When Capacity Is Lower, Support Needs to Be Higher (Capacity Series, Part 1)

Episode 177: Spotify | Apple Podcasts | YouTube
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Most people running on empty would never describe themselves that way. They say they’re fine, just busy. They say they should be able to handle more. They shrink every request for help down to the smallest possible size, and they wait to ask until they’re already at the edge.

There’s a simple principle at the center of this episode: when your capacity is lower, your support needs to be higher. Most of us are living the reverse. Stressors are high, supporters are low, and the gap between the two becomes the steady hum underneath anxiety, irritability, and eventually burnout or depression.

This is the first of three episodes on capacity. Before we get practical in parts two and three, we’re laying the foundation: what capacity actually is, why it changes, and why so many of us read a dip in capacity as a flaw in who we are.

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What We Cover in This Episode

• What capacity is, and the signs that you’re living at or beyond yours
• Why so many of us overfunction and under ask when it comes to support
• The difference between a capacity problem and a character problem
• Two questions that change how you approach support and your daily yeses

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Why Stressors Run High and Supporters Run Low

On the stressor side, part of the load is simply real. Life asks a lot of us. But many of us also add to it. We’re overfunctioners, often trained into it from a young age. We do too many things, and we tend to do them to a standard that is higher than the situation requires.

On the supporter side, the shape of modern life works against us. Humans are wired for communal living, and most of us now live far more isolated lives. Things that used to fall to a village now land on one person. Family may live far away, or may not be a safe place to turn. Many of us don’t know our neighbors. Resources that used to be shared now get duplicated in every household.

And then there’s the support that technically exists but goes unused, because asking for help stirs up a lot inside of us.

I fit every eldest daughter stereotype out there. In most seasons of my life I’ve been the helper and the doer, the one who anticipates needs before anyone voices them. Relational and practical support was often less available to me than it seemed to be for other people, so handling everything myself became my normal. Pair that with people pleasing and a sense of worth tied to productivity, and it put me on a fast track to burnout and resentment more than once.

My default questions around support sounded like this: How can I make this work? How much can I handle? What do I absolutely need help with? Even when I did ask, I’d make the ask as small as possible.

The Friend Who Called It Out

A few years ago, my husband and I were considering childcare for the first time. I was talking it through with a friend and said something like, “Three days would be nice, but I could probably get by with two if I shifted my work schedule around.”

She cut me off. She pointed out that I always do this: I find the bare minimum of support I can survive on, which leaves me barely supported with zero buffer for myself or for the unexpected. Then she asked, “What if you were a little crazy this time?” What if I booked the extra day and gave myself some space, even without knowing exactly how I’d use it?

She was right. Around the same time, my therapist offered a reflection that has stayed with me ever since:

“Some people like living with a full plate. That’s fine, but it comes with a cost. I want you to choose that full plate knowing you have the option not to. And right now, I’m not sure your system realizes that’s an option.”

Both parts of that were true. I do enjoy a full life. I like working, going on my kids’ field trips, doing crafts, helping friends move, cooking meals at home, and taking on projects that excite me. And at the same time, my system defaults to a full plate without registering that I chose it, and without registering that another way is available.

What Living at 95% Actually Costs

That default didn’t come out of nowhere. I was a chronically overscheduled kid with extracurriculars stacked on top of each other nearly every day of the week. In grad school, I took 22 units in a single semester while running research and writing my thesis. I also had a dog and worked two part time jobs, neither of which I needed financially.

Technically, I chose all of it. I signed up for the classes, accepted the jobs, and got the dog. But on a nervous system level, doing less never registered as a real option. I loved my color coded planner, scheduled down to the minute, and took pride in pulling off commitments that overlapped by ten minutes.

Eventually it caught up with me. It cost me relationships, my mental health, my physical health, and a lot of joy.

Here’s the math that makes this unsustainable. If ordinary daily life takes 95% of your capacity, you’re always one moment away from life asking for 6% more. A move. An illness. A sick kid. Even something you want, like an exciting opportunity, still requires room to say yes. When that extra ask arrives and you’re already at 95, your whole system responds as if there isn’t enough of you to go around.

I lived like that for over a decade, and I still feel the pull. My expectations of myself are skewed enough that I can be at 95% and tell myself it’s really 50, and that I should obviously be able to take on more. What has changed is my awareness of that pull. Knowing my default is what allows me to choose differently now.

