At every private event I facilitate, I ask the audience which of the Five Overwhelm Culprits™ resonates most. And every single time, the same one dominates the room.
Lack of Conditioning. The lack of physical and mental health and wellness.
And when I dig into why — the answer surprises people. Because it’s not about time. It’s not about a packed schedule. The number one theme I see behind the Lack of Conditioning Overwhelm Culprit™ is this: you care more about everyone else’s wellbeing than your own.
And the people pleasing cost of that — the real, tangible cost — is much higher than most people realize. I know because I paid it.
The People Pleasing Cost: My Personal Story
About five years ago, after I had my daughter, I decided — without anyone asking me to — that my job was to handle everything with the kids. All the night feedings, the school runs, the cooking. My husband was the primary earner that season. I told myself this was how I was best contributing.
I wasn’t sleeping enough. I wasn’t eating well. I had no time for myself. But I kept muscling through.
Then came a weekend trip upstate with my family. My husband stayed back for work. Two to three hours of sleep per night. And on the drive home, I had a complete mental breakdown — feeling a strong impulse to jump out of the moving vehicle. My parents didn’t feel safe letting me drive my kids home. My husband was called. There was an intervention.
We assumed it was postpartum depression. It wasn’t. My therapist helped me see the truth: it was a complete lack of self-care — specifically sleep. My body had short-circuited from the chronic depletion I had willingly put myself through to care for everyone else.
Why the People Pleasing Cost Falls Hardest on Women
What I experienced isn’t unique to me. It’s deeply rooted in generations of conditioning.
For generations, women’s worth was tied to their ability to serve others. Because women weren’t working outside the home, their entire value was in what they provided for their families. That was how they survived — their security was dependent on their partner.
It wasn’t until the 1970s and 1980s that women could even purchase a vehicle or own a home without a male cosigner. That’s recent. One generation ago.
So while the world has changed — both parents work, women earn independently, families look completely different — the belief system hasn’t caught up. We’re still operating like it’s the 1950s, living in 2026.
And overwhelm is what happens when your strategy no longer matches your reality. We are holding ourselves to a standard that was designed for a world that no longer exists. And we are paying for it with our health.
The Real People Pleasing Cost: What Depletion Actually Does to You
When you become physically and mentally depleted, you become the bottleneck in every single system you’re in. At home. At work. Everywhere.
Here’s what that looked like for me during that season:
Performance Cost
I was not a great mom during this time. I didn’t have the mental capacity to be fully present. I wasn’t a great wife — I was grinding myself into the ground and had nothing left to engage with my husband. And I wasn’t a great business owner — my mind and my body couldn’t function.
I was showing up as 50% of myself in every area. That is the performance cost of putting everyone else first.
Safety Cost
I was so sleep-deprived that the people around me didn’t feel safe having me drive my own children home. When you are responsible for other people’s lives, your depletion becomes their safety issue too. That is how serious this gets.
Financial Cost
Doing everything yourself at partial capacity costs more than asking for help. When you’re depleted, you can’t work efficiently. You can’t think clearly. You can’t execute. The house wasn’t clean. The laundry wasn’t done. Everything was falling behind — despite the fact that I was home.
Partial effort produces partial results. And partial results cost you.
Health Cost
If you keep going — if you never stop putting everyone else first — your body will eventually make the decision for you. That’s what burnout is. Your mind and your body shutting down because they have nothing left to give.
Mine almost did. And it was terrifying.
How to Stop Paying the People Pleasing Cost: Put On Your Oxygen Mask First
If you’ve ever flown with kids, you know what they tell you: put on your own oxygen mask before putting it on for others. Your self-care works exactly the same way.
Here’s what I actually did to turn things around:
Have the Frank Conversation
I had a direct conversation with my husband. Not about everything — but about the specific things I needed to change.
- He needed to take on occasional night feedings so I could get uninterrupted sleep
- He needed to handle the morning school routine so I could have a minimum of one hour to myself every day — to work out, meditate, or simply think
That hour had to be in the morning because that’s when I have the most energy. And it had to be protected.
Set Boundaries and Hold Them
Old routines crept back in. My workout would get cut short. My morning hour would get interrupted. My therapist called me out on it directly: “Why aren’t you setting boundaries?”
Her solution was clear. If my workout was being cut short — I got in the car and left the house. Suddenly, everyone was forced to handle the morning without me. Because they were capable. They had always been capable. I just hadn’t let them.
