285 - Pillar 3: Capacity

Elizabeth: [00:00:00] Now, here's something that you've probably said. You might have said it in the car, maybe you're your sister, or maybe just in your own head at night when you're going to bed. I need one more hour in the day. One more hour and I would get to the gym. One more hour and I would sit down and eat a real meal.

One more hour and I would get to bed on time. I believed that too for years. And then one day I actually looked at it and I realized it's a total lie. Not a lie that you're telling on purpose, but a lie you need to be true because the real answer is a hard one to swallow. Because here's what would actually happen if I handed you that hour tomorrow, and you already know this.

It's not the gym. Today, I'm gonna show you where that hour actually goes every single time and why the thing you keep calling a time problem has nothing to do with time. This is the piece nobody tells [00:01:00] you, and once you see it, you can't unsee it. So stay with me. This one's gonna land a little close to home

Welcome to the Done with Dieting Total Health for Women over 40 podcast, the podcast for women who are done with the start over cycle and ready for a way of taking care of themselves that actually works.

Hey everyone, welcome to the Done with Dieting podcast, the podcast for total health for women over the age of 40. I am your host, Elizabeth Sherman, and I am so glad that you are here with me today. So I want you to think about last Tuesday. You walked in the door somewhere between 6:00 and 7:00.

You had your bag on one shoulder and your phone in your hand, and you were already answering somebody about some question that they asked. Maybe you hadn't sat down since 8:00 o'clock in the morning. Maybe you'd eaten standing up or at the counter or in the car, or maybe not at all. And then this morning, when you were still a functioning person with [00:02:00] plans, you told yourself that you were going to make dinner, a real one, and you had everything for it, the chicken and the vegetables and the thing that you saw on Instagram.

And then you get home and you open the freezer, and there's the chicken, frozen solid. You didn't take it out this morning because you were finding the permission slip and answering the email and remembering the appointment for your mother. And so you stand there with the freezer door open and cold air on your face and you think, "I cannot do this.

I do not have the capacity for this."

Not I don't want to, but I just cannot. And nobody's offering to help. Your kids are in the other room. Your partner's on a call. Nobody comes into the kitchen and says, "Sit down, Mom, I've got this." Of course, you didn't ask either. You never ask. So you order the food, or you go get the rotisserie chicken and the bagged salad, and you dump it in a [00:03:00] bowl and put it on the table, and everyone eats it, and everyone's fine except for you, because you're standing there thinking, "What is wrong with me?

Other women can do this. This is not supposed to be hard. This is the bare minimum of running a household, and I couldn't even manage the bare minimum." And so you feel lazy. That's the word that you use with yourself, lazy. And then the night goes on, and you help with homework. You answer the last four texts.

You put the dishes away.

You find the thing your partner is looking for because they know that you know where it is because you are always the one who knows where it is. And then around 9:30, the house finally gets quiet, and here you are in the kitchen alone. Maybe it's with a glass of wine. Maybe it's the tortilla chips or whatever's left in the ice cream in the back of the freezer, standing up, eating it out of the container with a spoon.

[00:04:00] Maybe you're on your phone and you're scrolling something that you don't even really care about, and you stay there longer than you meant to. Way longer. Like, you look up again and it's after 11:00, and you're going to be wrecked tomorrow and you know it, and you don't care.

And then you get in the bed and you lie there and think, "I know exactly what I should be doing. I know all of it. Why can't I do it?" You've been asking yourself that question or some version of it for a long time. And so today I wanna talk about that answer Here's what you've decided. You have decided that the reason you don't do this stuff is because you're lazy, or that you've gotten soft, or that somewhere in the last 10 years you've lost whatever it was that used to make you a person who could actually follow through.

Or you've decided that you haven't found the right thing yet, the right eating plan, the right workout, the right app that finally will make it stick for you. [00:05:00] If you could just find the one thing that fits, you could stick with it, and then all of it would be solved. It would be easy. And underneath both of those is a third thing that you'd probably never say out loud, that you decided that something is wrong with you specifically.

Because look around. Your friend does Pilates four mornings a week. Your sister meal preps on Sundays. Your coworker runs half-marathons and has five kids. Like, they are all doing it, and they're managing something that you can't seem to manage, which is strange because you manage everything else. You run a department, or you run a practice, or a classroom, or a household with four people's calendars in your head at all times.

