Definition: Nervous System Dysregulation
This happens when your body’s natural alarm system for detecting danger gets stuck, making you feel overly alert or shut down, even when there is no real threat. It can cause your body to react in ways that don’t match what your mind understands is safe.
Definition: Emotional Labor
Emotional labor is the invisible work of managing your own feelings and often the feelings of others to keep peace and support relationships. It involves extra effort to handle emotions in family, work, or social situations, which can be tiring and stressful over time.
What makes sustainable change possible isn’t willpower or “trying harder” — it’s creating small, consistent shifts in how your nervous system recognizes what’s yours to carry and what isn’t.
Quick Summary
- You may be carrying emotional and energetic burdens that were never yours to hold.
- Recognizing and setting down these burdens is a gradual process that honors your nervous system’s limits.
- Your nervous system can be stuck in patterns of hypervigilance or shutdown due to past relational trauma.
- Emotional labor often involves invisible work managing your own and others’ feelings, impacting your wellbeing.
Many of you shared how you recognized yourselves in Alexandra’s story. The constantly running mental catalog of tasks. The physical exhaustion that sleep doesn’t touch. The quiet resentment that bubbles up unexpectedly when you’ve been carrying everything for too long.
Summary
The May Workbook post explores the practice of identifying what you’ve been unconsciously carrying for others—emotionally, energetically, relationally—and beginning to set it down. This is not about abandoning people you love; it’s about recognizing what was never yours to hold in the first place. For women who grew up learning that their worth was tied to being useful, this distinction can be quietly life-changing.
You’re not alone in this pattern. Your nervous system developed this brilliant adaptation for good reason, and the path toward putting down what isn’t yours doesn’t happen overnight.
Nervous System Dysregulation
Your nervous system is the body’s threat-detection apparatus. When it’s been shaped by relational trauma, it can get stuck in patterns of hypervigilance (always scanning for danger) or hypoarousal (shutting down to cope). Nervous system dysregulation means your body’s alarm system fires too easily, too often, or not at all — regardless of what your conscious mind knows to be true.
For women who’ve built their identity around being the capable one, the strong one, the one who manages it all — the journey toward a more sustainable foundation happens slowly, with gentle steps that honor what your system can integrate right now.
Emotional Labor
Emotional labor refers to the ongoing, often invisible work of managing your own emotions—and frequently others’—in service of relationships, workplaces, or family systems. While the term originated in workplace contexts, it applies broadly to women who grew up in households where they were expected to attune to adult emotional states, maintain harmony, or absorb the distress of those around them. Over time, this becomes automatic and exhausting.
What makes sustainable change possible isn’t willpower or “trying harder” — it’s creating small, consistent shifts in how your nervous system recognizes what’s yours to carry and what isn’t.
The workbook I’m sharing with paid subscribers today offers precisely that — nervous system-informed practices designed to help you begin this foundation work at a pace that feels workable for your particular system.
You don’t need to transform overnight. Each practice strengthens your ability to put down what isn’t yours to carry.
The Foundation Check: Identifying Your Patterns
Just as an architect must assess a foundation before beginning renovations, we’ll start by understanding where your foundation is carrying too much weight. This brief assessment will help you identify your specific over-functioning patterns and recognize early warning signs.
Over-Functioning Patterns Inventory
For each statement below, note how often you experience this pattern:
1 = Rarely | 2 = Sometimes | 3 = Often | 4 = Almost Always
- I anticipate others’ needs before they express them.
- I feel responsible for others’ emotions or problems.
- I say yes to requests even when I’m already overwhelmed.
Continue Your Healing as a Driven Woman
You’re reading part of a larger body of work now housed inside Strong and Stable—a space for ambitious women who wake up at 3 AM with racing hearts, who can handle everyone else’s crises but don’t know who to call when you’re falling apart, who’ve built impressive lives that somehow feel exhausting to live inside.
All new writing—essays that name what’s been invisible, workbooks that actually shift what feels stuck, and honest letters about the real work beneath the work, and Q&As where you can ask your burning questions (anonymously, always)—lives there now, within a curated curriculum designed to move you from insight to action.
