Why Your Body Knows You’re Over Capacity Before You Do

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So I had this conversation with a client recently. On paper, her week looked entirely manageable. A tight deadline on a piece of work that needed her full attention. A team to lead, new staff that were mid onboarding and all of those things happening at the same time now. Nothing she hadn’t navigated before, nothing that would have made it onto anyone’s radar is a particularly difficult week. And she handled it. She showed up to every meeting, she delivered on that deadline. She answered the questions, made the decisions, held the team together from the outside.

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She was doing what she always does, which is cope. And she was coping well. There were no obvious tells about the amount of pressure that she was actually carrying. But something was shifting beneath that. She noticed that she was sharper in her communication than she meant to be. Not aggressive, not unprofessional, just a bit tighter. Less patient, less space between the thought and the response. She was swearing under her breath at her screen in a way that felt slightly out of proportion to what had just appeared on it.

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And then there was the pivot table. Nothing unusual, nothing to see here. The kind of task she could complete with her eyes closed on any other week. This week, when it didn’t cooperate, she cried quietly, privately. She made absolutely sure that no one saw it. No one was going to see it. She thumped the desk, she cursed at exhale, she pulled herself together and she kept moving. She wasn’t falling apart, she wasn’t in crisis mode.

[00:01:39]:
She was functioning at a level that most people around her would have described as impressive. But her body had already made a completely different assessment of how that week was going while her mind was still running. I’ve got this. Her physiology had quietly shifted into something else entirely. That gap between what the mind insists and what the body already knows. Well, that is what this episode’s about. Because for many of the women that I work with, and maybe for you listening right now, the signals were there. Actually, they were always there.

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The question’s whether we have the language and the awareness to recognise them before the pivot table makes the decision for us. And the thing is, the pivot table wasn’t actually about the pivot table. It never is. Because when I sat with her and we looked at the week more carefully, what emerged wasn’t one big thing. It was the accumulation of a lot of smaller things that have been quietly adding up beneath the surface of her high functioning. The team member who appeared mid morning with the. Do you have five minutes? That was actually never five minutes. The new staff member who needed a little bit more hand holding than expected and the patience that required, on top of everything else already in motion, the meeting that ran over and pushed everything in her afternoon into a kind of controlled chaos that she managed brilliantly and resented slightly.

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The mental load of tracking 12 different threads simultaneously while making sure that none of them dropped, and underneath all of that, something she hadn’t quite named yet. She’d stopped being able to access the part of herself that genuinely wanted to help. The curiosity she usually brings to her team, the warmth, the capacity to read the room and notice who needed what. It wasn’t gone, but it was costing her more than it usually does. She was going through the motions of good leadership, while a quieter part of her just wanted everyone to stop needing things from her, just for five uninterrupted minutes. She noticed her jaw at some point during that week, and her shoulders, that feeling of having been on the balls of her feet all day, ready for the next thing to land, not quite able to settle even when the calendar briefly cleared the sleep that was technically happening but not really restoring anything. The drive home on Thursday, where she realised that she actually hadn’t taken a full breath since about 9 o’ clock that morning. Now, not in a dramatic way, just in that way where your body’s been quietly preparing for a threat that never quite materialised and by Thursday evening it had forgotten how to stand down.

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And then Friday night she poured a glass of wine, sank into the sofa, tuned out with a Netflix show that she didn’t particularly care about, but that required absolutely nothing from her, which, if we’re honest, is one of the ways that we subconsciously choose to regulate. By the way, that zoning out the numbing just enough, not because we’re avoiding anything necessarily, but because the nervous system’s been running hard all week and the wine and the show that doesn’t quite require any thinking is the fastest available off switch and then Saturday and then Sunday and then Monday again. Some weeks are just hard. That is genuinely true, and I acknowledge that there are always going to be periods that ask more of you, and sometimes pushing through is exactly what that situation requires. Sometimes you need to go over capacity to meet the moment and you do and you’re fine. But when you push through, what do you actually do to recover? Not just decompress, not just get to the weekend recover. And if the honest answer is that you move from one demanding weekend to the next, the glass of wine and a show you can’t remember watching as the bridge between them, then your body’s energy budget may Be telling a different storey to the one that your mind is running. Because there’s a difference between a hard week and a system that’s been quietly running on a depleted energy budget for longer than one week.

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And your body knows which one it is, even if you don’t. Now, maybe you’re thinking, yeah, but some weeks are just hard, Tracey. It’s just the way it is right now. And you’re right. So for those weeks, here are two things that take less than a minute and can be done anywhere in the loo between meetings, at your desk, even while someone’s talking to you. So the first is box breathing. All you’re doing with this is four counts in. Hold your breath for four.

