Are You Addicted to Stress? How to Break Free of Overwhelm, Chaos, and the “Adrenaline Trap”

Makena: Hello, everyone. 

Gigi: Hi, everyone. Hi, Makena. I’m back at home finally.

Makena: Yeah. Lots of travels. You were here with me in San Diego. You were globe-trotting around the world.

Gigi: Globe-trotting around my area here. Yeah. So almost a month. I’m so super excited about being back home. I can’t wait to just be home.

Makena: Yeah. I, on the other hand, am not traveling because I am very pregnant, getting more pregnant every day. 

So we are excited to be back with you all for another episode. Today we’re going to talk about what we’re calling the adrenaline trap, which is how can you feel alive without the kind of emotional roller coaster that sometimes people unconsciously start to play out. 

They might not even know they’re doing that. But there is this thing of getting a little bit addicted to whether it’s overwhelm, busyness, emotional ups and downs in our lives, chaos. And we think, “I don’t want that. I don’t want this thing.” But then the pattern persists. 

So we want to talk about that: what’s going on there and how do you actually change that? 

I’m a recovering overwhelmed, busyness addict myself, so I’ll be vulnerable about that as well today.

Gigi: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. We see this in a lot of people. The way these originally came from is from the patterns that I saw in women around men. Right. And then you really took that list and created that from what we were doing in the Aliveness Mastery. So this actually was, or some of the ones from our coaching program. 

But these are so incredible to see, like you said, because we’re about to go into summer, and everyone’s excited and leaving for holidays, and it’s a super exciting time. We’re with family and friends. But what we find also is when we are with family and friends, a lot of times we get triggered. 

So even though these come up in the year, maybe when you’re in your work environment and things like that, you have ways of distracting yourself all the time. So when you go on your holidays and they come up, they might even feel bigger than they normally do, especially when it is personal. It’s a little bit different when it is people that are close to us. 

So we want to talk about those and how, first of all, how they work and how to notice them. And then what are some ways that you can shift? 

I say with a pattern, when you start to have the awareness about it. All of us know how we get triggered, but I think we don’t sometimes really sit down and look at what is happening and where did that trigger come from? Often people just don’t know what to do about it. 

That’s what we want to do in this episode: give you some tools to start to see it, catch it. Because I always say the awareness is the key. Then, you might still do it, but then you’ll see, “oh my gosh, there’s the impact when I do it, look what happens.”

The next time, you will stop a little earlier, maybe before you do it. Before long, you’ll start to even stop way before you even have the reaction, which is really great to learn because it makes a huge difference in your communication and in your relationships. And how you address life.

Makena: Can we talk a little bit first? Because for some people, the idea of, oh, I have this pattern is not a new concept. But for some people, I feel like this is going to be something they haven’t really thought about before. 

They might just think, I am overwhelmed in my life a lot, or I am busy, or I do feel like I’m on this kind of roller coaster emotionally, or there’s all this chaos.

So how would someone identify that it is a pattern for them versus just something that’s kind of happening?

Gigi: Makena, I think it’s really important for us to share, how does somebody even know if they have a pattern?

Makena: Yeah, it’s a great question. Because when I was overwhelmed all the time, which I was for many, many years, a lot of my adult life, and super busy, that was one of my patterns, what we call overwhelm or busyness. I just thought that was—I don’t know, I kind of thought that was just my life or it was the way it had to be. I really, I think I often said, I don’t have a choice, or, that’s just the way it is. 

What I’ve come to realize is that I was actually generating that overwhelm and that busyness, and that’s something you really helped me see. 

So I think the way to know if it’s a pattern, whether it’s that one or the other ones we’re going to talk about, again, were emotional roller coaster and chaos, is: is it something that continues to show up in your life on a consistent basis over time? And if that keeps happening, then the common denominator is you. There’s something there where, even if a big part of you consciously doesn’t want it, there’s something—maybe you get a little addicted to some part of that intensity. 

