The Capacity + Support Audit: Where Is Your Capacity Actually Going? (Capacity Series, Part 2)

Episode 178: Spotify | Apple Podcasts | YouTube
View transcript on Buzzsprout

About five years ago, my husband left for a four day trip with his brothers. I wanted him to go. Then my son, who was barely a year old, got sick, then I got sick, and I ended up calling my husband in tears. I told him I didn’t want him to come home. I just couldn’t keep operating the way I had been. When everything went according to plan, I could keep every ball in the air. The minute anything went sideways, I wanted to walk away from all of it.

What I said to him next has stayed with me: I can’t see which of the things on my plate are optional right now. They all feel like obligation. I need you to tell me what I can stop doing.

He named a couple of things. Within a week I had let them go, and that call started a lot of internal and external reorganizing for me.

When your system is overloaded, the line between an option and an obligation disappears. You start believing the fix is a better morning routine or a tighter schedule that lets you squeeze in one more thing. What usually helps more is enough perspective to see what truly has to happen, what has to happen right now, and what has to happen by you. This post walks through how to build that perspective using the first two pages of the free Capacity + Support Audit. If you haven’t read or listened to part one of this series, start there for the context.

---

What We Cover in This Episode

• How to rate your current capacity across five areas: physical energy, mental bandwidth, emotional bandwidth, initiation, and handling the unexpected
• Why your capacity gets spent on invisible work like worrying, remembering, and anticipating
• A color coding method for sorting what you carry into needs, wants, and flexible items
• The difference between “this has to happen” and “I have to be the one who does it”

---

Start With the Capacity You Have Today

Before you can change your load, you need a clear read on what you have available to carry it. Page one of the audit asks you to rate yourself from low to high in five areas. Answer as the version of you sitting here this week. Leave out the version of you from six months ago, or the one who slept eight uninterrupted hours before kids.

• Physical energy. How rested or depleted does your body feel? Do normal tasks feel manageable, or does everything take more effort than usual? Sleep, illness, pain, nutrition, and hormones all show up here.
• Mental bandwidth. How much can your brain hold right now? Notice how easy it is to focus, plan, decide, and remember. When someone asking what you want for dinner feels like being handed a calculus problem, that tells you something.
• Emotional bandwidth. How much room do you have for feelings, yours and everyone else’s? Can something hard happen and you have space to absorb it, or does a mildly annoying email bring you close to tears?
• Initiation. This is the friction between knowing what you need to do and starting it. You know you need to make the phone call. You pick up your phone, end up on social media, and wonder why you can’t make yourself do it.
• Handling the unexpected. Plans change, a kid wakes up sick, the car makes a strange noise. Does your system have room for that?

That last one is one of my favorite indicators. We tend to treat flexibility as a personality trait, and some of it probably is. I also know that I roll with the punches far better when I’ve slept, when I’m carrying less, and when my days aren’t scheduled down to the minute. A lot of what we call being easygoing may simply be capacity.

Once you’ve rated each area, let the results be information. Low scores across the board are simply a starting point.

The question that stings a little…..

Where am I still expecting myself to function like a higher capacity version of me?

Look at your ratings, then look at your expectations. Maybe you expect to keep the house the way you did before the baby, or work out five days a week because that’s what you did two years ago. Maybe you expect to socialize the way you did in spring when it’s now the dead of winter, or to finish a full workday, make dinner, do bedtime, clean up, and still be pleasant at 8:30 at night. I have had plenty of seasons where I was not a pleasant human at 8:30 at night.

If your mind goes blank on this question, soften it. Where might I be expecting this of myself? Where might someone who knows me say I’m doing this? Gentler wording takes the pressure off finding a right answer, and the real answer tends to surface faster.

Where Is Your Capacity Going?

Page two answers the question I couldn’t answer on that phone call: what am I actually carrying? Treat it like a brain dump across these categories: health and mental health, work or school, parenting or caregiving, home and life admin, relationships, finances, and anything else taking up space. You’ll probably need extra paper.

Write down the invisible load too

Your to do list is only part of the picture. Include the doctor’s appointment you need to make and the decision you’ve been turning over for three weeks. Include the tension with your partner, the worry about your kid’s health, knowing you’re almost out of diapers, the birthday gift you haven’t bought. Mental load accumulates, sometimes more than the tasks themselves.

This also covers tasks someone else technically owns that only get done because you remember and remind them. Meal planning is a good example from my own life. My husband cooks a couple nights a week, and the grocery list and meal plan behind those dinners still fall to me. When one person executes a task after another person did all the prep work, the one executing often gets the credit while the other carried much of the load.

If you’re unsure where to start, the free card deck from Eve Rodsky’s book Fair Play is a helpful reference. The book was written to help couples divide domestic responsibilities, and the deck breaks home life into around a hundred jobs, each with a description of the mental load and the execution involved. I recently went through it to audit my own life, adding every card that fell on me.

Your list doesn’t need to be perfect. I spent about 15 minutes on my first pass, then paid attention over the next few days and added whatever I’d missed. You just need enough of it on paper to look at.

Expect mixed feelings. Seeing everything in one place can feel validating (no wonder this feels hard), and it can also feel overwhelming. Both responses make sense

Capacity Cost Is Different From Time Cost

Once you have a decent list, underline the three to five items costing you the most capacity. Time is a poor stand in here. A 10 minute task you’ve avoided for three weeks may cost you more than an hour every Tuesday that happens without much thought. Living with uncertainty about your health can take more out of you than your entire workday. A conversation you know you need to have can drain your mental space long before you spend a single minute having it.

