Summary 

Perfectionism can be a super-skill… until it quietly becomes the very thing holding you back. In this episode, I’m sharing the results of a not-so-secret experiment I’ve been running to break free from overthinking, reclaim my time, and find more presence in my life. What started as a simple shift in how I approached this podcast turned into a powerful lesson about pressure, productivity, and freedom.

If you’ve ever felt weighed down by your own high standards or found yourself second-guessing decisions to the point of exhaustion, this episode will give you a fresh perspective and a few practical strategies you can use right away.

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Check out my private podcast for lasting weight loss here: https://www.theunstoppablemombrain.com/bodyreset

What You’ll Learn from this Episode:

• Why perfectionism works in some areas (like medicine) but drains you in others
• The subtle way overthinking creates mental fatigue and steals time
• How I used my own coaching frameworks to experiment with letting go of “A+ work”
• The surprising ripple effects of setting hard stops and clear boundaries
• A sweet story about what I almost missed with my daughter and how presence changes everything

Listen to the Full Episode:

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Download the full transcript here.

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  Hey friends. Welcome back to the Burn Stress, Lose Weight podcast. I am back with the results of a not so secret experiment that I have been running in the background for the last few weeks. And as I've shared with you recently, you've seen me pop up in different corners of my house, in my car, at the gym, I've been in hotel rooms. I brought my podcast mic basically everywhere that I have been going with the intention and. The desire to basically release a lot of the holding back that I have been doing because of my very normal perfectionist tendencies. Now, this was all inspired, I have to thank my very good friend Devon, she's the host of the Point Me to First Class podcast. She talks a all about credit card points and leveraging your very normal spends as a busy professional woman on your credit cards, and we and her are both perfectionists. In the best and worst ways possible. So what I mean by this is my perfectionism has really created a lot of high quality results historically in my life. It is what maybe drove me to work very hard in school to get the A pluses that I did in elementary school. Definitely lost the A+ trend when I was in medical school and, and then onto residency. But it was my perfectionism and my desire to do high quality work that really created a lot of results. So it's not surprising as we talk about on this podcast, that my perfectionist tendencies and that includes my perfectionist thoughts were laced in practicality. I really for many, many years believe that to get results AKA, the proverbial a plus in my life, I have to do a perfectly, I have to have the perfect plan. I have to have the perfect strategy, and I have to execute perfectly to get those perfect results. And I think especially if you're in medicine, this is further reinforced because you don't want to be imperfect when you're dealing with someone's health. Right? Especially as a surgeon, as an OBGYN, I would never want to go into the OR with anything less than perfect on my mind. I want to do a perfect job for the health of the patient. And I think a lot of those perfectionist tendencies, particularly if you are in the medical field, can get really reinforced because it feels very unsafe, borderline dangerous to do anything less than perfect. However, what might have been and is, I don't wanna even say that it was, it is a super skill in my professional career as an OBGYN. It really did get me a lot of gold stars and A-pluses. I also started to find over the last year, especially probably over the last few years, but I really noticed this becoming a huge problem for me over the last one year where my profession was starting to create a lot of overthinking. So rather than maybe taking 10 minutes or 30 minutes to make a decision, I would spend an hour and then sometimes two hours, then I would make a decision, and then I would kind of wonder, is that the right decision? Is that the best decision? Is that the right way to say this? You know, information that I want to share? Is that the right way to write this email? Is that the right way to deliver this podcast? And I found that the overthinking that I was doing, it was like excess rumination, excess thinking was actually incredibly draining. So I was finding now not only am I not making a decision now, I'm second guessing the decision and I'm wondering what the best decision is. I'm going down rabbit holes of like a lot of thinking in my mind, and all of that excess thinking was leading me to feel an incredible amount of mental fatigue, not physical fatigue like I would maybe get in sleep. I mean, even that is also kind of on the fence because I would start scrolling Instagram and go down reels, rabbit holes because I needed a break from my overthinking. Do we see a trend here? Like part of the reason that I would get so behind is because I would have a tired brain because I was going down reels, Instagram, rabbit holes and Facebook rabbit holes. I'd be sleeping late because I just needed a break from my overthinking, and then I would come into my next day with the tired brain, unfocused, you know, add on top of that my perfectionism thinking. And like we would just spin out again. And what I noticed over the last year, and this was so insidious, it wasn't anything that was huge or major. It wasn't like some big catastrophe happened in my professional career, in my work. I just started to notice over the last many months, and I've been complaining to my friend Devon about this for over a year now, and that is I want to feel more present in my life. I've worked so hard for this one life, and I find myself constantly thinking about what I could be doing, thinking about the decision I could be making, thinking about how I want to execute on it, rather than actually slowing down and being present. Especially, I've really been feeling it with my kids. They're nine and six right now, but especially my daughter, she's six. I just see her growing up, like they're growing up, and I don't say this from a place of fomo, like I'm scared of them growing up and I don't want to miss out. Like I don't mean this from that place, but I really want to savor and soak up some of these really small moments.