There’s just something being generated in you. So that’s what we’re talking about in terms of a pattern, for those of you who are new to this lingo, let’s say, is something that is repeating like that, in such a way that you go, what is the common denominator here?

Gigi: Yeah, and I think another thing is, often people think it’s something outside of themselves. It’s like, oh, all these things are making me overwhelmed. Or, I keep on having all these breakdowns with the emotional roller coaster. When you start to look at the pattern, like you said, and you start to see you’re the common denominator, then you—it’s really exciting, even though it’s a little uncomfortable at times. It’s a little embarrassing, actually.

Makena: Yeah, right. Yeah, it was really embarrassing for me when I looked at my patterns.

So, yeah, definitely. Well, let’s start with overwhelm and busyness, because I kind of want to break them down one by one and just talk about, how does this—how do you see this show up with clients or people, when you’re working with them? What’s that pattern look like?

Gigi: It’s different in different people. But overall, it’s this energy of anxiety or something like that, feeling like they have so much to do that they just—they have to hold it all, it’s so much for them, they’re the only one that can do it. And again, there are different flavors of this. And that was yours, right? Remember, it was like, you had to do everything right? And so in it… and then it can show up as busyness and yeah, calendar non-stop, right?

Makena: Back to back to back to back. That was me. I literally remember saying the words a few years ago—I might have shared this on the podcast once before—to a coach that I was working with at the time. I said, if it feels like if I don’t get my to-do list done, I will die. Which is very dramatic. But it really did feel that intense to me. I piled on the commitments, so there was always more. But then it felt like I was running this hamster race. So that’s a very intense version. Not everybody has it to that degree, and it took a lot to unwind that. But you do see—you can probably think of this either for yourself or look at other people in your life and go, oh, wait, am I doing that? Am I just committing, committing, taking so much on and then being incredibly busy all the time? 

What you really helped me see with this, and we’ll talk about, is what we call the gremlin underneath. Gremlins are those little like fuzzy creatures. They’re mythical creatures. In the myth of them or the story of them, they make technical things go haywire. So we adopted that language. We thought it was fun for, what’s really going on underneath this pattern? Why would we continue to do this even though we say we don’t want to? You helped me see, Gigi, what’s the gremlin for overwhelming busyness?

Gigi: This is hard for people to digest. It’s self-importance. I had recently shared this with some people and oh my god.

Makena: They were like, that’s self-importance. I probably said the same thing when you told me that. What are you talking about? I can’t help it.

Gigi: Because it sounds like—but when you look into it, the pattern is self-importance. Like for you, Makena, remember, you said you had to hold everything and you have to do all this, nobody can do it like you do it, and if you don’t, then it’s going to be a mess. 

So you were so important to the equation always. What happened was, first of all, nobody else could be brilliant around you. And again, we’re not saying this in a negative way. It’s just, it’s an unconscious thing and we make light of it and fun of it and talk about it, because it’s so great to finally see it and be able to let go of it. You’ve done that beautifully through the years.

Makena: When you see it, you can own it, and then own the part that is true in that. Then, like you said, start to make a change.

Gigi: Yeah, yeah. You really, really made a huge change. I have other clients, too, that now—I have one in particular, she makes a joke all the time. She says, “I’m not self-important anymore!” 

She said, “I have a team and anytime I feel self-important, I delegate it to my team.” She really, really loves that now, so it became—and for you, too, it became actually a step up in your leadership and how you approach things, right?

Makena: Yeah. There are so many things—we’ll get more into how you can shift this later. There are so many things I did and we’ve helped our clients do to shift this. Some are things like you’re saying, like delegating and taking that self-importance out of things, but also changing the way—not saying yes to everything, being more aware with my word and my commitments, and things like that. There was something else I wanted to say about the—oh, I think just to say, too, is that all of the patterns come from… 

The way we teach it is that they all come from at some point in our life they worked to get us a result. On the flip side, they come from trauma, too. Sometimes they come from really challenging experiences, but also, there’s something we get out of them, or we wouldn’t keep doing it, even if it’s playing out unconsciously.

