My previous post was about exhaustion – the kind that rest doesn't touch. This one is about something that tends to show up right alongside it, often getting loudest exactly when capacity is at its lowest: a harsh internal voice, delivering a verdict that's usually far more severe than whatever actually happened. You might recognise a version of this: you send an email with a typo in the subject line to a client, and your first thought is I'm a mess. I can't even get the basi

When overwhelm goes on long enough, it can stop feeling like a temporary state and start becoming a more constant depletion of energy. Most women would probably just call it exhaustion. But there’s a particular kind of exhaustion that doesn’t respond in the way we expect tiredness to. There’s a difference between having the capacity to do something and being able to force yourself through it anyway. Being able to keep going can be a surprisingly unreliable measure of how well

Women often describe their current experience with the word "overwhelmed". Where brain fog is about how clearly you can think, overwhelm is more about how much you're trying to hold at once. I remember an evening when I found myself standing in the kitchen with a few small things in front of me – dinner to start, a school form to sign, a text to reply to - and simply not being able to begin any of them. None of them were particularly difficult. There were just several of them