Could it be too much? by Dr. Candi Vincent

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The Load No One Sees

It’s easy to measure what gets done in life, it is much harder to measure what you keep holding. Let’s pause and think about what you keep track of, the appointments, the schedules, the birthdays, the needs of everyone you anticipate. The emotional tone of the room that you monitor and adjusted to. The mental list that runs in the background all the time. This is the invisible labor that women carry every day, not just the tasks, but the ownership of the tasks.

Invisible labor is a constant, low-level responsibility for keeping things running, smoothing things over, and remembering what matters all the dang time. Most of it goes unnoticed because nothing falls apart when you carry it well. But, your nervous system knows and your brain knows that this is too much. It’s not just what you do, it’s what you hold, and you hold a lot.

Decision Fatigue Is Real

Every decision you make costs something. What to make for dinner, when to schedule the appointment, how to schedule the appointment, how to respond to that message, whether to speak up, stay quiet, push, pull, come, go, ugh. Individually, these decisions seem small but collectively they are relentless. When you are the default decision-maker across multiple areas of your life, your cognitive resources don’t just get used, they get downright depleted. By the middle of the day, many women aren’t running on anything but fumes.

That’s when it shows up: starting a simple task feels disproportionately (like really, really) hard, procrastination begins, about things you actually care about and want to do, a out of character snap, or shut down, or mindless little scroll when you really meant to move. It doesn’t make sense and because it doesn’t it becomes easy to turn inward and assume the problem is you. Hey….it’s not. I mean it could be, but it’s probably not. It sounds like and looks like an over saturated system.

When Overload Starts to Look Like Disorder

Here’s where it gets complicated and important. Yes, ADHD is real. Yes, executive functioning challenges deserve to be understood and supported in women and girls. We also need to know that more than one thing can be true at the same time.

When the demand placed on a brain, even a super human woman brain, consistently exceeds its capacity, the brain will start to look and feel disorganized. Focus slips, memory falters (why did I just call my child the dog’s name), follow through becomes inconsistent (I’ll write that HerFirst article tomorrow). From the outside, and often from the inside, it can feel indistinguishable from a disorder.

I’m going to say this loud, not all dysfunction is a disorder. Sometimes it’s overload, we just ask ourselves to do way too much. Overload happens when a high-functioning system is asked to operate beyond what it was designed to carry, day after day, moment after moment, without relief. It’s like Courtney Halbig making you do a farmer’s

carry for 16 minutes, can you even imagine??

The Cost of Carrying Too Much

This doesn’t just create inconvenience, it creates erosion. A quiet, persistent guilt that you should be able to handle more. A sense that you are always “almost caught up,” but never quite there. A loss of creativity, or presence, of the parts of you that don’t exist to manage something. Over time, you don’t just feel tired, you start to disappear. You become the one who keeps things going, but not necessarily the one who gets to fully live inside of them.

What Actually Helps

Most advice that we hear points toward doing more, but more efficiently. A better system, a better routine, or better discipline will be the golden ticket, but efficiency doesn’t solve overload. It just makes you better at carrying too much. What helps is quieter and more about being hones with yourself. Noticing… what you’re really actually holding, without minimizing it. Questioning… whether all of it belongs to you. Reducing… decision points where you can, simplifying instead of optimizing. Letting it be…good enough instead of perfect. Pause – pause-pause – feel the drama? Allowing yourself… to consider, even for a second, that the goal is not to become more capable of handling everything. The goal is to handle less.

A Different Question

What if the question isn’t, “What’s wrong with me?” What if the question is, “What am I carrying that no one else can see?” What might it look like, not to drop everything, but to set one thing down? I say it all of the time, you aren’t behind, you aren’t broken. You’re responding exactly how a human brain responds when it is asked to hold more than it should. The answer isn’t to push harder. It’s to tell the truth about what you’re carrying and decide what you are willing to keep holding.