The World Rewarded You for Abandoning Yourself

How Productivity Culture Conditions High-Achieving Women to Disconnect

This isn’t just a mindset issue. It’s nervous system conditioning shaped by productivity culture, emotional suppression, and the socialization of high-achieving women. When disconnection is rewarded early and often, the body adapts. That adaptation becomes patterning — and patterning becomes identity.

This is how productivity culture wires the nervous system of high-achieving women to disconnect from their emotions and internal authority.

Let’s stop pretending this is a personal flaw.

You didn’t randomly disconnect from your body.

You didn’t wake up one day and decide your emotions were inconvenient.

You were trained.

Trained to override.
Trained to perform.
Trained to produce.

And the more you succeeded, the more you were rewarded for it.

We are living in an era where disconnection is not only common —

It’s applauded.

The woman who pushes through? Celebrated.
The woman who never complains? Admired.
The woman who “handles it all”? Elevated.

The woman who pauses?

She’s inefficient. Emotional. Dramatic. Behind.

So your nervous system learned something intelligent:

Feeling fully costs you status.
Producing protects you.

And your system adapted beautifully.

The System Was Designed to Reward You — Just Not Fully

Here’s something Tara Mohr speaks about that stopped me in my tracks.

Women outperform men academically.
Graduate in higher percentages from professional programs.
Excel in structured systems.

And yet?

We hold a fraction of CEO positions. A fraction.

So what happened?

It’s not competence.

It’s conditioning.

School rewards compliance.
Professional systems reward high-functioning performance.
But leadership — real leadership — requires something different.

It requires voice.
Risk.
Boundary.
Visibility.
Conflict tolerance.
Internal authority.

And those are precisely the traits women were subtly discouraged from developing.

You were trained to be exceptional inside the system.

Not disruptive to it.

You were trained to be high-performing.

Not internally anchored.

So of course when expansion asks you to take up more space —
your nervous system hesitates.

That hesitation isn’t weakness.

It’s inherited programming.

Even if you don’t work inside corporate leadership, these conditioning patterns follow you into entrepreneurship — shaping how you build, scale, and lead your own business.

Productivity Became a Moral Code

Worth is no longer about character.

It’s about output.

How much you do.
How much you carry.
How little you need.

Busy equals valuable.
Rest equals lazy.
Stillness equals falling behind.

So your body learned to distrust rest.

Stillness feels like social danger when motion was the only thing that kept you safe.

You weren’t wired this way.

You were optimized this way.

The Good Girl Was Profitable

The good girl keeps the peace.
Doesn’t make waves.
Doesn’t need too much.
Carries the weight quietly.
Stays grateful — even when exhausted.

She gets praised.

She gets promoted.

She gets relied on.

She also disconnects from herself to survive.

And here’s the edge:

Self-abandonment works.

Until it doesn’t.

It builds the business.
It grows the platform.
It keeps the family afloat.

But it hardens into a ceiling you eventually collide with.

The coping strategy that built your success
becomes the constraint that limits your expansion.

Self-abandonment doesn’t scale.

It restricts the very capacity required for your next level.

What once kept you safe now keeps you contained.

This Is Not a Mindset Problem

You are not struggling because you lack discipline.

You are struggling because the culture rewarded disconnection —

And your nervous system optimized for survival within it.

That is not failure.

That is brilliance.

But what kept you safe is now limiting your capacity.

You cannot build regulated expansion on a disconnected foundation.

You cannot embody authority while suppressing sensation.

You cannot scale cleanly while overriding your body.

At some point, you either reconnect —

Or you keep performing strength while feeling misaligned.

The Radical Choice

The world rewarded you for abandoning yourself.

Now you get to decide whether that reward is still worth it.

Reconnection is not soft.

It is disruptive.

It is countercultural.

It is radical in a system that benefits from your over-functioning.

Feeling is not indulgence.

It is reclamation.

It is the path back to:

Intuition.
Clarity.
Internal authority.
Truth.
Purusha — the Sanskrit term for the steady witness beneath performance.

And when you reconnect?

You don’t become less powerful.

You become less fragmented.

This article is part of The Regulated Edge — a body of work exploring nervous system regulation, somatic leadership, and regulated capacity for high-performing women and entrepreneurs.

About the Author

Janeen Alley is a nervous-system-informed executive coach and the creator of the Body-Led Breakthrough™ method. She helps high-performing women and entrepreneurs expand their regulated capacity so they can build, lead, and grow without self-abandonment. Through her work at The Regulated Edge and inside her program Safe to Soar, Janeen explores the intersection of nervous system regulation, productivity culture, somatic awareness, and aligned expansion. Her framework centers on Regulated Capacity, Steady State, and Aligned Ascent — helping ambitious women increase emotional bandwidth, stabilize under pressure, and scale without imploding.

Because the next level of success isn’t about doing more.
It’s about being able to hold more.