The Superhuman Compulsion: Busyness, Striving & Consuming
As a child, my favorite superheroes were the Wonder Twins. In case this dynamic duo is unfamiliar to you, here’s a recap…
Zan & Jayna are twins from an extraterrestrial race called Exorian. Orphaned by a plague that killed their parents, the twin brother and sister were adopted into an intergalactic circus as unpaid performers. They were domesticated as slaves and seeking freedom. Neither of them could do this alone — they needed each other to activate their special powers.
They did this by touching knuckles, and speaking the phrase "Wonder Twin powers, activate! Make me the form of a ... (fill in the blank)." Jayna would shape-shift into an animal while Zan into some form of water — liquid, ice, steam, mist, and ice structures such as cages or sleds. As a child, I secretly wished that I was the sister, Jayna. I, too, wanted the power to become an animal when I felt threatened or in danger.
Eventually, the Wonder Twins escaped the circus in pursuit of their mission to be of service. Upon learning of a dark villain’s scheme to destroy earth, they traveled in their spaceship to warn earthlings of the impending danger. Shortly after arrival, they joined the League of Justice and Super Friends, and lent their shapeshifting superpowers to assist in the fight against villains and criminals.
Each one of us has superpowers and special medicine
What are your superpowers? Does your life allow you to access, cultivate, and share these special powers with others?
Sometimes our superpowers are invisible to us — yet they’re an unshakable aspect of our design. For example, are you blessed with the gift of empathetic listening; running big numbers in your head without a calculator; sensing energy shifts in people and places without words being spoken; or do you embody a coveted capacity to surrender into uncertainty instead of become frantic or paralyzed by fear?
Each time we give and receive appreciation for one another’s superpowers, we help one another deepen our embodiment of them.
In many indigenous tribes, when a child is born, the shaman will read the medicine of the young one’s destiny. From that day forward, each member of the tribe is devoted to fostering the child’s gifts and empowering them to live into the fullness of his or her authentic path. There is no manipulation to change the child into who a tribe member wants them to be.
Parents are encouraged to relinquish any desire to persuade or control the child’s interests. Since the tribe doesn’t operate like many western family systems, in which children are often molded into who other’s want them to be, the children’s gifts are not polluted by external agendas.
Like a dusty gem, each tribe member polishes the child’s destiny with celebration, tough love, encouragement, and curiosity.
This form of love, acceptance, and nurturing another being into their full blossoming is a sacred art of honoring another’s destiny.
How do you express your gifts, your presence, and your most authentic self?
What is the superhuman compulsion?
How do we help one another dust off and radiate the superpowers that we’re here to share with the whole of humanity?
Regretfully, many modern day systems of influence — family, education, religion, peers — have lost this art. Streams of conditioned expectations, fear-based messaging, and pressures of who we need to become take shape as early as infancy — long before we have the ability to self-reflect and make conscious choices.
Instead of being mentored to become our most authentic self, many of us are praised when we follow what’s expected of us and punished or shamed when we don’t.
This form of conditioning muddies our internal waters, and redirects our attention away from an internal orientation and towards external-seeking validation. As a result, we strive towards culturally esteemed markers of success, such as productivity, attractiveness, popularity, busyness, accumulating, consuming, and proving our value by doing instead of being.
This phenomenon is called the superhuman compulsion — an unrelenting drive to become someone who other’s will be proud of or to free ourselves from self-doubt, fear of inadequacy and chronic restlessness. You know the voice, “as soon as I have x (the partner, savings, home, promotion, recognition, etc), then I’ll be happy.” And often, when we possess the golden goose we’ve been striving for, the joy quickly fades, compelling us to refocus our attention and strive towards the next idealization of happiness.
Indoctrination and conditioning, are a primary cause for an internalized severing from abiding inside of our own basic goodness. If we don’t repair the separation from our center of being then most of our actions will be driven by anxiety, inadequacy, and lack as we strive for the self-image of who we think we need to be to be happy, loved and valued.
