Overwhelm Isn't Just a Feeling. It's an Emotional Toll.
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, arriving at the same time, and suddenly I couldn't seem to get hold of any one thing.
That's often how overwhelm feels. Not like one big problem, but like static. Too many things needing attention, none of them individually significant enough to explain why you suddenly feel like you can't cope.
And the toll isn't only cognitive. It’s emotional too.
The Invisible Cost
There's a phrase for part of what's going on here: mental load.
It's not just the doing of tasks. It's the tracking of them – noticing what needs to happen, when, and by whom, often before anyone else has said a word.
Try counting, honestly, everything you tracked in one ordinary hour yesterday.
Not just what you did, but what you noticed:
The appointment coming up next week
Whether the milk will last until Thursday
Whether your colleague seemed off in the meeting and might need checking on
Whether you replied to that email
Whether you're forgetting something you're forgetting
Then there is everything you're quietly anticipating: who needs what, what might go wrong, what someone else has forgotten.
Most women, if they actually stop to count, are surprised by how much is going on in the background.
This tracking is almost invisible to everyone else, precisely because the point of good tracking is that nothing gets dropped. From the outside, it can look like you're simply getting on with things. Inside, you're holding it constantly.
And that constant holding has a cost: guilt when you say no, irritation when someone asks a question you feel they could have answered themselves, resentment when you're once again thinking ahead for everyone else while nobody seems to notice what you need.
Sometimes it’s simply the exhaustion of appearing to manage when you’re not sure how much longer you can.
I've previously written about the invisible contract many women carry – I will remember. I will keep track. I will hold this together. Nobody read you the terms. It simply accumulated. Mental load is what that contract feels like form the inside, hour by hour: the tracking that has to happen for the remembering to look effortless.
When the Same Life Starts to Feel Like Too Much
This is part of what makes perimenopause so disorienting. Often, nothing obvious has changed. The job is the same. The family is the same. The responsibilities are the same.
But your capacity for carrying them may not be.
Sleep becomes lighter or more fragmented. Declining and fluctuating oestrogen is linked to changes in cortisol regulation and emotional reactivity – part of why the same everyday stress can suddenly feel much harder to absorb.
So the same number of demands starts to feel very different. The Tuesday that used to feel busy now feels impossible.
Your emotional margin shrinks too. You might find yourself unusually tearful, or irritated by a perfectly reasonable request. The thing you would once have handled with patience becomes the thing that makes you snap.
Then comes the harder question: Why can't I cope with things I used to manage? It's easy to turn that inward and assume the problem is you.
But perhaps what’s changed isn't your ability to manage your life - it’s how much capacity you have available for managing it in the same way.
That's an important distinction.
When ADHD Leaves Less Room to Spare
If you have ADHD, there’s often another layer to this.
Many women with ADHD have spent years building the kind of scaffolding I described in earlier issues – systems for remembering, organising, prioritising, starting tasks, switching between them and keeping track of multiple moving parts. That scaffolding didn’t just hold up memory and attention. It was also, quietly, what made all this tracking possible in the first place. Other people rarely see the effort behind it. They just see someone who appears to be managing.
When perimenopause makes attention, motivation or executive functioning less reliable, some of the familiar scaffolding may stop working as well – when there wasn't much spare capacity to begin with.
This is where rejection sensitivity can sharpen things further. If criticism – real or anticipated – has always landed harder for you, then struggling with something that “should” be simple isn’t just frustrating. It can feel like confirmation of every doubt you’ve worked hard to keep quiet: that you’re disorganised, unreliable, not on top of things.
There can be anger in it too. Not because you don't care, but because you have spent so long caring, remembering, compensating and keeping things moving – and it’s exhausting to watch that effort stop paying off the way it used to.
Sometimes the feeling underneath “I have too much to do” is closer to: “I'm tired of having to work this hard to make everything look manageable.”
The Effort of Looking Fine
For many women, appearing overwhelmed has rarely felt like an option. Saying “I'm at capacity” has felt riskier than quietly absorbing one more thing.
So you say yes when you mean I'm not sure how I'm going to fit this in. You agree to take on one more thing at work while your mind is already running through everything else.
At home, someone asks, “what's for dinner” and you feel a flash of irritation that seems wildly out of proportion to the question. You swallow it. Answer. Keep going.
This is one way masking shows up. Not hiding who you are, but hiding how much you're already carrying.
And perhaps you get through the day. Then you go home and collapse. Not because the day was extraordinary, but because holding everything together took more out of you than anyone could see.
What If Overwhelm Is Information?
The obvious response to overwhelm is to try to manage it better: better lists, better systems, better routines, more discipline. Sometimes those things help.
But sometimes the answer is less practical. Sometimes it’s admitting you’re tired – that you've been carrying more than you realised, for longer than you realised. The irritability you've been judging yourself for may simply be exhaustion. The guilt may just be how accustomed you’ve become to saying yes.
Needing less from yourself doesn't mean you've become less capable.
Sometimes the answer to overwhelm isn't another strategy for carrying more. It's deciding what you can finally put down.