Gigi: Yeah. It’s a certain kind of attention. We can get attention by—it’s a little bit like moods. So there’s a certain kind of attention we get. Of course, that’s not the kind of attention we want, but, like you said, through trauma or different experiences, this is the one that we created. So it becomes our fallback because we don’t even have the awareness that we’re doing it.

Makena: Yeah, yeah. For me, one of the places this came from was I was an overachiever, and that’s how I got attention, that’s how I got praise and so on. There’s no right, wrong, good, or bad about that, that’s just the way I grew up and developed. My siblings are very, very different from me, so it was something unique to me. But in that—this is a little bit what it turned into as I got older—was like an over-ramped up version of that. 

Again, it’s not to make any of this wrong or make you feel bad or anything. Like you said, when I saw where I was being a little self-important in things, and then I also saw the cost of continuing to operate the way I was operating, which for me was very much around my health and well-being and energy and vitality in the way that I felt—then I said, well, shoot, I really want to make a change. We’ll talk more about that in a minute. So that’s really the overwhelm and busyness. Is there anything else you want to say about that one before we move on to the others?

Gigi: No, I don’t think so.

Makena: So, emotional roller coaster. Can you define that one or share a little bit about how you see this one show up? Because this one I think can be a little harder for people to see sometimes.

Gigi: Yeah. This one is this up and down: Oh, everything’s great! And then two hours later, oh my gosh, my life is terrible and nothing works. These are complete opposites, right? Sometimes it’s more subtle, but what happens is, it’s continuous. It keeps happening and keeps happening. Again, it looks like the outside world, the circumstances, are creating this, but it’s so fascinating with people because what they do is gravitate towards the circumstances that create it. Again, because it’s unconscious. 

I think, I don’t know if you’ve said this already, it’s like an addiction. It becomes addictive and we don’t notice it. We just think, oh my gosh, life is throwing us all of these different things. Of course, sometimes life is just throwing us—there are all these different things. But when you see this pattern show up, it is continuous in a person. No matter what’s going on in their life, there is always this sensation of up and down and being overly dramatic about what’s happening.

Makena: I think it’s good to touch on this and chaos together because they’re very related. They’re not always related, which is why we separate them in terms of the pattern interrupt, but sometimes you do see both patterns playing at once, or you might have more of one or the other. So the emotional roller coaster like you’re talking about is this kind of emotionally up and down experience. It’s amazing, because even if you have this, you may not fully recognize you have it because it’s unconscious. 

We find this with our clients who voice note us—we do voice note coaching in our high-level mastermind or in our private coaching—and we will sometimes tell them, “Hey, go back and listen to your voice note from two days ago and then listen to the one you sent today,” because they will have these highs and lows and it’s like the whole world looks completely different, and they’re not even aware sometimes that they said the exact opposite to us two days ago. It is tough for people to come to that awareness sometimes. But it is that experience of, like you’re saying, it’s up and then it’s down.

Gigi: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s funny sometimes when they do that and they go back and listen, they’re like, oh my gosh, right?

Makena: They get their reflection in a lighthearted way.

Gigi: In a lighthearted way. Again, it’s shocking at first. It’s embarrassing at first. When I develop these, I usually started in the workshop when I would go into these. I would say, we’re going to go into something, I want you to keep your sense of humor as we go into it, because you’re going to get a very powerful reflection as we go through these. It’s always a difficult part of things, because again, it’s hard to look at. 

But once you get through that and don’t make yourself wrong, there’s so much freedom in these, and you really use these to your advantage over time as you learn.