You are the one who catches all the things before they fall. And when something [00:06:00] needs you to happen, people ask you because you get it done. You are competent. You have evidence of that going back 30 years. And then there's this one place, this one area where you keep saying that you'll do the thing and then not doing it over and over and over for years.

But we don't talk about that part. You're a little ashamed of it, honestly. And so you tell yourself the thing that you've told yourself 100 times, "I just need one more hour in the day." You've said it to your mom. You've said it to a friend over coffee. You've said it out loud in the car alone, sitting at a red light.

"One more hour and I would get to the gym, I swear. One more hour and I'd sit down and eat a meal like a human being. One more hour and I'd get to bed on time. That's all I need. Just one hour." [00:07:00] Now, I worked with a client, her name is Emma. Now, Emma is a physician, and I want you to sit with that for a second because it's actually important.

When Emma came to me, she was not confused about nutrition. She knew all about calories. She knew about insulin. She could have probably taught me a class. She had spent her entire adult life in the science of a human body, and she knew in detail what she was supposed to be doing. So whatever was going on with Emma, more information was never gonna fix it.

She was already full of information. Now, here's what Emma's day looked like. She would wake up at 5:15 because that was the only way the morning worked. She got the kids up, found the shoes, signed the thing, packed the lunches, and made sure her son had his cleats in the car for after school, and she checked on her parents.

Her mom is in her [00:08:00] 80s, and there's always something that she needs: a prescription, a doctor's appointment, a question about the Medicare paperwork that Emma will end up handling herself because it just seems easier. And then she went to work, and she took care of six people for nine hours, people who needed her, people who were scared or in pain or waiting on results.

She came home, and there were three text threads going on: the class parent group, her sister about their mom, her friend who was going through a divorce and needed to talk, and of course, Emma had time because Emma always had time. She got dinner on the table. She helped with homework. She listened to her partner's day.

She did the dishes, and somewhere in there, someone asked her for one more thing, and she always said yes. Emma was in service from the second her eyes opened until the second she closed them at the end of the [00:09:00] day, every single day. Now, here's the part that got me. Some nights, Emma stopped at the grocery store on the way home and bought the roasted chicken and the container of potatoes from the deli case.

She would put it on plates and set it down on the table, and her family would eat it and be happy about it, and she would sit at that table feeling like a fraud, feeling like there was something wrong with her because it wasn't homemade. It wasn't good enough because she had bought it instead of made it, because a good mother, a good wife, a real one, would have cooked for her family And she was serving her family food out of a plastic container from the grocery store.

She thought that made her lazy. A woman who had spent nine hours that day making decisions that kept other people alive, and she thought she was lazy because she [00:10:00] didn't cook the potatoes herself. That's the standard she was holding. And then there was the ice cream. Every single night, after the homework and the dishes and the last text and the lunches for tomorrow, Emma would get her kids into bed, and she would go downstairs, and she would open the freezer, and she would eat ice cream on the couch.

Sometimes a lot of it. Sometimes standing right there in the kitchen with the freezer door still open. And then she would go to bed and lie in the dark and be furious with herself because she knew. She was a doctor. She knew what she was doing, and she did it anyway, and she couldn't understand why. She'd tell herself tomorrow would be different, and then tomorrow wasn't different.

So when Emma and I started working together, she wanted to talk about the ice cream because in her [00:11:00] mind, the ice cream was the problem. Get rid of the ice cream, fix me. But I asked her something else. I asked her what happened before the ice cream, and she said, "Well, that's when everyone goes to bed."

That's when I understood what was actually going on. That ice cream was the only twenty minutes in Emma's entire day when not one single person wanted anything from her, not a patient, not her mother, not her kids, not her husband, not the class parent group, not her sister, not her friend in the divorce.

Nobody was asking Emma for anything at 9:30 at night on that couch. She could put her guard down. She didn't have to be capable or competent or kind or awake. She didn't have to be on. That was the only piece of her day that [00:12:00] belonged to her. She wasn't being weak at 9:30, she was taking the one shot that she got.

And when you look at it like that, of course, she wasn't gonna give it up. I mean, why would she? It was the only thing that she had.