  So I wanna share a little story in just a second, but I wanna share with you experiment what's been happening with this experiment? So again, I've been complaining to my friend Devon, me and her both complaining to each other, but just like commiserating in our perfectionism back and forth. We're like, okay, we really wanna get ahead. We really wanna be decisive. And then again, we would like loop into our like kind of perfectionist thinking. And I won't speak for her. I wanna speak more for myself. I just noticed. This very subtle weight started to get added. To my mind, it was like I was carrying this backpack that had a lot of weights, and I didn't even realize that I was carrying it. So while I was experiencing some physical fatigue because I wasn't sleeping well, because I was scrolling my phone, the bigger problem is I was experiencing a lot of mental fatigue. And I think especially after the age of 40, when you're not prioritizing high quality rest for your brain. It's like a recipe for disaster. You already have declining estrogen levels. You have more cortisol than the average bear. If you're an overachiever, you have more life stresses. And now add to that a tired brain. It's like a recipe for disaster, right? So I started to realize it was like feeling like a weight, like this dark cloud was following me around. And I don't mean to sound dramatic, but sometimes I use dramatic analogies to make a point. I just started to feel like I want to feel free of this. We hear on this podcast, we talk a lot about creating freedom. Freedom from food, but also freedom from achieving your biggest obstacles. You know, how do we create freedom as we hit our goals? So I've decided over the last month or so to take everything that I teach my clients in the Unstoppable Group, all the kind of techniques and frameworks and skills and strategies that we use to achieve our most amazing body goals and lose all the weight you want while feeling better, I decided to apply those exact same frameworks, exact same skills, exact same strategies, but tweaking the result. It's not that I want to lose weight, I want to gain back my time to my work life, and here is the most amazing things. So the experiment that I ran was particularly with this podcast, which is why you've seen me in random corners of my house with my microphone in the car, at the gym, in the hotel room, because I realized that it was the overthinking that was creating my fatigue. And every time I would be in fatigue, I would start, it's like the spiral. Then I would start thinking about having my notes and having my process and having my step by step and hoping that you all love it, which again, I hope you do. And it was taking me out of hitting the record button. So what would happen is because I was dreading my perfectionism, I was dreading feeling of needing to get it just right. It was so much pressure to put on myself. I would put it off so the pressure was not pushing me to perform the way that it might've pushed me to perform in the or. Or if somebody's hemorrhaging like that feeling of stress and pressure might make you act quickly. But because this is a process that's folded into kind of the work that I do week after week, it's not just like a quick one-time effort. I started to dread the pressure and because I didn't want to not record this podcast because literally this podcast is probably one of my most favorite things about what I do inside the Unstoppable orbit. It's one of my favorite ways of communicating with all of you and sharing real stories and sharing real. Frameworks and science and strategy. I decided to take everything that I teach my clients and bring it here. So here's what I did. I decided I was going to make the decisive decision. It couldn't be a, let's just see how it goes and I hope it works, and we'll see. Like none of that energy, all of that is like wishful wobbliness. We talk about some of the podcast all the time. It's like indecisive decision making. I decided I was not going to do the indecisive decision making. I was going to make decisive decisions and what that looked like. I talked about this a few episodes ago in the plane ticket to Paris episode, I decided that part of the reason that my brain was so fatigued is I didn't have my plane ticket to Paris on my calendar. I didn't have that time that I was just going to mentally decide. I am done with work for the day. This is my time to spend with my kids, to spend with my family, to spend at the pool or to spend, you know, taking my kids to someplace after camp to be completely alone, if that's what I want. Like off of social media, off of scrolling my phone, just to be like, actually just be present. Going for a walk outside and actually enjoying the birds and nature, like really just being present, slowing down and being present. So the first thing I did was I had to decide what was my plane ticket to Paris like, what time is that going to be in my day? And guaranteeing that no matter what, we discuss this concept on that episode. So if you did not hear it, go back and listen to that episode, unless there was an emergency, unless I couldn't get around it, or I had a pre-decided commitment that was going to be the time I stopped working and just doing that. Making that one decision that I'm not going to think about work. I'm not going to do work. I'm like, it's a guaranteed promise to myself, and this felt uncomfortable because my overachiever self wants to keep working, wants to keep going. I had to get more focused while during my actual workday. So when that moment would come that I wanted