Makena: And then chaos, how that one’s different: again, it can have a lot of overlap, but it’s the sense that there’s always all these external things. A lot of times, if someone has the pattern of chaos more than some of the other patterns, they tend to be pointing the finger outside of themselves—not on purpose, just that’s how it feels to them. Now there’s this thing with their kids, now there’s this thing at work, and now there’s… Of course, there are seasons like that in life for all of us. But if that’s a continuous pattern over a long period of time for you, that there’s just always another fire to put out and there’s always another crisis, then again, we want to look a little deeper and go, is there any part of you that might be playing a role in this or almost generating it? Like you said, there’s a little bit of this addiction component that we’ll talk about, to the adrenaline or to the cortisol of these intense experiences or continuous crises. These two are very related sometimes, but not always. Actually, when we look underneath, the gremlin for both is the same gremlin. So what is that gremlin, Gigi?

Gigi: Yeah, it’s one I call Drama Queen. Or Drama King. Because it’s so dramatic and it is like being on stage a little bit. When we go into what to do about that, in a minute.

Makena: I want to skip ahead and just give it to you right now. But, yeah, Drama Queen or King. Again, that’s tough to look at. That’s why we call them the gremlins—they’re the underneath. The top is easier to go, oh yeah, I do feel chaotic a lot, or I do feel overwhelmed, or whatever it might be. 

But the gremlin is usually the one that’s kind of hard to admit, but maybe a part of you, if you really look and see, you go, yeah, I could see maybe I’m being a little dramatic there, I’m bringing this kind of energy to things. That’s really, really important. Before we go into how to feel fully alive without the roller coaster, because there is this component of almost a kind of energy that we get from these things. 

Let’s talk about that addictive quality of it. What do you see there with people, Gigi?

Gigi: I just see, like I said, it becomes a pattern. There’s a lot of energy in it. In some ways, I think it feels like you are alive. You have these experiences and you’ve got a lot going on, so it feels like life is—there’s a lot going on. That’s what I see with people. Like we said, that becomes an addiction, because when you have peace or quiet or where things are really working, you can even see people start to create other things around it because it’s so embedded in them, and they’ve been doing it for a long time. 

Again, this can be something that you started when you were a child, and it was a great way to get attention. It can sometimes be a way to stand out. If you had a big family and you felt like you weren’t getting the attention, then that’s a great way to get everybody’s attention. Or, you know, you had all your mother’s attention, and then another child comes in, it’s a great way to get attention—you just become dramatic about everything.

Makena: Or again, it can come from also trauma. I think it often does. Maybe you just grew up in an environment, for example, where there were a lot of people or drama, or that was what was modeled to you. The hormonal side of cortisol spiking and maybe adrenaline when we’re having these experiences—science has shown—we don’t have the exact studies here, but we can absolutely get addicted to those stress hormones. They start to feel normal, and anything that’s not that almost doesn’t feel okay somehow. It’s almost like we can’t come down from that; it doesn’t feel safe to come down from that. 

So wherever it comes from doesn’t really matter all that much, it is just for you to recognize, okay, this is a pattern—it’s not me, it’s not who I am—and it is something that, even though you want to get rid of it consciously, on another side there might be an addictive quality to it, where the going, going, going, which I definitely had for a long time. That’s what happens when people start to unwind these patterns—a lot of times they feel like life is a little blah or, like you said, things are more peaceful for a short time, they’re enjoying it, and then they create another issue because they’re just not used to it. They don’t know how to operate in this new space. That takes some time and practice to unwind.

Gigi: I had an interesting thing—this doesn’t completely connect, but you’ll get it from the story. We lived in New York City, and that was so awesome to live there in so many ways because you walk downstairs—we were right at 63rd and Broadway—and you had restaurants and shopping and things going on all the time. So much fun. Also a little overstimulating, right? And then we moved back to Austin. I’ll never forget that—the feeling was, oh my gosh, there’s nothing going on here, like at night in this desert, in the middle of nowhere, like this dead atmosphere. I remember it. It was so hard for me to navigate for a while because I was so addicted to the life of New York and all the stimulation, and then not being stimulated like that—it felt like, oh my gosh, I just lost my whole life or something. So this is similar to that.

Makena: Absolutely. What you really taught me, Gigi, and what we do with our clients, is how do you get these needs or these aspects of ourselves fulfilled in a healthier way? Let’s start with emotional roller coaster or chaos. Again, they’re related, so we’re going to put them together. We talked about the Drama Queen was the gremlin.

