If you keep wondering why everything feels harder in midlife, or why you can’t handle what you used to…
the answer may have less to do with how capable you are and more to do with how much capacity you actually have available.
There was a season not that long ago when I kept asking myself this question:
Why can’t I handle this better?
The confusing part was that when I looked at the individual pieces of my life, none of them seemed unreasonable.
I had a career I loved and had worked really hard to build.
I was beginning to build Whole She Rises. Recording the podcast, writing, coaching, learning, and slowly creating something I felt God had placed on my heart.
I was a wife and a mom. I had one son in college and another still at home, and they needed very different things from me.
I wanted to be present with my husband. Present with my boys.
I wanted time with God.
I wanted to take care of my body. To exercise, eat well, go to appointments, and manage the things that come with hormones, midlife, and a body with a complicated health history.
I wanted friendships and church and tennis.
I wanted to have fun.
And here’s what made all of this so confusing:
I loved almost all of it.
This wasn’t a life I desperately wanted to escape.
I loved being a mom. I loved my husband. I was proud of my career. I loved building Whole She Rises and recording the podcast. I loved getting to finally move my body again and play tennis.
I was incredibly grateful for the life I had.
So why did it sometimes feel like so much?
When “I Should Be Able to Handle This” Becomes the Problem
I would look around and see other women working and raising families. Exercising and maintaining friendships. Making dinner and traveling and building things and keeping up with their homes.
So when I felt overwhelmed, my mind rarely went first to compassion or curiosity.
It went to comparison.
Maybe I’m not organized enough.
Maybe I need better time management.
Maybe I’m just lazy now and need to be more disciplined.
Maybe other women are simply better at handling life than I am.
And because my default for a very long time was to try harder, that’s exactly what I did.
I reorganized the calendar.
Made a better list.
Woke up earlier.
Tried to become more efficient.
Looked for one more place I could squeeze something into the margins.
And sometimes, that worked.
Until it didn’t.
Because there were days when I was doing just fine
and then one more relatively small thing would happen.
An unexpected appointment.
A difficult conversation.
A bad night of sleep.
One of my boys needing more from me.
A demanding week at work.
A health symptom popping up.
One more thing added to the calendar.
And suddenly, everything felt heavier.
Have you ever experienced that?
The thing that pushes you over the edge isn’t even particularly big.
Someone asks you one more question.
Another email comes in.
A plan changes.
You realize you forgot something.
And suddenly you want to cry, hide, snap at someone—or just have everyone stop needing things from you for five minutes.
We can look at that reaction and think, What is wrong with me?
But what if the last thing wasn’t actually the problem?
What if it simply exceeded what you had left?
Maybe Time Isn’t the Resource You’re Running Out Of
Eventually, I began to understand something that changed the way I looked at my life:
Time wasn’t always the problem.
There could technically be enough hours in the day to do everything on my list
and still not be enough of me available to do all of it well.
Because everything in my life required something from me.
Not just time.
My career required focus, decision-making, emotional energy, relationships, travel, and performance.
Building something creative required a completely different kind of energy.
My family didn’t just need whatever hours happened to be left on my calendar.
I wanted them to have my presence.
My body required something from me, too: sleep, movement, recovery, attention.
And depending on what was happening with my health, my hormones, my sleep, or simply the season I was in, sometimes my body required more resources than it did at other times.
Then there were all the things no one could see on my calendar.
The mental load.
The worrying.
The anticipating.
The decisions.
The things I was carrying for other people.
The outcomes I was desperately trying to control.
None of those things occupied a neat little colored block in my planner.
But they were still costing me something.
And that’s when I began to understand a distinction I wish I had understood much earlier:
Just because something fits on your calendar doesn’t mean it fits within your capacity.
Capacity Is Not the Same as Capability
This changed the question I was asking myself.
Instead of:
Why can’t I handle more?
I started asking:
What am I actually carrying right now?
And:
How much capacity do I actually have available to carry it?
Because capacity and capability are not the same thing.
I was capable of doing all of those things.
You probably are, too.
That’s what can make this so difficult for capable women.
We look at each responsibility individually and think:
I should be able to do that.
And you may be absolutely right.
You can handle the job.
You can care for your family.
You can exercise.
You can serve at church.
You can show up for a friend.
You can plan the trip.
You can make dinner.
You can navigate the doctor’s appointments.
You can handle the difficult conversation.
You can pursue the thing God has placed on your heart.
But the question isn’t only whether you’re capable of doing each individual thing.
The better question might be:
What does all of it cost when you’re carrying it together?