So let's talk about why this happens to you and not to some woman who has nothing going on. You are running at capacity, full capacity. Not just your time, although your time is gone. Your mental capacity is gone because you're holding four people's schedules, and the vet appointment, and the fact that the dishwasher is making that noise again.

Your emotional capacity is shot because you've absorbed your kid's bad day, and your mother's worry, and your coworker's mood. And your physical capacity is gone because you've been up since 5:30 in the morning, and you're 52, and you didn't sleep well, and you are full. There is nothing left in you at [00:13:00] 6:15 when you open up that freezer to make dinner.

And when a person is full, something has to come off the list. So here's the question: What comes off? It's not your kid's dentist appointment. Your kid needs a dentist, and someone will notice if they don't have one. Not the deadline at work. There are consequences, and people are counting on you. Certainly not your mother's prescription.

She'll call. She'll call twice. You know what comes off? The walk that you had planned, the thing that you were gonna make for dinner, the eight hours of sleep, the doctor's appointment for the thing that you've been meaning to have looked at, which you've now rescheduled twice. You cut the thing that doesn't have pushback.

Think about your Thursdays. You are literally standing at the door with your yoga mat under your arm. You paid for that class. It's on your [00:14:00] calendar. You have been looking forward to it since Monday because this is your time. And then your phone rings. It's your boss, who needs something before tomorrow, or it's your kid who forgot their uniform, or it's your mother and she's confused about her insurance again. What do you do? You put the mat down. Of course you do. That's what you do every single time. Or you're at work at 4:00, and a coworker comes over and says they're drowning and can you look at this section?

And of course you say yes because you're a team player and you always say yes. And now it's 6:30 and your own work isn't done, so you'll do that tonight after everyone's asleep, which means you're gonna be going to bed late again. Or it's Saturday morning, the one hour you carved out, the one hour that was supposed to be yours, and someone calls to talk.

And of course you have time. You always have time. [00:15:00] Here's what I want you to see. Your boss pushes back. If you don't get it done, you hear about it on Monday. Your kid pushes back. He will stand in front of you and say, "Hey Mom, I need this," until you do it. Your mother pushes back. She calls. She worries. She tells your sister.

Your body does not push back. You skip the walk and your body says nothing. You get four hours of sleep and your body says nothing, at least not in the way that you can hear it on a Tuesday morning. You eat standing up over the sink and your body doesn't call you at work to talk about it. Your body just takes it and deals with it.

It absorbs the skipped meal and the bad night and the missed walk quietly without complaint. And it does that for a year, and then five years, and then 12. And one day your [00:16:00] knees start to hurt on the stairs. Your clothes don't fit the way that they did. You're tired in a way that sleeping doesn't touch.

Your blood pressure comes back higher than it's ever been. And now, finally, your body is pushing back. But by then it's been absorbing the bill for over a decade. That's the whole mechanism. Your health didn't lose because you didn't care about it. It lost because it was the only thing on your list that wouldn't make a scene when you dropped it.

Now, you might be sitting there thinking, "Okay, fine. Then say no. Put the mat under your arm and walk out the door and let the phone ring." Sure. Let's talk about why you don't. Watch what happens when a man says no. He says, "I can't, I have a thing," and that's the end of it. Nobody asks what that thing is.

[00:17:00] Nobody follows up. The thing is not required to be more important than the request. The thing can be that he wants to sit down, that he doesn't wanna do it. now watch what happens when you say no. You need a reason, and not just any reason, but a good one, a verifiable one, something that outranks the thing that you're being asked to do.

You can't say, "I can't come Saturday. I'm going for a walk." You would never. You would feel ridiculous. So you say you have an appointment, or you say you have a conflict, and you leave it vague enough that nobody can measure it against what they wanted or needed from you. You have to justify it, and you know that you have to justify it because if you don't, someone's gonna say, "Well, can't you just move it?"

Nobody sat you down when you were nine and explained this to you. That's not how all of this works. You learned it by watching, by experiencing it. You watched [00:18:00] your mother eat last, standing at the counter after everyone else had a plate. You watched her hand out the good pieces of chicken and take the one that nobody wanted.