to pick up my phone, I wanted to scroll, I wanted to just like take random breaks when it wasn't on the calendar, I had to remind myself. Priyanka, don't worry. We have our plane ticket to Paris. Like let's just focus. Let's just knock this out. Now, here is what has happened. This is the results of the experiment. I started creating these podcast episodes, first of all, because I wasn't bogged down with the invisible, not so invisible weight of the pressure and the perfectionism that I need, the perfect background. My hair has to be perfectly combed. I need to have the perfect makeup. I hope my, you know, my clothes look good on, on camera. I need to have my perfect step-by-step strategy because I let that go, because I stopped overthinking. I actually started to feel so much more creative. I started to have so much more energy in my actual day. Actually, not only did I stop overthinking, my creative energy has just skyrocketed and I'm having idea after idea after idea. And because we're doing, you know, the way this experiment works is the moment I have an idea is when I hit record, I've been so much more productive in my work because I'm not overthinking. Here's the one caveat, because I'm releasing the perfectionism and I'm releasing that need. Which I know it's a very like compelling need to be perfect and have it just right. I have had to be willing to do, be quality work, so that's, you know, sometimes you might see that I ramble a little bit or maybe I go off on a tangent as I tell a story, but I do always bring it back. Sometimes I might say the same thing more than once. Right. I would call that B-level work. It's not a plus plus, but it's definitely not even B minus, like, I mean, just my opinion, I don't wanna toot my own horn, but I feel like this is B quality work, maybe even B plus at times, letting myself off the hook to have to do a plus quality work all the time has allowed me to crank out a lot more reps. I've been able to produce so much more content. I've been able to knock out so many podcast episodes that it has actually now created what I'm calling, it's almost like this positive spinning momentum cycle. So I feel like we get stuck in these two different cycles. The first cycle, which is like the perfectionism and the pressure and the need to get it just right. Perfect plan, perfect execution. And if we can't, then why bother? And then we hesitate and then we never put it on the calendar. And because we can't do it perfectly, we just hold back from doing it at all. And then we create more lacking results. We get further behind, we create more overwhelm. It's like the negative spinning spiral of overwhelm for me to get out of that, which is what I've been experiencing all year. And again, I'm being dramatic. So it wasn't like so terrible, but it was kind of terrible for me to go from the negative spinning cycle of overwhelm and start creating what I'm experiencing now, which positive cycles of just what feels like massive, magical momentum. I had to put hard stops, which is clear boundaries on my calendar for when my plane ticket to Paris was going to be. I had to actually do the math, so I had to decide, and that means delegate. I'm not going to do all of these tasks because that's me trying to fit 20 hours of work, maybe into a 10 hour window. 40 hours of work into a 20 hour window. I had to actually talk to my team, talk to myself. These are the, some of the things that we are not going to be doing. Either cross them off my list or delegate them, which can be sometimes hard. The third thing that I had to be willing to do was B quality work. I had to take the pressure of A+ off of my mind, and this is where I think that it requires an emotional resilience or like a mental resilience to be able to do that. So if you are someone that's like, I don't know how to do that. I also, a few years ago, didn't know how to do that perfectionism was one of, again, it's, it's a super skill and a superpower, but I think that through years of coaching and understanding the power of our mind, understanding the power of the thoughts I was having about myself and my work and my task list, and my ability to create massive results because I've learned really well how to catch a lot of my thoughts and coach myself. I think that that's what has led to me being able to really create this switch over from the negative spiral of overwhelm into the positive spiral of momentum. So if you are someone that also feels this massive drag, like you just want to get out of thinking about the work all the time. Here's my biggest lesson, stop overthinking things. I know this sounds bananas and if it feels unsafe, it's just because a lot of your safety and a lot of your results has maybe hinged on perfection. But really take a fine tooth comb and ask yourself, do you actually need it to be a plus perfect in every single area. Like really? Do you really need to do that? I am just noticing. There's so many areas that I actually don't need to be A+. There might be some parts of my business and some parts of my life that I want to be A+, but if it's creating pressure and if it's creating a lot of excess stress, listen, you're already living stressed enough as it is, we're adding optional stress on top. If it's feeling heavy, if it's feeling full of pressure, if it's not. Feeling right? If it's taking you out of accessing your best self, if it's taking you out of showing up in your best way, how could it possibly be perfect? Right? So I think that what we get to do on this podcast is we get to redefine what is perfect. What if actually making a few