What’s a healthy way for someone to get that need for a little bit of drama maybe, or a little bit of that feeling fulfilled? What do you usually tell people?

Gigi: Get on stage! Get on stage, somehow get seen. Usually, when I see this in my clients, I say, you need to either be on a stage, in front of a camera, go take an acting class—do something where you are getting seen and heard and attended to. Because if that’s something you love, and a lot of times people do, they’re hungry for that attention, that is so right on. That’s your sweet spot, that’s something—and you’ll see this. 

Like with you, Makena, with your modeling, remember from a little girl, you could see it and then you resisted it. I was like, no, you have to get on the camera and you have to go for that. That has been an evolution for you and a really, really great thing because it gives you a way to express yourself, a way to be seen, and people want to see you. That’s what I often find with people who have this, especially the emotional roller coaster one, is that there’s something that they want to express or do.

Gigi: Yeah, there’s a gift in there.

Makena: Yeah.

Gigi: And it’s a matter of owning that again and going into the gift or exploring what that could be for you. How do you feel called to be seen and heard? Like you said, if that’s speaking or showing up doing funny reels on social media or whatever that is. There could be something really incredible waiting for you on the other side of that, even if it’s just something you do on the side. Speaking of modeling, I’ll show for those watching on video—this is my new wall.

Makena: So beautiful. Yeah. Amazing.

Gigi: It’s so nice. Just imagine if you didn’t do that. You didn’t have that expression—imagine.

Makena: Yeah. It reminds me who I really am when I look at the pictures, which is funny because I’m embodying so many different people and characters. But being pregnant right now and going through this big transition in my life, I told my husband the other day, I look at these pictures and I think, oh yeah, that’s who I am. Because sometimes I’m like, what is happening? So yeah, you never know what you’ll discover there. So that’s what the emotional roller coaster and chaos is about.

Gigi: Then, what about overwhelm, busyness—that pattern, which again, the gremlin was self-importance. Why don’t you share what we did with you and the transformation, and then how you’ve really navigated that in business and everything?

Makena: Yeah, this was a journey, definitely, like you talked about before: delegating more, really learning to delegate in such a way that I just didn’t hand something off and then get frustrated if somebody didn’t do it well. I really took the time to find and train great people and have patience with them and train them until they were better than I was at a lot of things, which was really incredible. So finding people who—it was really their sweet spot to do certain things—and being willing to let go of the control. 

Of course, I could still oversee things, but just getting anything I would bring to you and I’d be stressed about, you’d be like, delegate it, delegate it. Give it to somebody. I was like, okay, okay, okay. So it became a muscle over time, and then it was like, how can I delegate as much as possible? It became fun. If you can do that, whether you hire somebody or even delegate things in your personal life, getting support—however you can do that, that’s huge. 

Then, what else can you eliminate is something that we also talk about a lot. All of this with the goal of getting more and more into your sweet spot. You really helped me see, okay, there’s a lot of things I was good at that I was doing and spending a lot of my time on, but they didn’t actually bring me alive. They were things that I had a skill in but I really didn’t enjoy doing. What we define as your sweet spot or zone of genius is something that you’re really great at that also brings you alive. That distinction was huge for me because I got to see, what are the things I really love? I love being out with people, I love doing certain aspects of the marketing or the writing or podcast recording, whatever that might be. 

So then really focusing in on those things and, again, delegating or eliminating as much of the rest of it as possible. Those were a couple things. Also, more boundaries, I would say, just more changing the way that I approached my calendar. 

Two really small tips—I could probably do a whole podcast episode on this and maybe I even have, I’ll have to look back—but two very small tips would be putting open blocks on your calendar. I started to—because I had a tendency to block every minute of every day, I started to put what I call “leave open blocks.” So in between, if I had four calls or something, I would put a leave open block in the middle of that and make sure that I wasn’t just going back to back to back. What that did was it allowed me to regulate myself better and have these pauses. Sometimes I might use that time to work, but sometimes I would take a break and go sit outside. That’s the one tip. 

