutes of writing. And what that means is when we are first to connect with ourselves, because our body does not lie. Our body just wants to be seen and heard just like the people around us. So if you start every day with one of three things, and my God, if you can do all three, you will be jumping, jumping hoops ahead. But spending 30 minutes of your day, warm drink in hand, or whatever makes makes you feel grounded in that moment, but finding a space, whether in your neighborhood, to go for a walk for 20, 30 minutes, not connected to the internet, not connected to other things outside of you, and just breathing and being present in that moment, noticing birds, noticing the weather, noticing whatever it is, you are literally reconnecting and reinvesting into yourself. That is one thing. A walk, it's such a low bar of entry, but it does have these exponential benefits. And we know from science that literally being outside and acknowledging that there is greater stimulus outside of ourselves helps us connect with our own health and our own body and notice things. And maybe you're gonna notice some things that feel heavy, or maybe you feel things that are joyful. But the point is this your body is struggling to be seen and heard by you and to be heard as much as the external stimuluses in your world. So this is you walking, connecting, acknowledging what's going on inside your body, allowing yourself to be heard in that moment. Number two, connecting through writing. Literally sitting in a quiet-ish spot or find a spot in a coffee shop, find a spot that feels right to you. Or if you did head into the office early today, carving out some minutes, write it at your desk before you accept any calls, emails, or visitors to your office. Sitting down and writing for 20 minutes, set a timer, and it is very simple. I'm not asking you to write a novel. I'm asking you to sit and literally notice what's going on in your body. You could start with, I feel pain. I feel stressed, and really being honest, allowing your pen to paper connect with what's physically going on inside of your body and letting that download happen, judgment free. Leave the judgment behind. Whatever happens on that paper is between you and your body and your mind and your nervous system. And giving yourself a voice in that capacity will organize exponentially what you have available that day and what really matters to you. One of the things I like to start with is a question. What did I do yesterday that made me proud? What is one thing that I noticed on my commute? It doesn't have to be world-breaking novel. It is a huge opportunity for your mental health and your physical health and your nervous system to connect and be honest in that moment. And then the other opportunity you have if you are not already actively moving and writing, is singing. I know it's it sounds like one of those really trivial things, but if you ever pulled up next to somebody at a stoplight and saw them singing openly, honestly, full body singing, and notice the joy coming out of their body. If you have no other time today, other than your commute, what a great opportunity for you to sing, connect with your body, lift that energy with the vibration you choose. And it could be a sad song, it could be a song from your youth, it could be something just basically on the radio, or if you have kids, maybe it's there's some Disney hits playing in the background. But just allowing yourself in that moment to connect with that moment, to feel disconnected from what other people and other stimuluses are pulling from you in that moment and allow yourself to arrive. I love giving these tips to clients. And it's always fun for me to hear back what sort of song came up for that client when they are so stressed about that commute, so unhappy about a situation they know is ahead of them, but they have given themselves one of those three opportunities that moment to invest back in themselves. Something is always going to take away your attention if you don't take control. And when you look around and you see other people who appear to be high functioning, you have to ask yourself, is that sustainable? Because high functioning is like a sprinter. You can sprint hard, you can sprint fast, but how far can you sprint? When you see yourself in this capacity, you're an endurance athlete. You are somebody who is thinking about the long game and also thinking very intelligently about what high functioning achievement looks like over time, as opposed to in the short burnout capacity. High achievement is about endurance, not about the sprint. I would love for you to take the quiz on our website, and it really will kind of pare down and help you understand what it is that you might be struggling with. So when you take the quiz and it's all about understanding where the cracks are in your wellness, in your health, in your achievement, and really offers you the support you need. So jump in there, take that quiz and give yourself the tools that are going to move you forward and support you best for the long term.