key decisions on your plane tickets to Paris on having a strategy that really fits the math of your life? You would be surprised when you stop overthinking and second guessing and like just. Perfect, perfect, perfect. Planning. I have gotten back so many hours of time and I see my clients doing this. I know that we had Hazel on the podcast, we had Kara on the podcast, and they both shared how having magic action structure and magic action decisions, which is a really clear decision making framework, how having these decisions in place, they're not just like losing weight and hitting their goals. They were getting at hours of time back per week, and it's kind of interesting how it's taken me. I had to actually learn this lesson personally, where I've seen it work with weight loss, but I had not been applying some of these same frameworks to my work life, and I'm kind of just blowing my mind with this experiment. I was just texting Devon that her entire plane ticket to Paris literally inspired this entire experiment to begin with because I didn't even realize how insidiously I had not been putting a hard stop on when I was going to be done with work. And I wanna wrap up today's episode with this one really sweet moment I had with my daughter. When we put our kids to bed when they were much younger, we used to read them a book or like we would read a chapter of a book maybe when they were really little and they read the tiny little books. We'd have to read multiple books. And I remember I used to be on the clock all the time, like, when are they gonna go to bed so I can have my time for myself? The nice thing is we are starting to get out of that phase and over the last year or so, my daughter, who is now reading on her own, she wants to read by herself. She kind of relishes this idea of independence and so she still wants one of us to be in the room with her kind of as she's winding down, she calls it a wind down and she's like usually going to read by herself. And what I have started doing again, this was the experiment of the month, I'm not bringing my cell phone into the room with her. So normally when she's reading her book, I would be on my reels rabbit hole. I would just be, she'd be reading her book and I'm just quote unquote, taking a break, quote unquote. This would be time for myself where I'm just going, all the reels, rabbit holes. But I realized like I would leave my scrolling rabbit hole. And I wouldn't actually feel better. I wasn't feeling more rested. I actually felt more fatigued, more tired. I actually felt worse after being just mindlessly scrolling. So part of this experiment, my whole plane ticket to Paris experiment also came with it really making hard boundaries around when I want to scroll, when I want to be on Instagram or Facebook, when I want to be on my phone and when I'm not going to be. So this was one of them during Wind Down. When she's reading her book, I actually now bring my book also, or yesterday she decided this will, this is the part that was so cute and I would've totally missed it if I had been on my phone like scrolling away as my typical self was doing. She found one of those, I think somebody gave me one of those, it's like a magnetic skeleton. It's a kind of a children's toy or game where there's different parts of the body. You have to figure out where the magnet goes. And so there's different arrows pointing to different parts of the body. And there is a template, like you don't have to just be randomly guessing. So my daughter was like, oh, instead of reading a book I want to do, she calls it like a, like a body puzzle. So she was like, for my wind down, I wanna do this body puzzle. And lemme tell you because I did not have my phone and because I was not thinking about work, and I've just been feeling this momentum, I've been creating these wins on having more time and getting more done has been making me feel so much better that I feel more comfortable just relaxing with her. She started putting these magnets onto this like magnetic puzzle piece. And she does the cutest thing where she talks to herself. So she's like, oh, hello. Like she's talking to the magnet and she's saying, oh, hello, magnet. Where do you wanna go? Magnet like, oh, you wanna go over here? Let's go find you a spot. She doesn't even know really that I'm listening to her, but I'm just listening to her. And this is coming back to the beginning of this episode, which is I have been craving wanting to savor some of these moments, like just savor watching her little fingers and her little face, find these little magnets. And then some of the names of these bones, and you know like the body parts are kind of complicated. It doesn't just say nose, it says nasal bone, like, so it'll say nose. And then underneath it it says nasal bone. And so she says Nozzle bone. The nozzle bone wants to go and sit over here. So she's pronouncing these body parts in the most hilarious way. Instead of phalanges, which is like part of your hand. She was saying the pilgrims, the pilgrims are going to come over here. So she like can read, but she clearly cannot read some of these words. When she got to zygomatic, which is a part of your head, she went because she couldn't pronounce the word zygomatic, which is like the mandible. I cannot tell you my friends. I mean, I'm just talking to you like I would be talking to one of my best friends right now. I cannot tell you how I felt watching her as a mom. And how I can be fairly certain I would've been fully missing out on capturing those little moments with her because I have been sitting in a soup