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Four counts out. Hold your breath for four. Do it with me. Breathing in for four. One, two, three, four. Hold it for four. Three, two, one. Breathe out for four.

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Three, four, two, one. Hold it for four, three, two, one. Congratulations, you just breathed yourself a box. Now, if you can. I left that a little bit faster on purpose in case you’re driving, but if you can do that, box breath a little bit slower. Now, this is the same technique used by Navy seals. They call it tactical breathing. And what makes it particularly useful for high achieving women in leadership is, is what former Navy SEAL Commander Mark Devine points out.

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He says that box breathing has a neutral, energetic effect. It doesn’t sedate you or wind you up. It brings your physiology back into a workable, regulated range while keeping you alert and present exactly what you need when you’re three meetings deep with two more to go. Right. The second is something called orienting. You simply let your gaze move slowly around the room and you notice what’s solid. The surface of your desk, the floor beneath your feet, the wall across from you. You’re not looking for anything in particular.

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You’re letting your nervous system register that the environment’s stable, that you’re physically safe, that the threat that your body is preparing for isn’t actually in the room with you. 30 seconds, that’s all you need and no one will notice. And it creates just enough internal space to stay regulated when the moment’s asking everything of you. Great. When you can’t take yourself away from the moment and into the loo for some box breathing. Right? So these are small acts of active recovery in the middle of a demanding day. Now, most of us think of recovery as something that happens after or at the weekend on holiday, when things quieten down. But active Recovery, even in 30 second increments, is part of what keeps the energy budget from running dry.

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Which brings me to what’s actually happening beneath the surface when a week like this one builds and builds. So your body has a finite energy budget. This is an actual, measurable, physiological reality. That’s right, people, we’re about to go down biology lane. So every biological process your body runs, whether it’s breathing, thinking, regulating your temperature, producing hormones, repairing cells, managing your immune system, coordinating your stress response. I know, it’s a lot, right? All of it costs energy. And at any given moment, your body’s making decisions about how to allocate that energy budget based on what it perceives the current situation needs. So this is what scientists call allostasis.

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It’s your body’s anticipatory system, its ability to sense demand, whether it’s real or imagined, and mobilise the appropriate physiological response before you’ve consciously registered that anything’s happening. And because it’s anticipatory, it doesn’t just respond to what’s in front of you right now, it’s running scenarios. It’s predicting what’s coming based on everything it thinks it knows about your environment, your history and your current level of demand. So the more scenarios it’s running, the more resources it preloads, which means a full inbox, a complex week ahead, a team who needs you, a deadline sitting in the background of everything, all of it is already being accounted for in your body’s resource allocation before you’ve even opened your laptop on Monday morning. I mean, sit with that for a moment. How amazing is your body? Your body is already preparing for your week before your week’s even started. So the problem isn’t allostasis. Allostasis is what allows you to perform at the level that you perform at.

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It’s brilliant, actually. The problem is what happens when that system stays activated for too long without adequate recovery, when the demands keep coming week after week, and the budget keeps being drawn down without being meaningfully replenished. Now, scientists call this allostatic load. This is the biological wear and tear that accumulates when your body’s stress response systems have been running above their sustainable threshold for longer than your reserve capacity can support. And before you think that this is something that happens to other people, people who are really struggling, people who can’t cope, I want you to stay with me here because here’s the thing. Allostatic load doesn’t announce itself dramatically. It accumulates quietly beneath the surface of someone who is, by every external measure, handling it beautifully. Think of it like your phone battery so your phone’s got a total charge, right? Running the basic functions, the screen on the apps ticking over quietly in the background.

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It uses a baseline amount of that charge throughout the day. That’s just the cost of being alive and functioning. If you’re a phone now, add the antenna searching for signal, the notifications coming in, the brightness turned all the way up. Maybe a video call, maybe three simultaneous downloads so the battery drains faster. Not because of the state of your battery, but because more is being asked of it than the baseline was designed to sustain indefinitely. So your body works the same way. So under sustained demand, it begins to ration. And the way it rations is really clever.

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Even when it doesn’t feel that way from the inside, when you’re living it right, it prioritises the functions that it considers to be most immediately essential. That’s things like breathing, keeping your heart beating, maintaining your blood sugar, keeping you upright and functional and in the room. And it quietly deprioritizes others. The cellular repair processes that keep your biology healthy in the long term. The immune surveillance that protects you from getting sick and at the level you’d normally notice during a demanding week. The emotional regulation, the perspective taking, the capacity to stay curious with a team member when your reserves are already stretched. The resilience that usually stops a non functioning pivot table from feeling like the last straw. Now, these aren’t character flaws.