The other one that really changed things for me, and I think has for a lot of our clients, is having one day a week that you take completely off, even if you’re working a ton. Now I take more than that off, much more. But even if you’re working a ton, can you get one day that you completely unplug? You’re not on email, you’re not in a bunch of technology, and you go do something fun and you totally, totally unplug. I started to unwind and unwire some of that cortisol addiction basically by putting these simple systems in place.

Gigi: Yeah. I remember sitting so many times with you with your calendar, remember? And you’d be going—and I would be like, why don’t you put space there? “No, I can’t, I have to,” and it was like pulling teeth for a long time.

You thought, like you said, it was almost like you felt like you would die if you didn’t have that whole thing scheduled. So amazing. You have to really acknowledge yourself for the transformation that you’ve done there, which is incredible.

Makena: You guys, now I’m the opposite—well, not quite the opposite. I still am a very effective person; I do get a lot done in a very short time. That’s what I realized too, that’s a superpower—I get a lot done in a short period of time. I don’t need to work as much or as hard as most people because I can get in there and focus in a way that most people can’t. Why not utilize that to then live more and enjoy more and so on and so forth?

But I really did get to this place where now, I like having—I like having a lot going on still, in a different way, but I like having open space. I like caring for myself. I’ve really rewired something there. I think we have a few closing thoughts around these patterns. Did you want to share some of those spots?

Gigi: So with both the patterns, first of all is just to really realize that it is an addiction to the intensity. If there’s part of you that loves that, then find ways to channel that intensity. Find places to put it, and also areas like you said, that really bring you alive, that you can be super intense. Or you can schedule it, right?

Makena: You have to fill an entire full-size freezer with food for postpartum. Let’s talk about nesting intensity here. I went a little crazy, so I have to find outlets.

And what are a couple more. Do you have some?

Gigi: Like you said, channeling the intensity can be in terms of drama queen or king—getting up on stage. But definitely for me, it’s having set times or projects where I allow myself to just go full throttle for a little while and then I go, okay, done with that. 

Now we take a break. Now we shift gears into a different energy.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And as we said before, don’t make yourself wrong. Use your curiosity to see, how do I do this and what am I doing and what could I do differently? We’ve given you some great tips here of different ways to handle it. 

Then notice on this time where you have more space and time when these things come up and start—it’s great to work on them during the summer before you get back into the fall routine.

Makena: Definitely. Or you may go on vacation or whatever it might be and come back into your life, and that’s when they become really apparent. Sometimes that happens as well.

Whichever way it shows up for you, if you start to recognize yourself in these, then you have some tips and some tools to begin to unwind them. 

I think that’s maybe a nice closing thought too is just to know that it is an unwinding process, and it does take time. 

It took us—maybe I could have done it faster—but it did take me several years to really see this again and again, to kind of have my nose in it and go, I want to change this. Like you said, working with you, and a lot of times our clients work with us to shift some of these patterns, but they keep coming up for a while because it is habitual and it is addictive. There comes a time, though, where more and more and more it lets go, and then ultimately you really can change these things, and really change them for good, I would say.

Gigi: Yeah, so you have them and choose them on and off, and they no longer have you and control your life.

Makena: Absolutely. Good. Well, thank you for sharing and thank everybody for listening.

Makena: We want to thank you all so much for listening and for your feedback. Again, if you love our episodes, please go in and comment and give us some stars and everything, because then we get seen more on the podcast.

Gigi: We can share with more people, and that’s the biggest compliment you can give us. Apart from, of course, we always love to receive your emails and things. You can always email us at support@ayofthemuse.com if you have an idea for a podcast episode or if you have feedback you want to share with us. 

But also, the biggest compliment you could give us is to share with a friend. If there’s somebody in your life that you think would love this or would really get value from this, please pass this episode along.

Makena: Yeah. Thank you. Have a good summer. Bye.