The way to course-correct domesticating ourselves and one another is to collectively dismantle the programming we’ve inherited and to shred the tightly bound packages that confine us. This isn’t an easy path, and it requires us to access our superpowers of inner strength, deep listening and embodied power.
In this article, I want to focus on the paradigm of superhuman compulsion. This socially esteemed and normalized way of operating that often requires us to neglect our need for rest, sleep, connection, play and self-care in order to sustain our self-image of being competent, valuable, and responsible.
Depending on our conditioning and soul curriculum, some of us will rebel against this. Others will innocently succumb to the conditioning and beliefs that the only way through is to do more, strive more, work harder, give up our needs, and hope someday we’ll find a rest stop or a finish line. Some of us will hunker down quietly and forge ahead as martyrs, trapped in our beliefs that there is no way to relinquish these duties of being the hard worker and the one who holds it all together, and therefore we choose to endure, numb out and slowly die inside.
A modern-day superhuman idealization
In the Western culture, we prize a “superhuman ideal.” From a young age, many of us are indoctrinated by cultural and social pressures to reach our highest potential and “hit our life out of the park,” even at the expense of our own authentic desires, health, and emotional well-being.
How many of us learned that our value is crystallized only after we have achieved the esteemed social status, the perfect job, the perfect family, perfect body, or the perfect healthy lifestyle?
These pressures whisk us away on a roller-coaster ride of highs and lows — one day we feel accomplished, successful, and worthy, and a day later, we collapse into depression, unworthiness and feelings of self-doubt and failure.
When we’re bombarded with social pressures of who we need to become it’s easy to forget who we are at our core — and what our life’s purpose is.
I tried with a fervent devotion to maintain my superhuman status until I was 32 and collapsed into a six-year illness. Not only did this healing crisis demand me to stop all activity, but it allowed me the space to excruciatingly expose the conditioned beliefs, behaviors, and brainwashing I had internalized. Finally, after digging deep enough to the roots, I identified the sources of fuel that had driven me into burn-out and adrenal fatigue.
The superhuman archetype: A conditioned behavior of domestication
Do you recognize a frenetic voice of anxiety that whips your attention, often in the middle of the night, towards the ballooning to-do list or problems to solve? You know, that voice that promises once they’re accomplished you can rest? It’s a trap. If you’re like me, no matter how efficient you are, there will always be more.
Let’s be honest — some of our lists are so exhaustive that we would need to remain awake 24 hours a day to accomplish a fraction of it.
If we’re lucky, we’re left with some time to exercise, rest, prioritize our spiritual practice, and spend time with the people we love. But paradoxically, even these sources of nourishment can become another task on our to-do list. Are we even present when we’re engaged in these activities, or are we still spinning in our heads?
Let’s take a brief inventory… How many of these questions resonate for you?
After a long day of chipping away at your to-do list, do you collapse into bed from pure exhaustion, and then wake up to do it all over again?
Is your health declining no matter how well you eat and often you go to the gym?
Is your need to numb out through various addictions increasing over time? (binging on Netflix, alcohol, sugar, socializing, etc.)
Do you prefer to stay awake into the early morning hours, daydreaming or surfing the internet with a secret hope of finding time to yourself, which seems hard-won during daylight hours? (or perhaps you wake at dawn for this kind of silence and space?)
Drying up the well of our passion and resiliency
Living under a constant pressure to uphold the expectations of being superhuman is a quick route to drying up our well of passion and resiliency. If we’re preoccupied with who we think we need to become then we may miss the boat and wonder on who we actually are when we aren’t stressed and striving.
When we feel pressured and under-resourced, we have less to give and more easily reactive towards others. We may surprise ourselves with frequent outbursts of hot-fused anger. Or, over time, we become less curious, we forget to check our assumptions, and instead look for someone to blame for our states of anxiety and overwhelm. Or, maybe we collapse into depression and self-doubt as we feel uninspired by the activities and people that used to bring us so much joy.
Unless our mind and body become replenished, it’s common for chronic states of anxiety, depression, stress and exhaustion to manifest into physical illness or disease.
“One of the most common causes of burn-out is the pressure to keep pace with expectations that push us beyond our capacity and natural rhythms ”
I’ll tell you this: you are NOT meant to do EVERYTHING.