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They’re not evidence that you’ve lost your edge or that this level of leadership’s too much for you. They’re your body making intelligent, physiological, coherent decisions about where to direct its limited resources. That’s pretty cool, right? It’s prioritising your survival over your sophistication. And it’s doing exactly what it was designed to do. Now, take a breath with me here, because I’m about to tell you about tears. This is one of my favourite pieces of biology, by the way. And here’s where I want to come back to her with that pivot table, because she cried over that pivot table and I want to reframe that completely, because tears are amazing. Crying is one of the most sophisticated self regulation mechanisms that your body’s got access to.

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And at the risk of geeking out, I know I’m on the borderline here, this is really fascinating. Your body doesn’t just cry randomly, it cries because crying works. When you have a big old emotional cry, your parasympathetic nervous system activates. This is the branch that’s responsible for bringing you back into calm after sustained stress and the Research shows that the calming effects of that activation actually outlasts the initial distress response by two to three minutes. So your body builds in a recovery window. It’s designed to complete the cycle. Did you know that emotional tears have a completely different chemical composition to the tears that your eyes produce when you’re chopping onions or there’s something that’s irritated them? Emotional tears contain higher concentrations of stress hormones, including cortisol and acth, as well as leucine enkephalin, which is a natural painkiller that your body produces. And the composition of your tears actually changes depending on the emotion behind them.

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Tears from stress and overwhelm carry a different hormonal signature than tears of grief or tears of joy. Your body is that precise. It knows what you’re releasing and it adjusts the chemistry to match. That’s pretty cool, right? So anyway, back to my person. She wasn’t having a meltdown, she was excreting stress, literally. Physiologically, her body had found a window, a private moment at her desk to initiate a chemical reset that her system had been needing for days. The build, the release, the settle. That sequence is physiologically complete and it’s amazingly intelligent.

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The only thing that interrupted it was her, because she made sure nobody saw. She pulled herself together and went straight back into that spreadsheet. Which, given where she was in the week, is completely understandable, right? And also meant that the reset her body was reaching for got cut short before it could finish what it started. You see, she didn’t cry because she was weak or overwhelmed or not coping. She cried because her body was trying to help her and it knew exactly what it was doing. You see, the sharpness in her communication that week wasn’t who she is. The compassion that felt temporarily out of reach wasn’t a deficit in her character. This is data.

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Her body sending information that her mind running its well practised. I’ve got this programme wasn’t quite ready to receive. And here’s what makes allostatic load particularly relevant for high achieving women in leadership. Because the system is anticipatory. It responds not just to what is actually happening, but to what it predicts is coming. A nervous system conditioned by years of high responsibility, high visibility and high consequence environments doesn’t necessarily stand down at five o’ clock on a Friday. It keeps running the prediction model, it keeps scanning. It keeps resources allocated to the stress response, even when the immediate demands technically passed.

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Which is why passive numbing, while it genuinely helps take the edge off, while it may not be enough to move the needle on the energy budget in the way that we hope that it will. Your body knows the difference between zoning out and actually recovering, and it keeps the account accordingly. Now, none of this means something is wrong with her or with you. A nervous system that functions this efficiently, under this level of sustained demand is not a struggling nervous system. It’s a highly adapted one. So the question is simply whether that adaption’s still working for you, whether it’s quietly become the water that you’re swimming in. So why didn’t she notice? She’s intelligent, she’s self aware. She spent time in personal development.

[00:19:04]:
She knows her patterns, she’s done the work. And yet her body was sending signals all week that she either explained away, pushed through, or simply didn’t register as information. She didn’t miss the signals because she was disconnected from herself. She missed them because she spent years, probably decades, building a leadership identity around being the person who handles it, the one who stays composed, the one who has capacity when everyone else is running low, the one people come to precisely because she doesn’t fall apart. And inside that identity, the body’s early communications don’t land as information. They land as inconvenience, as something to note and move past, as the cost of operating at this level, which she’s long since decided is simply what it takes. The jaw tension isn’t a signal. It’s just Tuesday.