That chronic imbalance between stressors and supporters became the primary driver of my anxiety, and it led to my eventual crash into burnout, shutdown, and depression. Learning to assess my capacity, and then getting strategic about rebalancing it, has become one of the core ways we support clients inside RESTORE, our 1:1 coaching program for anxiety and depression. Talking about how overwhelmed you are doesn’t move anything until the balance of stressors and supporters in your life actually shifts, and having someone help you find a realistic first step makes that shift far more doable.

What Capacity Actually Is

If you’re familiar with the stress bucket, you can hold capacity in a similar way. Here’s a simple working definition:

Capacity is the amount of internal resource you have available to meet what’s being asked of you before becoming overwhelmed.

That internal resource includes:

• Physical energy
• Cognitive and emotional bandwidth
• Decision making ability
• Tolerance for frustration
• The ability to initiate tasks
• The ability to regulate emotions and connect with people
• The ability to recover from stress

Read through that list and check in with yourself. If your energy feels low, your bandwidth feels stretched, decisions feel heavy, small frustrations knock you over, or it takes forever to come back to baseline after something stressful, those are signals that you’re living close to the edge of your capacity or past it.

We hear this from clients often: “My life hasn’t changed that much, and yet it feels so much harder.” Usually something has shifted internally, and capacity is lower than it used to be. That’s the reality to work within.re you’re standing than spend the next six months frustrated with a body that was doing its best to survive something genuinely hard.

Your Capacity Will Change, and That Makes Senseng Change Can Coexist

Think about strength training. In my twenties, before kids, I was the strongest I’ve ever been. If I walked into the gym today, loaded 300 pounds on a barbell, and insisted I should be able to lift it because I once could, I’d get hurt. My strength capacity is different now, and training well means adjusting to that.

Life works the same way. Calibrating your days around old capacity, or around what someone else seems able to handle, sets you up to fail.

Capacity shifts across seasons of life and even from one day to the next. Sleep, hormones, illness, grief, chronic stress, parenting demands, physical pain, how long you’ve been pushing through, and whether you’re in a more anxious or more depressive season all affect what you have available. (Some of those factors, like hormones and nutrient status, can be measured. That’s part of why we offer functional lab testing through Regulated Health.)

When capacity drops, behavior changes. The person who meal prepped, worked out, answered texts, and kept the house together starts ordering takeout. Laundry sits in the basket for five days. Emails pile up. One more request feels like it might bring tears.

That shift makes complete sense given what’s available. Yet the thoughts that usually show up sound more like: What’s wrong with me? Why can’t I get it together? I used to be able to do it all.

A Capacity Problem Is a Math Problem

“I have done this before” and “I have the capacity to do this right now” are two different statements. Feeling the difference between them matters.

When you read a capacity problem as a character problem, it fuels guilt and shame, and the only solutions you can see are demanding more of yourself, trying harder, and pushing through. When you see it as a capacity problem, you can set the shame aside and get strategic.

Think of it like money. If you have $10, you can spend $10. If what you want costs more, you can buy less or find more dollars. Capacity offers the same two moves:

1.Reduce demand.
2. Increase support.

You could argue for a third option, which is to keep going exactly as you are until you hit a wall. But the wall will eventually bring you back to those same two moves. Most of the time, the answer involves both.

The process we use breaks down into three steps:

1. Assess your current capacity accurately.
2. Map both sides of the equation: what’s on your plate, and what support is available to you.
3.Pick one starting point. Usually this means working through some internal protest about doing less or asking for more.

That first change needs to be realistic. It should match your current capacity, align with what matters most to you, and come with support for the discomfort that tends to show up when you change the pattern. Parts two and three of this series walk through a free Capacity and Support Audit, section by section, to help you do exactly that.

Why Overfunctioning Hides How Close You Are to the Edge

When I was in a season labeled as depression, it was easy to see my capacity was limited. Starting tasks was harder, decisions were harder, motivation dropped, and I pulled away from people. I could feel it in everything.

The decade before that was a different story. Ask me how I was and I’d have looked you in the eye and said, “I’m great! Every day is packed. But I’m definitely not too busy to help you. What do you need?”

Overfunctioning makes low capacity hard to see, partly because adrenaline is keeping you going. From the outside, you may look endlessly capable. You may be accomplishing a lot and getting praised for it. Internally, though, there’s constant pressure.