Illness related to burn out is an epidemic. Many people, families, and organizations are investing significant resources to prevent this by practicing mindfulness, boundary-setting, and embracing tools to build resilience.
With conscious awareness, we can expose the slave-driver who rejects our need for rest, play, intimacy and connection and ensure what we prioritize what we love and feel nurtured by.
What is your north star? Where do you orient to find contentment and satisfaction with your daily existence?
In today’s article, we’ll break down the root cause behind the superhuman paradigm, and how to dismantle its grip over us, in an attempt to embody a liberated, passionate, and authentic life.
Understanding our collective inheritance
As a culture, we’ve learned to manage high states of anxiety through distractions and addictions, such as consuming substances, people, food, and achievements. We’re under the spell of a collective belief that happiness and peace reside somewhere outside of us through the next relationship, achievement, spiritual insight, or rung on our glorified ladder.
Over millennia, we’ve been indoctrinated to seek freedom and validation externally instead of internally, forcing us to forfeit an intimate relationship with the sensitive and attuned instruments of our whole-being wisdom.
Many of us have lost connection to an inherent trust that when we surrender, rest, and listen, the flow of all things will carry us into the next steps. Instead, we’ve been taught that we have to fight hard and push relentlessly to will our way into what we want. The disempowering message is “Don’t slow down, or you’ll be left behind, passed up, or forgotten — logic and reason are safer than listening and waiting for guidance.”
“Cultural and social norms can be invisible interferences that, unless investigated, will rule our lives.”
Exposing the voices that reinforce superhuman idealizations and beliefs
How do we manage the quandary of being who we think we should be versus who we yearn to become?
As we expand our capacity to self-reflect and take ownership of our conditioned beliefs and behaviors we open the gates for evolution and integration. Each time we consciously identify the internalized voices responsible for reinforcing anxiety-based striving and super-human idealizations we reclaim aspects of our power.
Many of us will toggle between internalized expectations of, “Strive to be your best, try harder, do more” and “You’re lazy, you’re not living up to your full potential, you’re not enough.” These polarized voices create an internal land-lock of confusion, guilt, and depletion.
Here are some more common voices we may hear that are imprinted with the superhuman paradigm:
As soon as I have or achieve x (a partner, the next promotion, a baby, a new home, capital raised for my business), then I’ll be happy, relaxed, and enjoy my life.
I must strive to be my best, try harder, do more, keep going, I can rest later. If I don’t comply, I will have failed and proven my inadequacy.
To fit in, I must dress, think, talk, and look the part. If needed, I must repress my desires and become who others need me to be. I need to be accepted more than I need to be authentic. The cost of being my true self is too high.
I’m too much. I’m not enough.
It’s natural to have these thoughts, as most of us have internalized these ways of perceiving ourselves and our lives. But these messages are also detrimental to our mental, emotional and physical well-being.
The superhuman cultural phenomenon teaches us to mask our anxiety, self-doubt, exhaustion and overwhelm in order to save face and not appear as a fallen superhero.
What fuels the superhuman compulsion?
In this section we’ll explore two key factors that fuel the superhuman compulsion:
Seeking externally for validation
The addiction to busyness
1. seeking externally for validation
Over millennia, humanity has been indoctrinated to seek freedom and validation externally instead of internally, forcing us to forfeit, or disregard, an intimate relationship with the sensitive and attuned instruments of our whole-being wisdom.
Our cultural norms have enforced order and control by exiling aspects of our primal nature and wildness. We’ve inherited a collective story of fear, judgment, and shame. Most of us swing between two extremes on a daily basis of “I’m not enough” or “I’m too much.”
Or we try to locate ourselves within hierarchical systems of superiority and inferiority — which leads to games of “I’m better than you” or “you’re better than me.”
How many of us have invested in something out of fear and a need to improve ourselves for social standards instead of for our own joy and pleasure?
The superhuman compulsion causes us to look outside ourselves for our sense of value — to our professional or financial success, our physical appearance, or our social circle.