Asking for one hour for myself was not a lot. Not when I was spending 23 hours a day taking care of other people. A boundary isn’t selfish. It’s necessary.
Go Back to Your Minimum Viable Plan
If you don’t have a Minimum Viable Plan for your health and wellness — build one. Not a perfect one. A minimum one. The floor you come back to when everything around you is chaos.
This is what prevents burnout before it happens. Not a perfect wellness routine. A baseline you can always return to — especially when life gets hard.
The people pleasing cost is real. But so is the choice to stop paying it. You cannot pour from an empty cup. And you cannot lead others — at home or at work — when your own body is shutting down.
Put on your oxygen mask first. It’s not optional. It’s how you protect everyone else.
Find Out If Lack of Conditioning Is Your Overwhelm Culprit
If you recognized yourself anywhere in this post, the Lack of Conditioning culprit might be what’s holding you back. The free Overwhelm Culprit Quiz tells you in three minutes which of the five culprits is running the show — and your most powerful next step to address it.
Take the free Overwhelm Culprit Quiz here.
Go Deeper With the Book
I cover the Lack of Conditioning Overwhelm Culprit™ in full detail in my book — with even more strategies for breaking the people-pleasing cycle and building the self-care systems that actually hold.
The Five Overwhelm Culprits™: Strategies to Save Your Sanity Without Sacrificing Your Success is available now everywhere books are sold.
This is the book for the high-performing woman who is done putting herself last — and ready to lead from a full cup.
CLICK FOR TRANSCRIPT
[00:00:00] What do you see as the most common theme behind people whose overwhelm culprit is conditioning? This is a question I received during a recent private event Q&A while discussing the lack of conditioning overwhelm culprit. Which if you’re new here, lack in conditioning is lack of physical health and wellness.
And I realized this is a really good topic to cover here because by far the most common overwhelm culprit at any event that I do is conditioning, and the answer to this question is surprising.
But here’s the truth. If you struggle with taking care of your mental and physical health, it’s most likely because you care more about other people’s wellbeing than you care about your own. And that needs to change starting now.
If you’re a high achiever, especially a woman who struggles with making time to take care of your own physical and mental health and wellness, then you’re gonna wanna stick around because by the end of today’s episode, you’ll know why this happens and exactly what to do to [00:01:00] correct it.
Hi, and if you’re new here, my name is Corrie LoGiudice, otherwise known as Corrie Lo, and I’m a professional keynote speaker, facilitator, leadership expert, and author who helps high achievers transform overwhelm into confident leadership action, even in times of crisis. Talking about not taking care of your own physical health and wellness, I understand the true cost of this because it happened to me.
So this all happened after having my daughter. It was about five years ago at the time of this recording, and while I own my business and I spent time in it, it wasn’t generating as much revenue as it did when I had the capacity to be full-time in it. And that made me feel like I was a stay-at-home parent, which no shade to stay-at-home parents at all.
It was just very, very different for me after having been a full-time working mom through all [00:02:00] of my corporate career to now have my own business and be in a position where I wasn’t able to spend as much time in it and have it directly impact my revenue. It’s very, very different when you’re working in corporate and you have a very reliable paycheck.
When you’re an entrepreneur, the amount of time that you’re putting into your business… I shouldn’t actually say that because a lot of times too, Money isn’t necessarily always connected to time, but it is connected to attention. And because I didn’t have that attention into my business, my attention was in obviously being a new mom to my daughter, I did have a revenue drop-off, and this had me having all sorts of conflicting feelings surrounding it.
So at this time we were, for the most part, entirely living off my husband’s income. So that, to me, made it feel like it was my job to handle everything with the kids since my income was so reduced.
So this resulted me in doing all of the night feedings since my daughter was [00:03:00] exclusively breastfed, and as a result of that, I really wasn’t getting enough sleep. And I was also at that time trying to eat healthy, but I found it really difficult to manage doing so because for me, meal prep is a very important part of it because I do have a lot of food intolerances and it was near impossible for me to be able to eat healthier because I am the only cook for my household, and because my attention was on my daughter, I couldn’t really do that.
So I really wasn’t eating as well as I should have been.
So I’m barely holding it together, but I’m still muscling through all of it since that’s how I felt that I was best contributing to our household. And my way to do this was by handling all of the kids. Now mind you, we do have four in two different school districts, right? And at this time, one of them was an infant.
