Episode 314: Human Design and Burnout: What Your Energy Type Is Trying to Tell You
You’ve followed the "food rules." Bought allllll the supplements. Checked every “should” box. And yet... you’re still exhausted, overwhelmed, and questioning yourself.
This episode is your permission slip to stop blaming yourself—and start noticing where your wellness plan is just out of alignment.
We’re breaking down:
How to recognize when you’re forcing vs. flowing
What Human Design can reveal about it
Why the “problem” isn’t you—it’s the performance-based wellness culture we’ve all been conditioned by
Listen to the Episode:
“If there’s one thing that I‘ve been advocating over the past decade of doing this work is the concept of bio-individuality—not just knowing that we’re all unique, but accepting it and truly understanding this because you when embrace the truth that there is no one on earth exactly like you, you stop holding yourself to standards set by other people.”
Read the Transcript:
Hello and welcome to The Live FAB Life Podcast. I’m your host, Naomi Nakamura, and this episode is Part Two of a four-part mini-series on “designing your wellness around your energy.”
If you’ve missed Part One, bookmark it and go listen to it. We talked about how your energy isn’t the problem. The real issue is attempting a wellness plan that works against your design--against how your natural energy flows.
So, today, we’re getting into a truth that hits home for so many high-achieving women that I work with the truth that you're not failing. You’re just forcing things that were never meant for you, and your body has been trying to tell you this. She's been whispering this truth for a while now.
Whether it's that new wellness plan that you've been so earnestly, so desperately, trying to adopt, or that brand new productivity system that you're trying to implement, or that new diet that your friend or person you follow on Instagram swears by.
This episode is your reminder that just because something works for someone else doesn't mean that it should or will work for you
Now, you may not even be fully aware of all the ways that you’ve been forcing yourself into a plan or a system that's not meant for you. The forcing isn't always obvious. It doesn't only look like white knuckling your way through a workout that you absolutely hate.
Forcing can be subtle; it can be sneaky.
It’s waking up still tired after a full night's sleep, feeling exhausted, but dragging yourself out of bed and hitting the road for the run on your training schedule.
Forcing is pushing yourself through that 6am workout class at your gym, or that HIIT workout.
It can even look like pushing yourself through a yoga class that you just don’t want to be at. I've done this, and all it did was defeat the purpose of why I was there to begin with—to destress release tension, but all I did was watch the clock and countdown how many minutes were left.
Forcing definitely looks like eating what you think you-- using air quotes here, -- “should” be eating instead of what actually feels good.
Can I let you in on a secret? As a health coach, one might assume that I’m into all the so-called “superfoods”, and for the most part, I don’t mind them—except--I’m not a fan of quinoa. I think it's bland and it gets caught in my teeth every time I eat it, But, if I'm at a potluck and someone brings a dish with quinoa in it, I’ll eat it, but it's not something that I choose to make for myself at home. I just don't like it.
And don't even get me started on chia seeds, I think they're disgusting. I think they upset my stomach too.
But in the wellness world, quinoa and chia seeds are some of those glorified “super foods.”
For a long time, I forced myself to try and like them, until I got tired of faking it and finally admitted that I don't. This is what forcing looks like.
It can also look like ignoring all the signals that your body needs rest, because your to-do list says otherwise.
I know that I often talk about rest in relation to exercise and workouts, because that's my own personal story. But look at how you make space for rest in your day-to-day life.
Despite what you may have tried, what I’ve tried, you can't get all 20 things on your list done in one day. You can't get 10 things done. There are some days where it’s a struggle to get three things done, or even one thing.
The point I’m trying to make is that there's only so much we can do in a day, which is why I believe that time is our greatest currency. And that's why I'm always so appreciative of the time that you give me-- whether it’s listening to my podcast, watching me on Instagram, my social media platform of choice, you're reading my weekly email newsletter, I’m so appreciative of your time that share with me, because we can never get more than 24 hours in a day. That's it. We only get 24 hours. So, it is important that we spend it on what we love and the things that support our energy rather than drain it.
And rest is one of those things that’s important to everyone, even if you have a Defined Sacral Center, if you're a Generator or Manifesting Generator, rest is imperative for you too. It can't be an afterthought or a “nice to have.” And I’m just saying this from a Projector point-of-view.
Forcing also looks like perfectionism, and perfectionism is often dressed up as self-discipline. This is one of the biggest lessons that I’ve learned over the past 10 years.
I take pride in consistency and habit building. I've shared time and time again how I love the app, “Don't Break the Chain”, because it really does help me to build consistency in developing new habits, but along the way I’ve also learned that consistency and habits don’t always equate to self-discipline.
And the side effects of the kind of self-discipline where you’re forcing yourself to do something that really doesn't work for you is burnout, anxiety, resentment, fear, and when you keep pushing and forcing, you’ll eventually get to a point where your body just stops responding, or responds in ways that you don't want it to respond—it becomes counterproductive.