We are taught to identify with an “espoused ideal” of success — which is reinforced by a consumer-driven culture designed to propel us towards increased consumption and accumulation of material possessions.
When success is measured by external pressures to produce, prove, and accomplish, it’s easy to slide on a slippery slope into anxiety-based striving, performing, pushing, or insecure comparisons that spur us towards divisive competition with others.
The good news is that with self-awareness and discipline, we have the power to interrupt this cultural measuring stick of doing over being.
How radical would it be to slow down, feel the power of our presence, and show up with space, awareness, deep listening, and curiosity?
What if this inner game of present awareness and open-heartedness was our milestone, instead of the hoops we jump through to impress others or prove our value?
“This superhuman paradigm pushes us out of our bodies and into our intellects, while depriving us of the potent wells of wisdom that live within our primal intelligence, hearts, and full presence.”
Self-inquiry:
How often do you sit quietly to hear the voice of your heart, intuition, body senses?
What are some of the ways you make other people’s perceptions of you more important than your authentic needs and rhythm?
Do you forfeit your authenticity to maintain social status? Is it more important to you to be considered reliable and loyal even if that requires you to engage out of obligation instead of genuine desire?
What do you seek externally that can be cultivated within? (i.e validation, intuition, connection, self-regulation)
2. The addiction to busyness
One of the most common, and socially normalized addictions is busyness.
This can take shape through stacking our lives with social engagements, work meetings, and daily engagements which result in zero space to rest, contemplate and connect with our full presence.
Defaulting to unconscious anxiety and stress responses can lead us into addictive behaviors. Some forms of addictions carry a cultural stigma, such as substances, sex, or shopping. Meanwhile, other forms of addictions are revered in our culture, like workaholism and relentless striving for success, recognition, status, accumulating material possessions and pursuing spiritual experiences.
When does your busyness move from a compulsion to manage compounding anxieties and pressures to perform and affirm your worthiness and value? And, when is it inspired from whole-hearted passion and creative purpose?
We can’t shift what we aren’t conscious of.
As children, many of us inherited voices that suggest being busy is more important than rest, connection, self-care, and building our reserves — what do we do with this now as adults?
We make space to self-inquire, study and mindfully track our thoughts and behaviors associated with our addictions to busyness and doing.
“You’re enough. It’s okay to rest and slow down.”
Self-inquiry:
What would it take, in a hyper-charged culture of busyness, to value your needs and to move at a pace that matches your natural rhythm instead of your cultures?
How has the phenomenon of excessive doing and busyness impacted you?
What have you forfeited, or when have you overridden your authentic needs and desires, to keep the pace required of you?
How do you stay resourced and clear-headed about your choices when you feel stretched in multiple directions?
The defensive posturing that attempt to uphold superhuman compulsions
When we’re highly stressed, we will default to one, or a combination, of the following three strategies:
Fight — work harder, push, prove, strive, consume, and amass material possessions
Flight — collapse, give up, sink into depression or frantically pursue our cravings
Freeze —dissociate, zone out, and struggle with shame or addictions
Each of these defense mechanisms interrupts out ability to be present, open-minded, open-hearted, and curious. When we’re threatened, we have a one track mind: stop the threat and move on. To learn more about our primal wiring, read my article: We’re Wired To Connect and Protect.
Self-inquiry:
How do you offload your fears of failure, losing status or perceived inadequacies?
How do you unknowingly defend and reinforce the superhuman compulsion?
How can we deconstruct the superhuman cage?
An antidote to the superhuman phenomenon is to expose how we give our power away to beliefs, cultural, and social expectations that cause us to feel shame and inadequacy.
No one is meant to be superhuman. If we feel we need to be, then we‘ll likely strive harder and push beyond our resources. If we can’t keep up with our internalized superhuman idealization, then we may instead sink into depression or hide behind addictions.
To integrate and heal is to find acceptance for where we are — without slipping into the quicksand of shame and collapse or revving our engines into more busyness to avoid painful feelings of unworthiness or perceived failure.