of pressure or sitting in a soup of overwhelm or stress or just like numbing out with my phone. And so this experiment, I would call it a success. Now, one thing I will say about all experiments, and I'm going to be wrapping this podcast episode up, one thing I can say about all experiments. Is that even though I feel such massive wins with it and I can feel this positive momentum, and the more wins I create, the more confidence I'm creating and the more I'm proving to myself that way, it turns out I don't have to be perfect to create results. It's like amazing. I also have, in my mind, I that it may not be perfect, like I might at some point in front of her pick up my phone. And this is where we really have the opportunity to catch ourselves. If we slip back into one of the negative spiraly ways, one of your old habits, if you find yourself slipping back into an old pattern or old habit, don't be mean to yourself and don't make yourself wrong. It is normal. So I wanted to share that as kind of a concluding piece to this, because I think. Sometimes we get this idea. Once you learn that magic action decisions can help you lose the weight you want to lose, and you start creating results, and you start having momentum, that means that you will never go back to the quote unquote old way. But that's not reality, right? Human brains are messy. You will sometimes have those moments where you slip back and just catching it with compassion and curiosity and just getting back to what is creating winning results for you seriously. It just lets you take any strategy and plug and play forever. So I wanna share the results, uh, the experiment I've been running this summer. And the other thing that really inspired this entire experiment was I know that in August I want to be off with my family off of tech. Off of recording, off of all the things, but I also want to keep delivering high quality content and information and science informed strategy for all of you. And I felt like instead of me trying to hustle last minute, I wanted to just get so far ahead that I wouldn't even know what to do with myself on vacation. My goal on my next vacation is to be so incredibly bored that I don't even know what to do with myself. I feel like that's what happens with a lot of my clients. When you're so used to thinking about weight loss and how to lose the weight, it takes up so much bandwidth. When you solve the problem, I feel like you don't even know what to do with yourself. It's like you have to go find something else to start thinking about, which I mean, I think it's a problem worth having. Anyways, that was today's podcast episode. I hope you enjoyed it. I hope you enjoyed this kind of series that I've been doing. I'm gonna keep going like this until I feel like the creative bug has gone down. When I feel like I'm not in my flow with this podcast, with these creative ideas, I might go back to some notes. We'll see where this goes. I'm actually not going to think so much about it. As I see topics coming up as I talk to real humans, as I coach my clients in the Unstoppable group, as I really take a fine tooth comb over my own life as a busy mom who really wants massive, amazing things for myself and my family and my community, I will keep bringing them here. Hope you enjoy today's podcast episode. If you're loving it, leave me reading and review. Shared this podcast episode with a friend, and I have some amazing free resources if you really want to take some of this work and kind of put it into action. First off, if you're not aware, I have a four. Part private podcast series called The Body Reset. It lets you kind of take all the stuff you're learning on this podcast. Of course, there's so many episodes now, but it breaks it into four private podcast episodes that breaks down the science of how to lose weight and support your hormone health. How to really address your real life stresses, like how to really burn stress and lose weight starting this week 'cause you're not waiting and waiting for next month and New Year's and like the next time. I want you all to stop waiting. Episode three is all about urges and cravings, which is literally going to be the game changer for how to stop snacking and scrolling without making it such a dramatic problem. And four is accountability, super skills, how to create accountability. Have structure that is really going to fit your life in a way that I think creates a lot of meaningful results. I hope you all enjoyed this episode. If you want to go and grab that private podcast, you can get it over at burnstressloseweight.com/bodyreset. I'll meet you in your email inbox with a private podcast link. And until next time, I hope you guys have an amazing week. Bye. Thanks for spending this time with me on the Burn Stress, Lose Weight podcast today.

  I hope that you are leaving today's podcast episode feeling a little lighter and more inspired than when we started. It turns out. That you don't need to have a stress-free life to hit your goals on and off the scale, but when you feel more empowered to respond to your real life stresses, with true strategy, we will game change how we show up, and how we hit our goals. If you wanna take what you are learning here on the podcast and put it into real life implementation, it might be time for us to work together in the Burn Stress, Lose Weight, Feel Unstoppable Group coaching program. Head over to burnstressloseweight.com and you can learn all of the details, the nuts, the bolts, when the next group is starting and exactly how you can join. Okay, friend, I'll see you next time.