That’s a very different question.
And it gives us a much more compassionate—and useful—way to understand those seasons when ordinary life suddenly starts to feel harder than it used to.
The Spoon Theory—and Why Capacity Can Change
Years ago, Christine Miserandino created what became known as Spoon Theory to explain her experience of living with lupus.
Spoons represented the limited energy available to get through a day.
The analogy was specifically created in the context of chronic illness, and I think it’s important to honor that.
But it also gives us language for a broader truth:
None of us has unlimited physical, emotional, cognitive, or relational capacity.
And we don’t all begin the day with the same amount available.
Even you don’t necessarily begin every day with the same amount.
Monday-you might wake up with twelve spoons.
Thursday-you might wake up with seven.
Not because Thursday-you suddenly became less disciplined, less resilient, or less capable.
Maybe you haven’t slept well for three nights.
Maybe your hormones are shifting.
Maybe your body is fighting something off.
Maybe there has been conflict in your family.
Maybe you’re grieving.
Maybe you’ve had an unusually demanding week.
Maybe you’ve made a hundred tiny decisions before lunchtime.
Chronic illness, prolonged stress, hormonal changes, poor sleep, pain, grief, mental load, and difficult seasons can all affect how much we have available, or how costly the demands of ordinary life feel.
Capacity is dynamic.
And that matters, especially in midlife.
Because sometimes we compare what we can handle today to what we could handle ten or fifteen years ago without acknowledging that the entire equation has changed.
The demands may be different.
Our bodies may be different.
Our hormones may be different.
The people who need us may be different.
The invisible responsibilities may be greater.
And yet we’re still measuring ourselves against an earlier version of ourselves and asking:
What happened to me?
Maybe that isn’t the most helpful question.
Maybe a better one is:
What is taking up capacity right now?
Good Things Cost Spoons, Too
This is another piece I think we miss.
Not everything costs the same number of spoons for every person.
Dinner with friends might restore one woman’s capacity.
For another woman who’s already socially depleted, that same dinner might require three spoons.
A hard workout might leave one woman energized and another depleted because her body is already navigating a chronic illness flare.
Travel can be wonderful and exhausting.
Parenting can be deeply meaningful and demanding.
Creative work can be life-giving and still require enormous mental energy.
A hard conversation can be necessary and still cost something.
Healing work itself can cost capacity.
Things can be worth the spoons and still cost spoons.
I think that distinction matters because we can fall into the trap of believing that if something is good, meaningful, chosen, or God-given, it shouldn’t tire us.
But that’s not how being human works.
Loving your children doesn’t mean parenting requires nothing from you.
Being grateful for your career doesn’t mean it doesn’t use energy.
Loving your friends doesn’t mean you’re always available.
Feeling called to something doesn’t mean pursuing it requires no recovery.
And acknowledging the cost of something isn’t the same as resenting it.
It simply gives you more accurate information about what you’re carrying.
Three questions can help:
How much capacity do I have today?
What is using my capacity right now?
What helps me replenish—or gradually expand—my capacity over time?
Those questions lead somewhere very different than Why can’t I handle more?
They allow us to ask:
Do I need to reduce the load, replenish some resources, or slowly build more capacity?
Sometimes the answer is to reduce.
Sometimes it’s to restore.
Sometimes it’s to build.
And sometimes it’s simply to recognize that today is a lower-capacity day and respond accordingly.
But Healing Isn’t About Making Your Life Smaller
This is where I want to be careful.
Because once we begin paying attention to capacity, it would be easy, especially for those of us who tend to over-effort, to turn capacity into another thing to optimize.
How can I get more spoons?
What’s the perfect morning routine?
What supplement am I missing?
How regulated can I become?
How much more can I eventually handle?
Until suddenly “healing” means becoming capable of working seventy hours, caring for and pleasing everyone, sleeping five hours, saying yes to everything, and somehow remaining perfectly regulated while doing it all.
That’s not healing.
That’s over-efforting with a nervous-system vocabulary.
And the opposite extreme isn’t the answer either.
I don’t want nervous-system healing to teach us to become afraid of challenge.
To make our lives progressively smaller.
To assume discomfort means danger.
To believe every difficult thing is “dysregulating” and therefore should be avoided.
There are times when healing looks like rest.
There are times when it looks like saying no.
There are times when it looks like asking for help.
And there are also times when healing looks like gently doing something difficult and discovering:
I can handle this.
Maybe a better definition of capacity is this:
Capacity is having enough internal resource to meet appropriate challenge without repeatedly overriding your body’s signals.