So we wind up going, or I should say me and the kids end up going on this weekend trip with my family to celebrate my mom’s birthday, and my husband had [00:04:00] to stay back due to work at the time. So it was just me with the kids, and I had my parents there, and my brother and my sister-in-law and their kid.
And through the course of this weekend between the late night hours, keeping the baby up ’cause we were going up for dinner later than her bedtime, so she was up and all sorts of wacky. Plus just overall changes in routine. I got max maybe two to three hours of sleep each night on this trip. So on the way home, and we had carpooled with my parents, as a result of me not getting the sleep. I had a complete and total mental breakdown where I felt this strong impulse to just jump out of the moving vehicle.
So it was very, very serious. At that point, by the time we got home, my parents didn’t feel safe having me drive the kids back to my house from their house. They ended up calling my husband. It was this whole, intervention thing, and at that point everyone was like,
“You need to go to therapy. You probably have postpartum depression.”
So we had assumed it was postpartum depression, and so I start [00:05:00] working with my therapist again, and I’ve talked about my therapist multiple times. I’ve worked with her through multiple different issues over the course of the last decade. So I start working with her again during this phase, and through that work we discover that it wasn’t postpartum depression.
It was actually a complete and utter lack of self-care hygiene, specifically sleep. So during the course of my sessions with my therapist she calls me out on this, it was very easy for me to see how my own self-limiting beliefs contributed to this breakdown. And how it could have been entirely prevented altogether had I not continually put everybody else’s needs before my own.
So I’d love to know, is what I’m sharing resonating? Is this something that you’ve experienced as well? Share yours in the comments. I would love to hear more, about how you’ve experienced this.
So from here, in order to discover what we need to do first. To solve this issue of us constantly putting other people’s needs in front of our own. We need to understand where this belief [00:06:00] even came from. And I’ve done so much research on this, it’s part of a couple of keynotes that I give.
But in general, when you look at the data. Women in particular, through generations have been known that our worth is tied to our ability to serve others and there’s a reason for that and it’s because women were not always working. Women relied on men, their partners, to be able to provide for the family because they weren’t out there actually earning money.
They were working in the home. But now we’re in this scenario where you have both parents working outside of the home, and it is very common. And women can earn financially. We are not dependent on our partners. But these beliefs are still deeply ingrained in our psyches because it’s only been roughly a generation or so since women can even do things like purchase vehicles or own homes on their own.
Back in, I believe, the ’70s and the ’80s, women still had to get cosigners, for stuff like that. And I was born in the ’80s, Not to age myself. But there’s a reason why when you look [00:07:00] at it this way, why women just automatically default to feeling like we need to put everybody else’s needs before our own, because that is how we survived.
Our survival used to be dependent on men, and when you look at the typical 1950s nuclear family, it worked because at that time, women worked inside the home and not outside the home and their partners provided for the family. Now it’s split. So we’re functioning in, an old generational nuclear family, with the same expectations, but our circumstances have changed significantly.
And that’s one of the things I talk about often, on my channel and in my work, is that overwhelm, it’s a sign that you need to change your strategy to match your current reality. We are still functioning as if we are living in the ’50s, but really, we live in as of this recording, 2026, and it’s time to adapt because otherwise we’re gonna stay overwhelmed.
So in my scenario, I was mentally running a business as well as running a household, plus also physically healing from having brought a baby into [00:08:00] this world. And my body, in that car ride on the way back from the trip, literally short-circuited from the lack of self-care and maintenance that I willingly put myself through to care for others.
And that came at a cost. So let’s break down the hidden costs of what happens when you become depleted and you keep putting everybody in front of yourself. When you become physically and mentally depleted, you become the bottleneck in every single system that you’re in.
So looking at me as an example, during this time, I was not a great mom. Because I didn’t have the mental capacity to be fully focused. I wasn’t a great wife ’cause I was doing everything myself and grinding myself into the ground and didn’t have energy to actually engage with my husband or the people around me, and I also wasn’t a great business owner because my mind and my body could not function.
So why am I choosing to only show up as 50% of myself? It doesn’t make any sense. And your [00:09:00] depletion can also become a safety issue. So I was so tired and sleep-deprived that people didn’t wanna let me drive with my kids. That can be serious. So when you’re responsible for other people, it is your responsibility to make sure that you can function.