When familiar patterns of anxiety and striving arise, we have a choice, we can:
habitually reinforce the strategies we use to manage our anxiety through busyness
slow down, suspend our habitual responses, and investigate the thoughts and beliefs that reinforce us to seek externally for validation or pour ourselves into busyness to manage our anxiety and fear
The art of expanding our self-awareness
It’s possible to generate states of well-being from the inside out, rather than grasping for them externally.
It’s also possible to break down habituated addictions to busyness.
The journey begins with our ability to study, track and take ownership for how the superhuman compulsions of doing, striving, accumulating, consuming, achieving and enduring live within us.
Some starting points are:
Expand our self-awareness
Expose the underlying beliefs that drive our striving
Open our hearts to develop attuned aways to manage our anxiety
Embark on a journey of self-acceptance, and normalize the impulse to strive to prove our value and lovability
Rewrite the autopilot reactivity scripts by choosing how we want to respond when the triggers arise
Not much is possible until we are able to expand our self-awareness of what we are doing habitually and why. Before we can befriend our wounds and distorted beliefs, we must be able to see them.
Each time we expand our awareness we open the pathway to expose the beliefs that drive our compulsive behaviors.
Once we see the map of how we’ve been operating, we begin to explore the journey of self-acceptance, despite our messy and compulsive addictive coping mechanisms. It takes great courage to open our heart towards our patterns of anxiety and fear instead of shut down with shame and denial.
Most of our beliefs have been erected to protect our vulnerability against being exiled, rejected or abandoned. Our operating system is not who we are, it is as a stand-alone mechanism of behaviors and beliefs that we inherited as a means to manage the complexity of being We’re Wired To Connect and Protect when we feel vulnerable.
The more we are able to see our defense mechanisms, and embrace ourselves in the process, the greater opportunity we have to rewrite the reactive scripts that we default to when we’re triggered.
You are not broken. You are human. We heal together through building support systems and allies —both internally and externally. This helps us to embrace the process of interrupting habits and updating our choices, beliefs, and behaviors to match who we are becoming rather than continue to reinforce who we’ve been.
One of my favorite books that serves as an antidote to this painful superhuman and inadequacy phenomenon is Brené Brown’s ‘The Gifts of Imperfection.’
“There is tremendous potential for intimacy and healing when we bring self-love and compassion to the banquet table of being a messy and vulnerable being.”
The superpowers of self-care and self-respect
I don’t know about you but I never remember seeing a superhero take time for self-care. I don’t recall any mid-day naps, nourishing meals eaten slowly and deliberately, quiet periods of sitting meditation, making love on a slow and easy morning, or sipping a warm cup of chai while staring through mesmerizing wonder at the orange and yellow flames dancing in the fireplace.
When did the essential need for rest, self-care, and quiet time become a sin?
Why does self-care feel frivolous for many of us? Maybe because it’s been marginalized and labeled as selfish and unproductive? Yet, it’s the most important superpower that we can cultivate individually and collectively.
When emotional depletion and physical fatigue are causing conflict in our relationships, sleepless nights, and inflaming health challenges — then isn’t that proof enough that we need a reset?
I sometimes feel conflicted when I need to re-prioritize my life towards a slower pace, less socializing, less technology, more time in nature, and a stronger commitment to my spiritual practices. I disappoint people, and sometimes I feel judged — but I can’t afford not to.
I learned as a young girl, when things get hard, keep going, push harder, don’t stop. This belief is now part of my inner critic who vehemently suggests that I’m being irresponsible when I slow down to rest.
When I need to take care of myself I sometimes get derailed by the critic’s commentary “But, it’s sunny outside, you should be out hiking not taking a nap — what’s wrong with you?”
I understand that this aspect of my psyche is attempting to protect me from a potential threat of being punished or shamed for stopping to rest like I experienced in childhood. But now, it’s only being reinforced by me, and this is where I have the power to change history by taking the luxurious nap anyway!
Many of my clients bump into this too. They crave time to slow down, connect with themselves and quite their minds. Yet strangely, as soon as the words slip from their lips, they feel contracted and selfish for wanting to invest in their own self-care. Or their resistance patterns and excuse-making takes over and paralyzes them from action.