Not unlimited energy.
Not a life without stress.
Not perfect regulation.
Enough resource to participate fully in a life that will inevitably include effort, challenge, uncertainty, disappointment, joy, relationships, responsibility, adventure, and recovery.
That is a very different vision of healing.
What Is Quietly Using Up Your Capacity?
Once I began thinking about capacity differently, I realized something else.
Some of the things costing me the most weren’t things anyone could see.
They weren’t appointments or work meetings or workouts or errands.
They were happening inside me.
How much capacity do we spend anticipating everyone else’s needs?
People-pleasing?
Replaying conversations?
Trying to control outcomes?
Perfectionism?
Doing something ourselves because asking for help feels uncomfortable?
Carrying responsibility that actually belongs to another adult?
Trying to make sure no one is disappointed in us?
Worrying about something that hasn’t happened yet—and may never happen?
Those cost spoons, too.
They’re just harder to recognize because they don’t show up on a calendar.
You can have an afternoon with nothing scheduled and still have a mind working overtime.
You can be sitting on the couch while mentally managing five people, three future scenarios, a conversation from yesterday, and a problem you haven’t figured out how to solve.
Your body may be still while your internal world is anything but.
And this is where I think the conversation about capacity becomes much deeper than time management.
Because sometimes we don’t need a more efficient calendar.
We need to ask what we’re carrying that was never ours to carry in the first place.
Do I Need to Reduce the Load—or Support My Capacity?
When everything starts feeling like too much, I think there is a compassionate question we can ask ourselves:
Do I need to reduce the load—or support my capacity?
Sometimes the answer really is to reduce the load.
Cancel something.
Say no.
Ask for help.
Let something be good enough.
Stop carrying a responsibility that belongs to someone else.
Give yourself permission to recognize that something that worked
in a previous season may not fit this one.
But sometimes the answer isn’t to keep removing things from your life.
Sometimes your capacity needs support.
Maybe you need more sleep.
More recovery.
More consistent nourishment.
Movement.
Connection.
Better boundaries.
Strength.
Help.
Maybe there is a medical issue or a hormonal change that deserves attention rather than being dismissed as something you should simply push through.
And sometimes building capacity means allowing yourself to experience manageable amounts of challenge instead of avoiding everything that feels uncomfortable.
Because discomfort isn’t always danger.
Stress isn’t always harmful.
And activation doesn’t necessarily mean something has gone wrong.
A healthy nervous system isn’t one that never becomes activated.
It’s one that has greater flexibility—the ability to respond when life asks something of us and then recover when the demand has passed.
So there will be seasons when honoring your body means resting.
And there will be moments when honoring your body means
gently showing it: We can do this.
Not by forcing or overriding.
Not by returning to the old pattern of pushing until something breaks.
But by allowing yourself to stretch and recover.
To work and rest.
To give and receive.
To experience challenge and come back.
That’s how capacity can begin to grow.
A Lower-Capacity Day Is Not a Character Assessment
This may be one of the most important shifts of all.
There are going to be days when you simply have less available.
That doesn’t mean you have lost all your progress.
It doesn’t mean your nervous system work isn’t working.
It doesn’t mean you’ve become lazy or weak.
And it doesn’t mean you need to immediately figure out how to fix yourself.
Sometimes the most truthful thing you can say is:
I have less capacity today.
That’s information.
Maybe you didn’t sleep well.
Maybe your hormones are shifting.
Maybe your body is fighting something.
Maybe you’re grieving.
Maybe you’ve had a difficult week.
Maybe you’ve been making decisions all day.
Maybe you’ve been carrying something emotionally heavy that no one else even knows about.
The goal isn’t to judge the number of spoons you have.
It’s to notice what is true and respond with wisdom.
Because your capacity isn’t a measure of your worth or your strength.
It’s information about what you’re carrying and what resources you have available right now.
And when we stop turning that information into an indictment of ourselves, we can actually do something useful with it.
We can reduce what needs reducing.
Restore what needs restoring.
Build what can be built.
And release what was never ours to carry.
Your Spoons Are Meant to Be Spent
I don’t want you to finish reading this feeling like you need to guard every ounce of energy you have.
That’s not the point.
Your spoons are meant to be spent.
Your energy exists so you can live.
Love people.
Use your gifts.
Move your body.
Create things.
Serve.
Travel.
Laugh.
Sit around a table with people you love.
Have the difficult conversation.
Try something new.
Show up for your family.
Pursue work that matters to you.
Do things that require something from you simply because they’re worth doing.