And doing everything myself, it actually costs more to do it all yourself than it does to enlist or hire help. And the reason why it costs more is because you’re doing everything you can at only a partial capacity. So if you were able to function at 100%, sure, you could do it in a time-efficient manner
but because you’re lacking capacity I mean, looking at me in this scenario, Yeah, I was at home, but I wasn’t able to clean the house at any sort of level or keep up with laundry. So basically, I was slowly drowning in every single system that I was in. And when it gets to this point, and we talk about this often, especially here on the channel when you address overwhelm, you get to potentially prevent [00:10:00] burnout before it happens.
Burnout is what happens to your mind and your body when your body gives out. So this took a toll on my health to the point that my body did shut down, and it was very scary.
So what do you do? What’s the solution for this? The truth is you gotta do what they tell you to do on airplanes. If you’re a parent and you’ve ever traveled on an airplane with your kids, the flight attendants will always tell you, ” You need to put on your oxygen mask before you can put it on for others.”
So start thinking about your self-care like that. So solutions for me was I first and foremost had to have a very frank discussion with my husband that he needed to help pitch in more, not in the areas that we had thought. ‘Cause my husband is very hands-on. He helps with all sorts of household things like, he does the dishes, I cook.
He helps with laundry and stuff like that. But there are things, specific things that I needed help with in order to solve my self-care issues. The first one is I needed him to take on occasional night feedings. I needed to be able to give up that night [00:11:00] feeding. I needed to also make sure I pump so that he could do the night feeding.
I also needed him to handle more of our morning routine, specifically with school, so that I could have a minimum of one hour to myself daily in the morning to be able to do whether it be work out, or if I needed to meditate, or just have time to think and be by myself. And it had to be in the morning for me because that is when I had the most energy after I had just woken up from sleeping.
And then from there ’cause we were able to do this, and it worked great, and I was working with my therapist through all of this. But then there were instances where we would slip back into old routines. Where he would kinda like just default and maybe, my workout would get cut short, or that hour in the morning kinda cut short.
And from there that’s when my therapist started calling me out and saying,
“Why aren’t you setting boundaries?”
So I needed to set boundaries to make sure that time was protected, and I was getting what I needed to be able to take care of myself. So one of the things to make sure that my workout didn’t get cut short that my [00:12:00] therapist had suggested was that if it was happening, that I got in the car, and I left the house.
That then everybody in the household would be forced to have to handle it without me because truth is, they were capable of doing it. And asking for an hour for myself was not a lot, especially when I spend the majority of 23 hours during the day caring for other people.
So to recap. The number one theme I see when it comes to the Lack of Conditioning culprit is people who feel the need to care for everyone else before they care for themselves.
They are the afterthought, and that needs to change. We’re not living in the same society that we did in the 1950s, and we can’t care for everybody in the same way from strictly a capacity standpoint. We just do not have the capacity to be able to do it. So not prioritizing our care leads to severe consequences and costs, including becoming the bottleneck in every single system you’re in, whether that be your family or at work, to potential safety issues where you could become unsafe to [00:13:00] be managing and caring for others.
It could lead to cost issues because the things that you are involved in, you cannot function at 100% to get it done efficiently. And also, most importantly, health issues can go long-term. You let this keep on going and you will burn out, and your body will show you by shutting down. So what do you need to do next?
That’s simple. Make sure that you’re putting on your own oxygen mask before putting it on for anybody else. So this goes back to, and we just did an episode on this very recently. What is your minimum viable plan when it comes to your health and your wellness and making sure that you stick to it and keeping yourself accountable.
So hopefully you found my sharing this today helpful. If you have any questions that you would like for me to answer, whether it be on this topic or maybe even something new, feel free to leave a comment, and we just may feature it on a future episode. And if what I’ve shared today really resonates, and you wanna know for sure whether the lack of conditioning culprit is what’s holding you back at this point, I invite you to take my free quiz, which [00:14:00] you can find linked in the show notes.
You can also learn more ways to work with me, whether that be one-on-one through coaching and advisory, where I can help hold you accountable to taking care of yourself or with your organization or team through my speaking offers, and you can learn all about that in the show notes as well. Thank you so much for being here, and I will see you on the next episode.
See you then.
Thanks for checking out The Next Step with Corrie Lo. If this episode resonated with you, share it with a friend, subscribe, and leave a review. Together, we’ll transform overwhelm into action, and we’ll keep taking the next step towards confident leadership. See you next time.