I want to pause for a minute and ask you to do an exercise. I want you to ask yourself--this is a moment of self-observation--where are you holding yourself to someone else's standard?
Because that's really what this is about--holding yourself to other people's standards.
Are you holding yourself to the standards in your Strava community? In your personal communities--your family, friend groups, in your group chat? Is it at work with your manager and your colleagues? Is it on social media?
Now, I'll be honest with you. I was a wellness perfectionist, and at times, I still am. I’m a work in progress working through shedding my own layers of conditioning.
There are times when I catch myself falling back into some of those patterns, like loading up on all these veggies at the farmer's market to make green juice to minimize all the junk food I ate. But guess what? Half the time I end up throwing out a lot of those veggies because I didn't do anything with it.
I also used to treat my running coach's training plan for me like it was the Bible. And being the overachiever that I was, not only did I follow the plan to a “T”, but I also always had to do a little more-- go beyond the plan, even when I was bone tired.
You know it's bad when your coach says that you're doing too much and need to scale back (and of course, I didn’t listen).
Perfectionism looks like trying to train through injury, scheduling your entire day--your work schedule, social calendar, meals, when you shower, when you do laundry day, your grocery list, all the bags that you pack for the day--your work bag, handbag, gym bag, shower bag, lunch bag. I say “you” but I really mean me, because these are all the things I did.
Everything was scheduled around my workout schedule, because, as someone who was always the last kid chosen for teams in PE class and pegged as a couch potato, without any athletic ability by the adults and peers in my life, to finally discover a sport that I could actually do in, and then accomplish something that not a lot of people can say they did, like marathons, well it was a huge deal for me.
Discovering a new part of me that had never been explored before was addicting. I clung to it and went all in, but at a cost.
Because internally, behind the scenes, I was exhausted. My sleep was trash. I had digestion issues, and I couldn't figure out why things that should be working weren't, despite all my efforts, hard work and training.
So, when I finally reached rock bottom, and I was forced to make yet another lifestyle change, and one that I wasn't happy about--to scale back on my running, and actually for a period, not run at all--was really difficult for me to accept.
But then I found something else to throw myself into--nutrition school and learning everything that I could about Functional Nutrition, which was a whole new way of thinking. If you’re not familiar with the tenets of Functional Nutrition, it’s not a diet, it’s not a plan. In fact, it’s not “nutrition” in terms of only what’s on your plate. It's a different way of thinking, a shifting of mindset that can be applied beyond nutrition or even health and wellness. It’s looking at the big picture of any given situation.
I couldn’t absorb all of this information fast enough, just like I couldn’t get enough of endurance training. Nutrition school and Functional Nutrition training led to starting a health coaching practice and entrepreneurship, and all the adjacent things that come with that, like podcasting and social media.
If you followed me back in 2015-2016, the very early years of my practice, you might remember how much content that I was pumping out at the time. Coaching programs, one-on-one coaching, blog posts, social media content--and this is before I even had a podcast! People would say, “Wow, I can't believe how much stuff you're putting out there.” and neither could I.
But the reality was that I just replaced long-distance running and endurance training with entrepreneurship. The rate that I was operating at was unsustainable.
And guess what? Much of it was influenced by people with different Human Designs than me. I was influenced and ultimately conditioned by so many different external energies--it was a whole different kind of over training but also led to burnout.
It wasn't until I discovered Human Design and learned that I was a Splenic Projector and what that meant, did I begin to shift my perspectives on rest --that rest isn’t lazy and intentional breaks aren't inconsistent.
I had been living out of alignment, had built routines and picked up habits and beliefs based on what worked for other people, not me.
Learning and aligning with my Human Design as a 1 / 3 Splenic Projector helped me redefine what things like rest and consistency meant to me and how it looked in my life.
So, now, let me ask you--how do you know when you're forcing things?
Here’s a few ways it can show up:
Forcing can look like dreading any part or all your wellness routine. Wellness is different for each person, and it's important to explore what it means for you, because your wellness practices should feel good. It should excite you. It should never feel forced or feel like “one more thing” added to your to-do list.
Forcing can look like feeling guilty about rest. Rest isn’t laziness and we all need rest. I have a long-time friend and when we were fresh out of college, just starting our careers, we worked long hours to establish ourselves. I remember that we’d spend our entire weekends having slog fests in front of TV, watching Law and Order marathons and we’d call those, “Fat Dog Days” because we thought we were so lazy, but the reality was, we worked so hard and such long hours during the week, those “Fat Dog Days” were essential to let our bodies and brains rest. I remember guilty feeling that we were so lazy and unproductive and that stayed with me for a long time.
But Human Design reframed what rest means to me, and I’ve been able to really tap into what makes my body feel rested, because that's ultimately what rest should look like. Your rest may look very different from what I deem “rest” for me—rest is all about what allows your body to tap into your parasympathetic nervous system so that you can experience deep rest to truly rejuvenate yourself.