[00:20:05]:
The sleep that doesn’t restore isn’t a signal. It’s just a busy period. The tears over the pivot table definitely aren’t a signal. That was just a moment of weakness she made sure nobody saw. But capacity is not a reflection of who you are or how good you are at your job. It’s a physiological reality with measurable limits. And the most sophisticated leadership skill available to you, the one that most high achieving women in corporate leadership have never been taught, is not the ability to do more. It is earlier recognition of what your body’s already communicating about the state of your energy budget.

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Pushing through is sometimes exactly the right call. There will always be weeks that ask more of you than feels comfortable. And sometimes you rise to meet them and you’re genuinely fine. The difference between that and allostatic load building quietly beneath the surface, isn’t the intensity of the week, it’s the awareness you bring to it and what you do before, during, and after. The woman who pushes through consciously, who knows she’s drawing on her reserve, who has something in place to replenish it, she’s in a fundamentally different physiological position to the woman who pushes through on autopilot and then wonders why she’s exhausted by Wednesday of the following week and the week after that. One is a choice, the other is a pattern. And patterns, unlike choices, tend to run without us. This is not about becoming someone different.

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It’s not about softening your edge or dialling back your ambition, or suddenly becoming the woman who leaves at 5pm and doesn’t cheque her phone. It’s about creating enough internal awareness to actually choose to know when you’re drawing on the reserve, to recognise the signals your body’s already sending before the pivot table makes the announcement for you. Because the goal of this work is not less leadership. The goal is leadership that doesn’t cost you the things that matter most. Your health, your relationships, your capacity to be present in your own life. Your ability to feel something other than tired and capable and needed and quietly running on empty. This is what becomes possible when your body stops being something that you manage around and starts become something you get to listen to. You see, this isn’t really about avoiding hard weeks.

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You’re already an amazing leader. You carry responsibility. People depend on you. There will always be periods where more of you is required than feels comfortable. And sometimes drawing on your reserve capacity is exactly what that moment asks for. The question isn’t whether you’ll ever go over that capacity. The question is whether you’ll know that you’re doing it. Whether you’ll recognise the difference between stretching to meet a demand and quietly living beyond your body’s sustainable limits for so long that it starts to feel normal.

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Because those two things are not the same. One builds resilience, the other slowly spends it. And what I’ve noticed over and over again is that the women who thrive in leadership long term aren’t necessarily the women with the highest tolerance for stress. They’re the women who develop a different relationship with their biology. They stop treating their body as something to manage around or to override or negotiate with. And they start treating it as a source of information, because your body is paying attention the whole time. It’s paying attention when your jaw tightens, when your patience gets shorter, when sleep stops feeling restorative, when the things that would normally roll off your back suddenly feel harder, even though nothing on the outside seems to have changed. And all these things are simply information.

[00:24:34]:
They’re data. They’re your physiology, giving you an update on the state of your system long before your performance ever starts to reflect it. And once you see that, something changes because awareness creates choice, you get to recognise when you’re drawing on your reserves and make that a conscious decision rather than an unconscious pattern. You get to respond earlier, you get to recover more intentionally. You get to work with your biology instead of finding out months later that it was trying to get your attention all along. So today isn’t about doing less or becoming a different person. It’s about understanding yourself well enough to know what your body already knows. And I want to mention something before we close, and I’m mentioning it now because if this episode has landed for you in the way that I hope that it has, what I’m about to share might actually feel like the right next step.

[00:25:37]:
So in September, I’m running a free three day experience called Biology of Leadership. One hour each morning across three days. That’s it. Nothing to prepare, nothing to work on in advance. You simply get to show up. And over those three mornings, we go much deeper into everything. This episode has been touching. Why leadership feels easy some days and hard on others.

[00:26:03]:
The hidden biological cost of sustained responsibility and what actually supports the body that carries that responsibility, including the herbal medicine piece. Because there’s so much more to say about that than one podcast episode can hold. So this experience is free. It’s you and me live on Zoom, and it’s designed for the woman who is not looking to turn her world upside down, who doesn’t have the bandwidth for one more demanding thing, but who’s been quietly sensing that understanding her own biology might change something fundamental about how leadership feels from the inside. Now, if that’s you, the link’s in the show notes. I would love to see you there. And as a small thank you for being part of this community, everyone who registers as a result of this podcast, well, you’re going to receive something from me before we begin. The recipe for my nervous system Love herbal tea blend and how and why I use it.

[00:27:09]:
A short somatic practise that you can use in the weeks leading up to September. Simply DM me the word joyful and I’ll get you set up. Now. There’s no pressure, there’s no urgency. It’s just an open door. If it feels like the right next step for you, you, I’m sending you lots of love. Bye for now.