The question isn’t:
How can I keep all of my spoons?
The better question is:
What do I want to spend them on?
Because there is a difference between ending a day tired because you spent yourself on something meaningful and ending it depleted because you spent yourself
trying to manage things that were never yours to manage.
And that distinction has been humbling for me.
Because when I look at the things that have consumed enormous amounts of my own capacity over the years, a lot of them were never on my calendar or list of goals.
Some of them were control.
Trying to anticipate what might happen.
Trying to make sure everyone was okay.
Trying to prevent disappointment.
Trying to figure things out before I had enough information to figure them out.
Carrying outcomes.
Carrying other people’s emotions.
Carrying the future.
And somewhere along the way, the question about capacity started to have a spiritual side to it.
Maybe You Were Never Supposed to Carry All of It
Jesus says in Matthew 11:
“Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened…”
I’ve read those words many times.
But for a lot of my life, I think I heard verses about surrender
while still quietly believing it was my responsibility to hold everything together.
I could pray about something, and then spend the rest of the day mentally trying to solve it.
I could tell God I trusted Him, and still try to control the outcome.
I could ask Him to carry something, and pick it right back up before I even finished saying amen.
Maybe you know what that feels like.
We can call it responsibility.
We can call it being prepared.
We can call it caring deeply.
And sometimes it is those things.
But sometimes underneath all of that is a belief that says:
If I don’t hold this together, who will?
And I’ve begun to wonder how many spoons I’ve spent trying to do a job that was never mine.
Because trust has a capacity component, too.
Every outcome I insist on controlling costs me something.
Every future scenario I try to solve before it arrives costs me something.
Every person I believe I am responsible for keeping okay costs me something.
Every burden I pick back up after God has invited me to put it down costs me something.
And maybe becoming whole isn’t about becoming strong enough to carry all of it.
Maybe it’s realizing I was never supposed to.
Maybe the Goal Isn’t to Save Every Spoon
So no, I don’t think healing is about creating a life that never stretches us.
And I don’t think the goal is to become so protective of our nervous systems that we slowly remove every demanding, uncertain, uncomfortable thing from our lives.
I want more for us than that.
I want us to have enough capacity to love deeply and live fully.
To work and create and serve.
To navigate hard conversations.
To move our bodies.
To take the trip.
To show up for the people we love.
To walk through difficult seasons without interpreting every struggle as evidence that we’re back at the beginning.
To know when we need rest, and to know when we’re ready to stretch.
To recognize our limits without making an identity out of them.
And to trust that capacity can grow.
Through adequate sleep and recovery.
Through strength and movement.
Through nourishment and appropriate medical care.
Through boundaries and support.
Through meaningful relationships.
Through experiencing manageable challenge and discovering that we can recover from it.
Through putting down responsibilities that aren’t ours.
And through learning to trust God with what was never ours to control.
Maybe the goal isn’t to save every spoon.
Maybe it’s to stop spending so many of them trying to control
what was never yours to control.
To replenish them when you need to.
To slowly build more capacity where you can.
And then—
to spend your spoons generously on the life God actually gave you to live.
So if you’ve been looking at yourself lately and thinking,
I used to be able to handle all of this. What’s wrong with me?
Maybe you can ask yourself something different.
What am I carrying right now?
What is it costing me?
And is all of it actually mine to carry?
You don’t need unlimited capacity.
You don’t need to become the woman who can handle everything.
Maybe becoming whole looks less like learning to carry more and more—
and more like becoming wise enough to know what is yours to carry, strong enough to carry what matters, and trusting enough to place the rest back into God’s hands.
Want help connecting the dots in your own life?
If you’ve been wondering why you feel more overwhelmed, exhausted, reactive, or unlike yourself lately, my free Back to You Blueprint can help you begin looking at the bigger picture—stress, hormones, symptoms, your nervous system, your current season, and what your body may be asking for.
[Download the free Back to You Blueprint →]
And if you’re ready for more personalized support, this is the work I do with women inside Whole She Rises. Together, we look beyond isolated symptoms or another list of things to “fix” and begin making sense of the patterns in your body, your life, and the way you’ve learned to carry both.
[Learn more about working with me →]
Keep Going
If this conversation helped you recognize that your capacity isn’t only about how much you’re carrying—but also how well you’re recovering from what life asks of you—listen to Episode 35: Is Your Rest Actually Restoring You?
We’ll talk about why stopping, sleeping, or even taking a vacation doesn’t always leave you feeling restored—and what may actually help your body begin to recover.