Forcing can also be relying on willpower instead of following your intuition.
And lastly, at least for this list, forcing can also be when you keep tweaking your wellness plan because something about it still feels “off” or isn’t working quite like how you want or expected it to.
Listen, I'm all about tweaking. We're always learning new things and we're naturally curious people, who want to try new things. But let’s do it with the awareness to recognize when something is working and the willingness to let it go and not feel guilty or bad about yourself.
Because my friend, when you work with your energy, your life flows, and flowing feels sustainable. It's effortless, and likely even joyful. It's not about being lazy. It's about being in rhythm with your body.
Now, each Human Design Type has a natural flow. If you're familiar with Human Design, this might be a good refresher, but if you're not quite familiar with Human Design, here's a quick rundown:
Generators and Manifesting Generators thrive on satisfaction. If it's not a “hell yes, I so want to do this!” then it's a “hell no, I don’t.” If you're doing something that's not a “hell yes”, you're forcing.
Projectors—we and I say “we” because I'm a Projector, we need rest, and we need recognition. When we try to hustle like a Generator, Manifesting Generator, we’ll inevitably burnout.
Manifestors need the freedom to initiate. So, my Manifestor friend, when inspiration lands on something you need to start, you need to have the freedom to be able to do so. Sticking to rigid schedules limits your freedom and is what forcing can look like for you.
This is probably why a lot of Manifestors have a hard time working for other people, because you're working according to someone else's schedule. This isn’t to say that Manifestors can't work for other people.
And if you want to hear a couple of great episodes with a Manifestor in a 9-5 job, listen to Episode 121: Understanding Your Priorities & Establishing Boundaries in the Workplace with Terri Quinn and Episode 129: Best Practices for Working from Home and Managing Virtual Teams with Terri Quinn. Terri is my former manager, and now former colleague as she’s now retired, but she joined me in these episodes before I knew about Human Design.
Once I learned about Human Design, of course, I looked up her design, and she's a Manifestor. When you listen to her interviews, her Manifestor vibes definitely come through and she talks about how she’s always “managed up” in her career and found a lot of success taking that approach. And now that I know she’s a Manifestor, it makes perfect sense.
I'll link to both episodes in the show notes at www.livefablife.com/314 for Episode 314.
Reflectors, you need time and space to feel into your decisions and be in the environment that feels most supportive for you. Anything less than that is forcing.
My friend, when you start honoring your energy, that's when everything changes, because not honoring your energy is going to leave you feeling frustrated, angry, bitter, disappointed—these are the Not-Self emotions that each Type feels when not in alignment with their design.
And continuing to push and force yourself to follow a plan or system that’s not congruent with your energy will inevitably bring about your Not-Self emotions and ultimately, if you still continue to push and force, will lead you to burnout.
So, think about one wellness habit that you’ve been forcing, and think about what would feel like to let go or to shift it based upon your Type, Strategy and/or your Authority?
Unfortunately, the wellness culture can be toxic--like toxic positivity. It can teach us to keep pushing, to keep forcing—"no pain, no gain”, “you can rest when you're dead”, “just go beast mode!”
Human Design teaches us to pause and reflect, then align with your Type, follow your Strategy and Authority because when you do, you’ll find the best opportunities for you, make correct decisions at the right timing.
This is a radical reframe from what society teaches, especially if you've been conditioned to believe that rest is lazy, or that listening to your body is indulgent, or if you've never been taught how to listen to your body, which by the way, if you've never been taught how to listen to your body, you're following what other people with different designs than yours do.
But here's the thing, you're the only person living your life--not the Instagram algorithm, not your group chat. You.
If you've been nodding along, thinking, “I've been trying so hard and it's still not working,” one, you're not alone, and two, it's not about trying harder, it's about tuning in.
So, here's your invitation to download my free guide, Energy Mapping. 101, or if you're ready to go deeper, grab Design to Thrive, my gentle guide to Human Design. These resources will help you reconnect with your energy so that you can finally stop forcing.
And stay tuned because next week, we're getting to the decision-making process, that Authority that changes everything, because when you can trust yourself again, everything starts to shift, my friend.
Thank you once again for your time, your energy and attention--I don’t take them lightly and I can't wait to see you again next time. Bye for now!
Naomi Nakamura is a Health x Human Design coach who’s creating a healthier society through aligned energy.
She blends a bespoke mix of Functional Nutrition and Human Design to help others shift into alignment to leverage and correctly manage their energy to support their body, mind, and spirit.
She believes that when we embrace our authenticity and lean into our bio-individuality, we naturally live a life of freedom, empowerment, and optimal health.
Naomi resides in the San Francisco Bay Area and can often be found exploring the area with her puppy girl, Coco Pop!
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