The Secret Off-Buttons
The wine at the end of the day. The edibles in the lockbox. The impulse-shopping cart at midnight. Annie Wright, LMFT walks through why so many driven women reach for the same handful of “off-buttons” , and why the real story isn’t about willpower, but about a nervous system that never learned it was safe to stop.
It’s 4:47am on a Tuesday. You woke up an hour and a half early but with your mind spinning you can’t go back to sleep so you walk downstairs and grab yesterday’s cold cup of coffee stuffed into the fridge , the one your husband made you yesterday morning and you didn’t have time to drink before you had to leave for work. You sit down at your desk while everyone’s still sleeping, with every intention of doing the gratitude journaling Wellness TikTok says you should do. Maybe six minutes of meditation, too. You have the journal open. But then you get antsy. You open the laptop just to check.
An hour and a half later you’ve answered all the emails.
By now, your partner and kids are waking up and you have to close the laptop and go to your morning mom shift , getting everybody fed, dressed, and out the door. You rush out after them. Nine hours later you’re commuting home. You’ve navigated four crises, three of which weren’t yours to handle but fell on your plate anyway. You’ve managed your manager’s anxiety, your team’s anxiety, and an angry client who’s insisting no AI tools be used on their project. You’ve held it together with a composure that looks, from the outside, like it was easy. But it wasn’t easy. You’re fried and sleep deprived.
And then you walk through the door.
The house , which you tidied literally just last night , has been trashed again. How?! And then the second you’re inside your partner doesn’t smile, doesn’t ask how your day was. Instead he asks where the pasta is. There’s a pasta system. There’s literally a labeled section in the cabinet which you set up in the hopes of not being asked questions with obvious answers. As you’re telling him where the damn pasta is, your kid grabs your sleeve: “Dad won’t let me watch the iPad!” The whining and bickering starts. Dinner isn’t started but your partner has been home for an hour.
You feel the rage rise. You’re so tired you could cry but you won’t because there’s still dinner to make and homework to oversee and a fight over screens that you have to referee again. Nobody is asking how your day was.
And before you can even consciously think about what you’re doing , before you’ve even taken your coat off , your body moves to the kitchen and you’ve opened the fridge and you’re pouring the white wine into one of those big, beautiful glass tumblers. A pour that’s definitely not one serving.
I earned this, you think. I worked all day. My home life is just more stress on top of stress. There’s no end in sight to all this work.
The Off-Buttons
Your kid is now whining about being hungry. Your partner comes in to share this with you and asks how soon it’ll be on the table. Again, your partner who’s been home for an hour. You pour a second glass.
As you’re pouring it you know you probably shouldn’t be drinking this much wine just to be able to be around your own family.
You know it’s going to trash your REM.
You know it’s going to interfere with the HRT you just started last week for the hot flashes.
You know it’ll impact your run tomorrow morning.
You know all of this. The bottle is less than half full now. Still you drink the second glass and feel the edges numb off just a little.
Or maybe it isn’t wine. Maybe it’s the edibles , the good ones, the bougie ones in the beautiful packaging you keep in the lockbox in your desk drawer because the kids shouldn’t find them. You take out a 2.5. Then you think about what kind of day it’s actually been, and you put it back and take out the 5 and the 2.5. You know it’ll wreck your sleep. You know you’ll wake up at 3 AM with your heart pounding and spend an hour scrolling. You take it anyway.
Or maybe it’s later, once everyone’s finally in bed. You open the online cart , a duplicate of the shirt you already own in gray, now in cream, a skirt you have absolutely no occasion to wear , and you check out. Money you didn’t need to spend. You know you should be putting that toward the household help three days a week that would actually change your life, that would mean the laundry wasn’t on the couch when you walked in, that would mean you weren’t doing a second shift at 9 PM. You buy the clothes instead. They feel like another reward for how hard you work. Your life doesn’t feel perfect right now. But maybe your wardrobe can.
Or maybe it’s the guy you met at the conference last spring.
You know exactly what you’re doing when you open the old text thread. You know what’s at stake , the marriage you’ve built, the life, the net worth you’d split down the middle if this went sideways. You message him anyway. Not because you want to blow anything up (right?!). Because you want to feel as attractive and desirable and interesting as you did when you and him met , not like this shell of a workhorse trapped in the same Groundhog Day. The dopamine hit from his messages is real so you text him.
No matter which of these off buttons feels familiar to you, here’s the thing: we don’t (usually) call any of this a problem. We call it the small things we need to get through the day. We call it self-care for being a hard working mom. A perimenopausal mid lifer trying to manage her daily stress while living in a world generating ambient trauma and anxiety every day.
But at some point you might notice something you haven’t wanted to look at directly.
Like you can’t remember the last day you didn’t reach for the wine or the cannabis. Can’t remember a weekend with your partner and kids that didn’t involve drinks or edibles somewhere in it. You notice they’re getting earlier , it used to be after dinner, now it’s while you’re making it. And you notice how furious you are when you can’t have them (like when you’re the only parent around to drive your kid to the birthday party).