There is a shift occurring and many of us are growing to understand and honor that self-care is as essential as food, air, water, connection, and sleep.
Self-inquiry:
Do certain forms of self-care feel selfish or frivolous? Which ones and why?
What happens when you stop or slow down? — do you panic and anxiously strive to do more? Or do take the time to feel yourself and your needs?
How do you recognize superhuman impulses that push you against your natural rhythm and needs? What is the red flag that tells you a push is on the move?
Do you say ‘no’ to self-care or to your true passion, in an attempt to keep up with the expectations and needs of others or your inner critic?
Re-wilding: The art of dismantling domestication and disembodiment
What does it take to live a wholehearted and authentic life that isn’t driven by a prescribed formula of who, what, and how we should behave in order to belong?
To re-wild is to remember the fullness of who we are.
The journey of re-wilding is a path of unifying and welcoming any exiled part of ourselves back home into the center of our heart and whole-being. It’s a daily process of embodying love and a homecoming into our power and wisdom.
Re-wilding is rooted in the present moment — it’s an emergent and dynamic way of being, not a prescriptive one.
Re-wilding starts with the commitment to ‘know thyself’. This includes both valuing our unique and exquisite gifts as well as embracing our conditioned patterns of shame and indoctrination.
By intentionally expanding our self-awareness, we activate the x-ray vision needed to scan for the banished parts of ourselves. This is how we dismantle habituated ways of reinforcing domestication. This is how we remember our wild and embodied self.
Self inquiry:
Have you traded your own wildness to fit in? If so, how? What part of your authentic self have you sacrificed in order to belong?
How do you know when you’re being seduced by the the superhuman compulsion? How does it feel in your body?
How do you know when you’re being passionately guided by the yearnings of your heart? How does that feel in your body?
What do you need to change about your current reality that feels too big and scary to consider?
Are you locked into a lifestyle — mortgages, job status, social pressures, and compounding responsibilities — that make it impossible to move towards the envision life that you long for?
Instead of taking action, do you bargain with yourself to stay safe by enduring in the familiar and suffocating life you’ve created?
“Coming home to our primal center is a heroic journey of re-wilding ourselves back home into our most undefended, compassionate, expansive and creative self.”
The Power Reclamation System
Most of us have had no easy roadmap to reclaim and integrate our lost power. Yet, we know in our hearts that in order to become the force we were born to become, we need to call all of ourselves back home.
The Power Reclamation System is a dynamic, non-linear discovery process designed to help us welcome exiled parts of ourselves back into the wholeness of our being.
It’s a journey of hunting and tracking for areas in which we have unconsciously lost power. How have we each innocently thwarted our powerful life force by unconsciously reinforcing patterns of acquiescing our needs to please others through compliance? What about using our charm, guilt trips, blame or shame as a means to control others to get what we want through the tactics of power-OVER?
SIX ENTRY POINTS TO EXPLORE POWER RECLAMATION
There are six distinct powers that encompass the wheel of integrated power in the Power Reclamation System.
Each power serves as an entry point to illuminate our individual gifts and superpowers, as well as conditioned or banished aspects of ourselves that eagerly await our acceptance and fierce love.
“Understanding the ways in which we generate, express, deplete and replenish our power is a life-changing journey to the heart of who we are.”
Disassembling the trappings of the superhuman compulsions — what’s possible?
How do we solve the growing epidemic of suicide, loneliness, and isolation occurring on a daily basis?
How do we create a world where we embody the value of our presence and feel the pulse of our spiritual connection? Would this naturally waylay compulsive behaviors driven by anxiety and fear?
What would happen to our world if we created a system of collaboration, loving-presence, nervous system regulation, and personal responsibility for the superhuman compulsions of busyness and seeking outside of ourselves for validation?
Stay tuned for a more in-depth series of podcast interviews and articles on this topic of the superhuman archetype, addiction to seeking validation externally, and the trance of busyness.
Your stories and questions are welcome here. If you prefer to send a question anonymously, you can do so via the form included on Ask Anne-Marie. Or chime in on Instagram, @anne.marie.marron.