If you’re tired of holding it all up alone, you’re invited to step into a space where your nervous system can finally start to settle, surrounded by women doing this foundation work alongside you.
Step Inside
If you’re ready to go deeper, I work one-on-one with driven, ambitious women through relational trauma recovery therapy and trauma-informed executive coaching. And if this essay resonated, there’s more where it came from — my Substack newsletter goes deeper every week on relational trauma, nervous system healing, and the inner lives of ambitious women. Subscribe for free — I can’t wait to be of support to you.
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Your LinkedIn profile tells one story. Your 3 AM thoughts tell another. This quiz reveals the childhood patterns keeping you running — and why enough is never enough. TAKE THE QUIZ → |
Frequently Asked Questions
How do I know what isn’t mine to carry?
A useful starting point is noticing when you feel responsible for someone else’s emotional state, comfort, or outcomes without being asked. If you consistently feel anxious when others are upset, or feel compelled to fix, soothe, or manage—ask yourself: is this mine, or did I learn to claim it?
Why is it so hard to put down other people’s burdens?
For many driven women, carrying others was a childhood survival strategy. If you kept the peace, stayed attuned, or remained endlessly helpful, you may have received safety, connection, or approval in return. Putting it down can feel like risking loss—even when it’s no longer necessary or true.
Is this related to relational trauma?
Relational Trauma
Relational trauma is the psychological injury that results from repeated experiences of feeling unsafe, unseen, or unvalued in significant relationships — particularly early ones. It doesn’t require a single catastrophic event; it accumulates through patterns of emotional neglect, inconsistency, or control in the relationships that were supposed to teach you what love looks like.
Relational Trauma
Relational trauma is the psychological injury that results from repeated experiences of feeling unsafe, unseen, or unvalued in significant relationships — particularly early ones. It doesn’t require a single catastrophic event; it accumulates through patterns of emotional neglect, inconsistency, or control in the relationships that were supposed to teach you what love looks like.
Directly. One of the hallmarks of relational trauma is learning that your needs come last, that your value is conditional on your usefulness, or that the people around you cannot reliably regulate themselves. Adult women from these backgrounds often carry invisible loads because it was built into their foundation.
What does it look like to actually put something down?
It starts with recognition, not action. Before you can put something down, you have to see that you’re holding it. That might look like noticing a familiar knot of anxiety when someone is unhappy with you, and pausing to ask whether their discomfort is actually your responsibility to resolve.
Can I do this without hurting my relationships?
Yes—and this is worth saying clearly. Releasing what isn’t yours to carry is not the same as becoming unavailable or cold. It often makes you more genuinely present in relationships because you’re engaging from choice rather than from compulsion or fear of consequences.
This is part of our comprehensive guide on this topic. For the full picture, read: People Pleasing as a Trauma Response.
DISCLAIMER: The content of this post is for psychoeducational and informational purposes only and does not constitute therapy, clinical advice, or a therapist-client relationship. For full details, please read our Medical Disclaimer. If you are in crisis, please call or text 988 (Suicide & Crisis Lifeline) or text HOME to 741741 (Crisis Text Line).
You deserve a life that feels as good as it looks. Let’s work on that together.
References
- Porges, S. W. (2011). The polyvagal theory: Neurophysiological foundations of emotions, attachment, communication, and self-regulation. Norton Series on Interpersonal Neurobiology.
- van der Kolk, B. A. (2014). The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. Viking.
- Siegel, D. J. (2012). The developing mind: How relationships and the brain interact to shape who we are. Guilford Press.
- Hochschild, A. R. (1983). The managed heart: Commercialization of human feeling. University of California Press.
- Cook, A., Spinazzola, J., Ford, J., Lanktree, C., Blaustein, M., Cloitre, M., … & van der Kolk, B. (2005). Complex trauma in children and adolescents. Psychiatric Annals.
- Herman, J. L. (1992). Trauma and recovery: The aftermath of violence—from domestic abuse to political terror. Basic Books.
- Jack, D. C. (1991). Silencing the self: Women and depression. Harvard University Press.