Then maybe you start to realize it’s not just self-care anymore. It’s not just a reward for how hard things are. You realize that you’re becoming dependent on these things just to get through your days. Realizing this feels really, really uncomfortable. It’s totally incongruent with who you are, how competent and capable you are, but it’s still true.
What This Actually Is
“To be in the state of hambre del alma, a starved soul, is to be made relentlessly hungry. Then a woman burns with a hunger for anything that will make her feel alive again. A woman who has been captured knows no better, and will take something, anything, that seems similar to the original treasure, good or not. A woman who is starved for her real soul-life may look ‘cleaned up and combed’ on the outside, but on the inside she is filled with dozens of pleading hands and empty mouths.”
Clarissa Pinkola Estés, PhD, Women Who Run With the Wolves, 1992
Here’s the thing that trips most of us up: you can know exactly what you’re doing, know it’s probably not great for you, know what it’s costing you , and still keep doing it. Tuesday after Tuesday. Same glass, same scroll, same cart. Because knowing isn’t the same as stopping.
That’s because this isn’t really about the wine. Addiction , and let’s use that word plainly for a second, even if it doesn’t feel like it applies to you , always develops the same way.
Something feels intolerable.
We find something that makes it feel less intolerable.
We reach for it again.
Over time, what started as a choice to self-soothe becomes a reflex to just cope.
For a lot of the women I work with, this kind of behavior isn’t new. In almost every case, there were compulsions earlier , the food rules at 22, the overexercising at 28, the achievement addiction and workaholism that’s been running since her adolescence.
The specific coping mechanism and self soothing behavior changes. The function doesn’t.
She’s been finding ways to manage intolerable feelings her whole adult life.
The wine at 44 is just the latest version.
And right now, at 44 (give or take 10 years) the feelings are a LOT. Too much for many of us.
The Window of Tolerance
A term coined by Dan Siegel, MD, describing the zone where the nervous system can actually function , where we can feel something hard without falling apart, handle stress without tipping into rage or shutdown, be present without white-knuckling it.
In plain terms: inside the window, you can cope. Outside it, you’re just surviving.
In midlife, basically from 30 to 45 (which is what researchers call the “rush hour of life”), and then from 45 to 55, when we women get the privilege of moving through perimenopause and menopause, throwing our body into chaos just as our life structures may calm down a little. Most of us just feel like we’re surviving.
And then, on top of that, women who grew up in homes with relational trauma , a home with a mood-disordered or personality-disordered parent. A home where love was intermittent, parts of you weren’t welcomed, or the situation was downright dangerous or abusive , tend to start adult life with a narrower window than most. Their nervous systems learned to run on high alert. They didn’t get the early experiences that build the capacity to tolerate distress, sit with discomfort, or come back to calm on their own.
And then, for them too, midlife hits. The career at full throttle. The kids who need everything. The marriage that’s running on logistical fumes. The perimenopause nobody warned her about. Maybe aging parents. Maybe financial pressure. Maybe all of it at once. The window that was already narrow is now being asked to hold more than it was ever built to hold.
So OF COURSE she’s reaching for the off-buttons. The wine, the gummies, the impulse shopping, the impulse flirtexting. Not because she’s weak or a bad person. But because her nervous system is totally overwhelmed and the wine works and the gummies work and the dopamine hit of the DM works and nothing else in her life right now is working to help her feel better.
The Same Problem, Different Clothes
What I’ve come to understand, and what the research on complex trauma’s been quietly confirming for decades: if you’re addicted to your work, you’re probably not just addicted to your work. That’s the uncomfortable part I’m trying to shed light on with this essay.
In fact, there’s a passage I keep returning to in Christine Courtois and Julian Ford’s work on complex trauma. They describe a specific type of woman I see constantly in my therapy and coaching practice , the one whose childhood survival strategies led directly to super impressive adult achievement.
She’s competent, self-sufficient, the one who handles everything.
AND, they name, explicitly, what tends to show up alongside the workaholism and external excellence in her life: eating disorders, alcohol, compulsive spending, excessive exercise. Not as separate problems she also has. Clinically we call these co-occurring disorders, but let’s just imagine it as the same problem wearing different clothes on different days.
The eating disorder she had at 22 and the wine she drinks every night at 44 are more related than she thinks. The restriction and the excess are both the same nervous system, trying to feel okay in a body that doesn’t FEEL okay.
The work addiction got the applause. The rest got the same lockbox as the gummies.
“A reckoning with burnout is so often a reckoning with the fact that the things you fill your day with , the things you fill your life with , feel unrecognizable from the sort of life you want to live, and the sort of meaning you want to make of it. That’s why the burnout condition is more than just addiction to work. It’s an alienation from the self, and from desire. If you subtract your ability to work, who are you? Is there a self left to excavate?”