In a more activated, sympathetic nervous system state, your system spends enormous resources behind the scenes: scanning for threats, rehearsing conversations, anticipating what could go wrong. On some level your body knows you’re close to the edge, and that any unexpected demand could tip you over. So it works overtime to predict and prevent.

Functioning and sustainable are two very different things. I got by functioning for a long time, and it took its toll.

Two Questions to Try On This Week

Before diving into the audit, start making some space in your mind with two shifts.

1. Swap the minimum for the maximum

Instead of asking, What is the minimum amount of help I can get by on right now? try asking:

What is the absolute most support I could ask for, accept, or invest in right now?

Notice how that question lands in your body. If you’re in a season of anxiety or depression, your capacity is lower, whether or not that feels comfortable to admit. Your supports likely need to be higher than you think, and higher than you’ll feel comfortable with at first.

Sometimes there is a genuine lack of resources, financial or relational. And I’ve also never sat in a strategy call with a member focused on rebalancing this equation without finding some support available to them that they weren’t using, or some way to strategically reduce what’s being asked of them. Support can take many forms, too, from a babysitter or grocery delivery to a standing monthly practice like Release, our live nervous system regulation class.

Brainstorming support options doesn’t commit you to any of them. Whatever you choose, you don’t have to keep it forever, and none of it means you’ve become incapable. The goal is to hold a real assessment of your capacity alongside the full range of hypothetical support, and land somewhere realistic in the middle.

Giving Food a Seat at the Table

Coming back to food: she described it as comforting, a source of enjoyment, a way to avoid hard feelings, and a way to get through her workday. If you recognize yourself in that list, please don’t make your next move stripping away every food you enjoy.

When food has been one of your main sources of pleasure or regulation and you remove it all at once without replacing anything, you create a vacuum. The goal is to expand the places you can find comfort, pleasure, and support, so food doesn’t have to do the whole job alone. With clients, I might explore questions like:

• What else brings you comfort?
• What else brings you enjoyment?
• When those hard feelings come up, what do you actually need? What are they signaling?
• What else could help you get through your workday?

Food can still have a seat at the table. It just doesn’t need to be the only chair.

2. Filter every yes through its cost

Before answering Can I do this? ask: What will doing this cost me right now?

Can you make dinner tonight? Probably. But if cooking takes your last 5%, you’ll likely be snappier with your kids for the rest of the evening. Maybe walking to Chipotle serves your family better than a homemade skillet dinner tonight.

Could you clean the house yourself, train the dog, plan every birthday, research the therapist, chaperone the field trip, and cook something new every night? Maybe. What will it cost, and is there another way?

You don’t get a trophy for how much you can carry alone, or for how close to the ground you can run yourself before you finally accept help.

If you’d like a place to practice this with others who are working on the same patterns, that’s a big part of what happens inside the Regulated Living Membership.

Making Room for a Maybe

For now, the invitation is to make room in your system for a maybe. Maybe lower capacity says nothing about your character. Maybe you can set down some of the shame around feeling overwhelmed. Maybe you don’t need to fill every bit of capacity you have.

What would it look like, in this specific season, to be truthful about your capacity and brave enough to change what you’re doing and how you’re doing it? What if you deliberately oversupported yourself, built in more margin than seems necessary, and accepted help before you were desperate for it? What if you made things easier simply because they could be easier?

Accessing support sooner is what keeps you from exceeding your capacity so often. In part two, we’ll start the Capacity and Support Audit together and explore what more support could look like in your life right now.

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Three Tangible Takeaways

1. Capacity is variable, so your expectations can be too. With awareness and practice, you can let your expectations and the support you access adjust as your capacity rises and falls, rather than holding yourself to an old standard.
2. Filter “Can I do this?” through its cost. Before saying yes, ask what it will cost you right now and whether that’s a choice you want to make. Often there’s another option worth considering.
3. You don’t have to wait until you’ve exceeded your capacity to get support. Ask, accept, or invest in support while you’re still doing okay. That support is often what keeps you okay.

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Looking for more personalized support?

• Book a FREE discovery call for RESTORE, our 1:1 anxiety & depression coaching program (HSA/FSA eligible & includes comprehensive bloodwork)
• Join me inside the Regulated Living Membership, a mental health membership and nervous system healing space (sliding scale pricing available)
• Join my Release Class, a monthly guided nervous system regulation class
• Order my book, Healing Through the Vagus Nerve today!

*Want me to talk about something specific on the podcast? Let me know HERE.

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Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician or qualified mental health provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition.