When Life Feels Like Too Much: Understanding Over-Capacity.
My husband and I have been having a lot of conversations recently about our marriage and our lives together. We've been together for sixteen years and are preparing to celebrate our fourteenth wedding anniversary this fall. Our love story began when his children were five and two years old. One of those children has special needs. Today they are twenty and seventeen, and we have a ten-year-old child together.
When I look at our life from the outside, I can clearly see how rewarding and meaningful it is. We have built a beautiful family. We have weathered challenges together. We have created a life filled with love, purpose, and connection. And, it has been much harder than I ever imagined, and has taken its toll on me and our relationship.
For years, I've been telling my husband that something needed to change and have been harping repeatedly on the level of stress, overwhelm, and burnout present. Recently, a new word entered our conversations that perfectly captured what we have been experiencing:
Over-capacity.
Having the language to describe what we were experiencing together gave us a new lens through which to reflect on our experience. In that reflection, we realized that when we had the older children 50% of the time, life felt full but more manageable. We had stress, but we had recovery time. There was time for work, parenting, rest, and nurturing our relationship. But after our youngest son was born and we became full-time parents together, the balance we once had disappeared. Although I wouldn't trade it for the world, our lives became fuller than our capacity could comfortably hold.
This quote came to me years ago, and I have a sticky note with it on our refrigerator: "We are stressed because we are blessed.” It's true that we are both incredibly blessed and incredibly full. In many ways, we have been living in chronic over-capacity. It has become normal, but it isn’t healthy.
What Does It Mean to Be Over-Capacity?
Being over-capacity means that the demands on your life consistently exceed the energy and resources available to meet them.
Capacity includes:
Physical energy
Mental bandwidth
Emotional reserves
Relational abilities
Financial resources
Nervous system resilience
Time available
When people are chronically over-capacity, their emotional and nervous system resources are depleted. When this happens for long enough, unfortunate things begin to happen to people. Sometimes, people think something is “wrong” with them when really, they can be symptoms of chronic stress, overwhelm, burnout, and over-capacity.
Signs You May Be Living Beyond Your Capacity
When people are over-capacity, they often experience:
Chronic exhaustion
Feeling overwhelmed by small tasks
Irritability and impatience
Anxiety and worry
Brain fog and forgetfulness
Difficulty being present
Increased conflict in relationships
Feeling disconnected from themselves and others
Activities that should feel fun or joyful, like planning a vacation, feel exhausting and stressful.
What Contributes to Over-Capacity?
I see over-capacity regularly in my practice. It often shows up as:
Working Parents Trying to Do It All
Managing careers, parenting responsibilities, household tasks, extracurricular activities, and relationships can quickly exceed a family's available resources.
Caregiving Roles
Whether caring for a child with special needs, aging parents, or a loved one experiencing health challenges, caregiving requires significant physical and emotional energy.
Carrying Unprocessed Emotional or Mental Weight
Many people spend their days managing not only their own emotions but also the emotions of their partners, children, coworkers, family members, and friends.
Unprocessed emotions consume enormous amounts of energy.
Constant Exposure to Stressful Information
Our brains and nervous systems were not designed to process every tragedy, crisis, conflict, and catastrophe happening around the world.
Not Having Healthy Boundaries
Sometimes people don’t understand their own limits and will say yes or do things that contribute to their over-capacity.
Navigating a Major Life Transition
Going through big life changes has always been challenging, but when the environment is highly uncertain, navigating them can take a lot of energy.
How Being Over-Capacity Impacts our Nervous Systems
When overwhelm becomes chronic, the body begins operating from a state of survival rather than regulation. We become more reactive, impatient, anxious, and depleted. We may become exasperated with our partners, less patient with our children, or disconnected from ourselves. It's because our systems are trying to manage more than they were designed to hold.
There is a lot happening in the world, in our country., our communities, homes, relationships, and inner worlds. Many people are carrying stress that has accumulated over the years without opportunities for healing and recovery. Over-capacity has become normal. People are surviving, but they are not thriving.
How Do We Begin to Recover?
We have been doing the following to help with our over-capacity issues & although we certainly don’t have it all figured out yet, it’s been making a difference.
Identify where you are over-capacity by asking yourself: What are my “have to’s” vs. what are my choices?
Delegate when possible.
Get Curious. Are there changes you can make that would help?
Give yourself permission to care for yourself, even if the to-do list isn’t done.
Process the emotional and mental weight you are carrying.
Allow yourself moments of rest.
Create nervous system reset opportunities throughout your day.
Ideas for Nervous System Reset:
Exercise
Take a walk.
Spend time in nature.
Talk with someone.
Practice mindfulness.
Laugh.
Breathe.
Have Fun!
How to Increase Our Capacity:
One of the best ways we can navigate over-capacity is by increasing our capacity. While that may sound counterintuitive, capacity expands when we stop judging ourselves for our experience and start processing it and honoring it. We increase our capacity when we allow ourselves to hold multiple truths at once. We can be simultaneously grateful for our lives and still feel overwhelmed by them. We can love our families and still need more support. We can feel both blessed and exhausted. When we move away from self-criticism and toward self-compassion, our nervous systems soften, our emotional and mental resilience grows, and we create more space within us to handle all that life brings!