, Anne Helen Petersen, Can’t Even, 2020
What This Isn’t , and What Actually Helps
The point of this essay is not to hand you a diagnosis. It’s not to tell you you’re a bad mom or a bad wife, or that you can’t hack it even though everything you worked so hard for has actually arrived. It’s not to scare you or add something else to the list of things you should be doing differently.
It’s to say: if you recognized yourself anywhere in here , the second pour that leads to a nearly empty wine bottle, the lockbox emptying faster than it used to, the repeated impulse checkouts as a reward for the hardness of your life, the risky text thread , that’s NOT evidence that you’re a mess of a person. It’s information. Your nervous system is telling you it’s being asked to hold more than it can hold on its own. And the things you’ve been reaching for to manage that are starting to become less of a choice and more of a compulsion. That gap , between I want this and I need this to function , is so worth paying attention to.
And not with shame. Just with honesty and compassionate curiosity.
Because here’s what no amount of wine or cannabis or impulse shopping actually fixes: a window of tolerance that was too narrow before your life got this full, and that’s now completely maxed out. What fills that gap isn’t another coping strategy. It’s not a 30-day reset or a dry January or a new supplement stack or a temporary leave for burnout. It’s actual therapeutic work , the kind that goes to the root. Trauma-informed therapy. Somatic modalities. Relational work that helps your nervous system build capacity it never got the chance to build when you were seven years old on that staircase, listening to your parents arguing in the kitchen.
That’s what widens the window. Slowly. Not glamorously. But actually.
You don’t have to decide anything as you read this. But if you felt uncomfortable reading this essay, what I wrote felt way too close to home. Again, just take that as information. You can make a decision about what to do with it later, but for now just notice. That noticing is a great start.
Q: What are “off-buttons”?
A: The small, repeated behaviors , a nightly glass of wine, edibles, impulse shopping, a risky text thread , that a nervous system reaches for when it has no other reliable way to feel less overwhelmed.
Q: Is reaching for wine or edibles every night a sign of addiction?
A: It can be a sign that a choice has become a compulsion. The clinical distinction isn’t about the substance itself, but about the gap between wanting it and needing it to function.
Q: What is the window of tolerance?
A: A term coined by Dan Siegel, MD, for the zone where your nervous system can handle stress without tipping into shutdown or overwhelm. A narrower window means less capacity to cope before reaching for an off-button.
Q: Why do driven women in midlife struggle with this more?
A: Midlife (roughly 30, 55) stacks career demands, caregiving, and perimenopause on top of nervous systems that, for many women with relational trauma histories, were already running with a narrower window of tolerance.
Q: What actually helps widen the window of tolerance?
A: Trauma-informed therapy and somatic, relational work that builds nervous system capacity at the root , not a 30-day reset, a new supplement, or a short break from work.
EMDR-trained, trauma-informed therapy for driven women healing relational and developmental trauma.
Trauma-informed coaching for driven women navigating leadership, burnout, and identity.
Annie’s signature course for relational trauma recovery. The framework, in your own time.
Annie Wright, LMFT
Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist · Relational Trauma Specialist · Author, W.W. Norton 2027
“Helping driven women finally feel as good as their résumé looks.”
Annie Wright is a licensed psychotherapist with 15,000+ clinical hours since 2013 and an EMDRIA Certified Therapist. She’s the founder and former CEO of Evergreen Counseling, a multimillion-dollar trauma-informed therapy center she successfully exited. She’s currently writing her first book, The Everything Years: Navigating the Pressure and Promise of Your Thirties, with W.W. Norton (2027). Her expert commentary has appeared in Psychology Today, Forbes, Business Insider, NBC News, and The Information.
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This article is educational and isn’t a substitute for therapy, diagnosis, or a clinical relationship with a licensed mental health provider. If you’re in crisis, call or text 988 (US) or visit findahelpline.com. See our Medical Disclaimer and Editorial Policy.
Annie Wright, LMFT
LMFT · Relational Trauma Specialist · Author, W.W. Norton 2027
Helping driven women finally feel as good as their résumé looks.
Annie Wright is an EMDR-certified licensed psychotherapist and relational trauma specialist with over 15,000 clinical hours, and she's been in practice since 2013. Trained in EMDR, psychodynamic, and somatic modalities, she is licensed in 14 U.S. jurisdictions and registered to provide telehealth in Florida (California, Colorado (telehealth only), Connecticut, the District of Columbia, Florida, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Texas, Utah, Virginia, and Washington). Annie works with driven and ambitious women from relational trauma backgrounds, and everything she writes about is field-tested across thousands of clinical sessions. She is the founder and former CEO of Evergreen Counseling, a multimillion-dollar trauma-informed therapy center she built, scaled, and successfully exited, and is currently writing her first book, The Everything Years: Navigating the Pressure and Promise of Your Thirties, with W.W. Norton (2027). A regular contributor to Psychology Today, her expert commentary has appeared in USA Today, Forbes, Business Insider, Inc., NBC, and The Information.
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