This is often where the first real insight shows up. The heaviest items on your list are rarely the ones taking the most hours.

Sorting through this alone can be hard when you’re already depleted. Inside RESTORE, my 1:1 anxiety and depression coaching program, mapping load against capacity is part of the foundational work we do together, with someone outside your life helping you see it more clearly.

Sort What You Carry Into Three Colors

Grab three highlighters or markers. The workbook uses yellow, green, and pink, though a crayon works fine. If you truly have nothing colorful nearby, make three separate lists.

• Yellow: needs. The things your brain says have to happen right now. Taking your medication, getting your kids to school, showing up for work, paying the mortgage.
• Green: what you want to carry. These cost you something and feel worth it. Your kid’s soccer game, a workout that takes energy and gives some back, showing up for a friend going through a hard time, a ceramics class.
• Pink: what might be flexible. Items you could potentially delete, delegate, or do differently.

Green deserves extra attention, because the goal of this exercise is a life with more in it than obligations. Green items can be demanding. I would highlight my kids in green without hesitation, and having three tiny humans takes a lot from me. Green simply means you’re choosing the cost because it aligns with your values or gives back more than it takes.

Some items will land in two colors, and that’s fine. For pink, hold off on solving anything yet. You’re only noticing what you carry that may not have to be carried this way, or by you.

It Has to Happen vs. It Has to Be Me

Go back to your yellow items, because this is where many of us trip ourselves up. We merge two separate statements: this has to happen, and I have to be the one who does it.

Getting your kids to school may truly have to happen. Does it have to be you every morning? Groceries need to arrive at your house. Do you have to make the list, do the shopping, carry the bags in, put everything away, and notice when the toilet paper runs out? Could someone else take part of that, or could delivery handle it?

Circle only the yellow items that you alone can do. Only you can attend your own medical appointments. Only you can meet a work deadline that truly belongs to you. When I was breastfeeding, no one else could do that for me. Every yellow item without a circle becomes a candidate for the work we do in part three.

Borrow someone else’s eyes

If you can’t tell which items deserve a circle, ask someone who knows you and your life. We all see our lives through one lens, and someone standing outside it may look at your list and ask why a particular thing has to be you. Five years ago, my husband named two things I could stop. When he said them out loud they were obvious, and I still couldn’t have seen them on my own in that moment.

Two Questions Worth Sitting With

What am I carrying primarily because I think I should?

Cooking more, keeping the house cleaner, volunteering, answering every call, remembering every birthday, exercising a certain number of days a week. Any should can stay if you want it to. The point is to ask who set the standard, whether you actually value it, and whether you’ve been paying a weekly capacity bill for a rule you never consciously chose.

This was a big part of my story. Somewhere along the way I decided what a good mom does, what a good business owner does, what a good friend does. Eventually everything on my list had turned yellow.

Where am I using “I technically can” as the reason I keep doing something?

I technically can lead the Girl Scout troop. I technically can join the PTA (I did, and it was one of the things I cut a couple of years ago). I technically can deep clean the house or make a different dinner every night. “I technically can” is a very low bar for spending a limited resource.

These questions can overlap, and sometimes the answer surprises you. I’m currently coaching my son’s soccer team. I took it on because no parent had clearly stepped up, and the uncertainty felt more uncomfortable than saying yes. It turned out to be a green item for me. I love it, and I have an amazing assistant coach without whom I’m not sure I would. You can ask the question and still keep the thing. What changes is that you’re choosing it.

If you want ongoing support while you work through this kind of reorganizing, the Regulated Living Membership gives you nervous system tools and a community doing the same work. And Release, my monthly live regulation class, is a simple way to start building capacity back up.

Pause Before You Fix It

If you’re anything like me, the moment you see a problem you want to solve it. Here’s my pink. Who do I delegate to? What do I cancel? Who do I hire? That part comes next week. For now, sit with your list for a few days. Add what you notice yourself doing or thinking about that didn’t make the first round, and color code it.

Maybe you’ll realize you’re carrying a lot. Maybe half of it doesn’t need to be you. Maybe you’re spending real capacity on something you barely care about. Or maybe your life simply asks a lot of you right now, and most of it feels nonnegotiable. That calls for self compassion: of course there’s no capacity left. All of it is useful information, and all of it points toward rebalancing, whether that means decreasing stressors or increasing supporters.

I’m much better now at asking myself these questions before I end up on a hysterical phone call. I’m far from perfect at it, and better is the goal. The more clearly you can see what you’re carrying, the more your choices start to belong to you again.

---

Three Tangible Takeaways

1. Rate the capacity you have today. What you could do in a past season and what you have room for right now are two different things. Let your current ratings set your current expectations.
2. Invisible work counts. Worrying, remembering, and anticipating draw from the same limited capacity as your to do list, so put them on the page.
3. Aim for choice. Sort what you carry into what’s necessary, what you choose because it matters, and what may be more flexible than you realized.

---

Looking for more personalized support?

• Book a FREE discovery call for RESTORE, our 1:1 anxiety and depression coaching program (HSA/FSA eligible and 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!
• Download free resources here

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

---

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.