It doesn’t feel like you’re asking for too much.

You want to enjoy your work without it consuming you. You want to be present with the people you love. You want to exercise and eat well and sleep so your body feels good.

So why does it feel like you’re always falling short — like no matter what you do, you can’t quite keep up?

The problem is that the world you’re trying to meet those needs inside of makes it nearly physically impossible to do so.

Our bodies evolved to live in tribes — sharing labor, sharing caregiving, built for movement that was woven into daily survival instead of squeezed in around it.

Sleep wasn’t a project. It arrived when the light did.

Rest wasn’t something you only got to when you were too exhausted to do anything else; it was already built into the rhythm of the day, the same way carrying water or digging for roots was.

Taking care of a body’s needs wasn’t a separate task on a list, because there was no list. It was just how a day went.

That’s not the world we’re living in now.

Now we’re trained to push through — to override our body’s signals, to give more than we actually have, and then feel guilty the moment we want anything back for ourselves.

That guilt is a much bigger deal than it looks like from the outside. It convinces you that you’re failing, when the truth is closer to the opposite: a system built on unreasonable expectations is failing you.

And if you’re like most women living inside that system, you’re struggling to show up for the people you love, the work you care about, and yourself — not the way you actually want to, but the way you feel you’re supposed to.

It feels like your fault. It isn’t.

I know this feeling intimately, because I’ve lived it for years.

When my kids were little and my husband asked for a weekend away, and my body went straight into panic mode. It was impossible for me to be happy for him, when I would’ve supported it whole heartedly under different circumstances.

He deserved it. He needed it.

But his time off meant more for me to do, and I was already at a breaking point.

For years the same anger arose in me whenever he got sick. I used to be the type of person who would spring into action and lovingly nurse him back to health, but now my body rebelled on a visceral level. 

I see this constantly in clinic, too. It just doesn’t always look the same from one woman to the next.

Last week, two women came in who were both struggling.

The first has two kids under five, a part-time job, and a husband finishing a master’s degree on top of full-time work.

She told me a familiar story. She feels touched out and full of rage she doesn’t recognize.

“I wonder if my kids would be better off without me at this point,” she said — not because she wants to disappear, but because she’s been carrying so much for so long that she can no longer tell the difference between being depleted and being a bad mother.

Her body is showing this feeling physically, in her case it’s nausea, a constant low-grade sick feeling that has nothing to do with what she’s eaten.

The second woman who came in has older kids and a full-time job.

From the outside, she’s fine.

She told me she can handle everything — she just hasn’t felt happy in months.

Her emotions are flat, and her body is tired in a way that doesn’t lift no matter how much she sleeps. She doesn’t get nauseous, but there’s a knot in her stomach that feels relentless and painful, right below her diaphragm. This, and her back goes out about once a month, a symptom that started after she had a c-section and had to lift her kids. 

Two different presentations. My own story is a third. Same exact thing happening underneath all of it.

I call it Chronic Somatic Override™ — the tendency to keep functioning past what your body can actually sustain, for so long that overriding it starts to feel normal.

And it has an effect on your body, your emotions, and your sense of self. 

It’s not a diagnosis. It’s not happening to any of us. It’s a pattern we’ve been taught to train into our nervous system. 

Here’s the part that took me the longest to understand, both in clinic and in my own body: the volume of your symptoms has almost nothing to do with the size of the override.

Some nervous systems are emotionally loud.

They send rage, exhaustion, anxiety — unmistakable, embarrassing, hard-to-ignore signals that something is wrong.

Other nervous systems speak louder through symptoms.

A back that keeps going out, a stomach that never quite settles, headaches that show up at the most inconvenient moments. Muscle and joint pain that makes you feel older than you are. 

None of this means something is broken. These are all ways your body communicates with you, asking for help. 

There’s a belief driving all of this.

I call it the Chronic Override Fallacy — the idea that if you’re disciplined enough, loving enough, or strong enough, you should be able to keep giving without it costing you anything.

You’re not failing.

You’re in a body, with a body’s actual limits, living inside a culture that has never once told you those limits exist or how to honor them properly.

Not by pushing more, but by responding better. 

I want to be clear that this isn’t only a mother’s problem, even though mothers are often where I see it most clearly — because the demands on a mother’s nervous system are some of the most relentless and least optional.

But override shows up anywhere someone has spent a long stretch giving more than they had: caregiving for an aging parent, carrying a team at work, holding a friendship that only flows one direction.

If you’ve spent years being the reliable one, the strong one, the one who doesn’t fall apart — this is for you too.

Even people who’ve devoted their entire lives to service have run into this.

Ram Dass, who spent decades teaching service as a path to freedom, also talked about how honoring your own limits is part of what makes real service possible — not a betrayal of it.

The point was never to increase suffering — including your own.

Brittany Luse, host of NPR’s It’s Been a Minute, put words to this in a way I love.

Her personal philosophy: “I’m going to give as much as I can lovingly and no more.”

Past that point, she said, you either end up in conflict, or you end up feeling shortchanged — even if the other person never notices a thing. NPR

But that’s the line most of us were never taught to find.

We weren’t raised to ask what can I give lovingly — we were raised to ask what’s expected of me, and then to find a way to override the gap.

Here’s what I want you to take from this, more than anything: rest isn’t the only thing you’re under-giving yourself.

It’s true rest, yes — but it’s also play, stillness, time that has no output attached to it.

Most of the women I treat feel guilty for wanting any of it.

Not because they don’t deserve it.

Because somewhere along the way, prioritizing the things that make you feel good started to feel like selfishness instead of a basic biological fact.

The symptoms you’re powering through right now — the knot, the headache, the nausea, the back and hips that feel stiff and weak — aren’t separate from any of this.

They’re your body’s first language, long before it has to escalate to something louder to get your attention.

Stress that has nowhere to move and release doesn’t just disappear. It accumulates, and eventually it stops being a feeling and starts being a real, life-altering diagnosis.

If any part of this felt uncomfortably familiar, that’s not because you’re failing.

It’s because the standard you’ve been trying to meet was never actually possible to sustain in the first place.

It’s not your fault — and you don’t have to figure out how to carry it differently on your own.

That’s the work we do together in Applied Somatic Medicine™ sessions: not teaching your body to push through more efficiently, but helping it finally let go of what it’s been holding.