You watched her be the one who stayed up wrapping presents while everyone else slept. You learned that a woman's time belongs to whoever needs it more, and someone always needs it more. By the time you were 12, this wasn't a rule anymore. It was just who you were, which is why the guilt is not a small thing.

It's not a feeling that you can talk yourself out of on the drive over. When you say no to your mother, your whole body reacts. Your stomach drops. You spend the afternoon composing the text where you explain yourself, and then you don't send it, and then you think about it for three days afterwards. Like, that is real, and I'm not gonna pretend that it isn't.

And the [00:19:00] pushback is real, too, because when you have spent 20 years saying yes, the people around you built their whole life around you saying yes. Your no is genuinely inconvenient for them, and some of them are going to let you know about it. Your mother gets quiet on the phone. Your kid says, "But you always do it."

Your boss says nothing at all and just looks at you. And then there's the part underneath it. You believe it falls apart without you. You believe if you don't do it, it will not get done, or it'll get done badly and then you'll have to fix it anyway, plus feel bad about the mess You are the one who knows where the extra key is, and which kid hates cheese, and when the car registration expires, and what your mother's cardiologist actually said.

Now, you're not wrong about that. You are, in fact, [00:20:00] the only one who knows those things. You have made sure of it for two decades. And here's what I wanna say very clearly, because I don't want this to be misunderstood. You are not doing this because you're a doormat. You love all of these people inside your life.

You genuinely care about them. You want your mother to feel taken care of. You want your kid to have what they need. You want the people you work with to be successful. When you help them, it feels good because it is good, and you are good at it. That love is not the flaw in this. That love is exactly why the whole thing works so well, and exactly why nobody, including you, has ever questioned it So let's go back to that hour, that extra hour that you want in your day, the one that you've been asking for, the one that you said out loud in the car.

I want you to do something [00:21:00] with me. Pretend I can hand it to you tomorrow, Wednesday, whatever day it is. I'm going to reach into your day and give you 60 more minutes, free and clear. Nobody knows about it but you. It's yours. What do you do with it? Be honest with me. Don't tell me what you'd like the answer to be.

Tell me the real one. Because I think that you would open up your laptop and answer the emails that have been sitting there since Monday. I think that you would get ahead on the project so that Thursday isn't so brutal. I think that you would finally call your mother's insurance company and sit on hold and sort out the billing thing because she can't do it, and it's been bothering you for weeks.

I think that you would drive somewhere. I think that you'd pick somebody up. I think that you would use it to catch up on the pile of things that you owe other people, and you would feel a little bit of relief, and then you [00:22:00] would go get the ice cream. But you wouldn't go for the walk. You wouldn't cook the chicken.

You wouldn't get in bed at 9:30 with a book. You know that you wouldn't. You've had free hours before. That's not what happened to them. So here's the thing I need you to sit with, and I want to say it as kindly and with as much love as I know how, because I am not trying to be a jerk here or call you out.

The hour was never gonna come to you, and not because you don't deserve it, not because you're bad at time management, but because you have spent your entire adult life running a list where you are not on it, and adding 60 minutes to the top of the list doesn't put your name on that list. It just gives you more room to do what you were already doing.

If I gave you two hours, you would give away two [00:23:00] hours. If I gave you a whole Saturday, and I think you know this is true, you would fill it with other people by Wednesday, which means all these years you've been telling yourself that you have a time management problem. You don't have a time management problem.

You have not been skipping the walk because there wasn't a spare 45 minutes in the day. You've been skipping it because when the 45 minutes came up, appeared, you gave it to your kid, your boss, your mother, or the coworker who was drowning every single time. That extra hour isn't coming, and even if it did, you already know exactly what you'd do with it.

So I wanna say something to you now, and I'm going to say it with as much love as I possibly can. You get one body in this life. That's it. That's the whole allotment. That's all any of us get. The one that you're sitting in right now, the one with the knee that [00:24:00] clicks and the shoulder that's been bothering you since March.

Nobody's issuing you another one at age 60. And you get one life, this one. Not the one that starts after your mom's situation is settled, or after your daughter finishes school, or after this quarter at work, after things calm down. Things are not going to calm down. You have been waiting for things to calm down for 11 years now.

This is it. This is your life, right now, on a Tuesday, in the kitchen, with the freezer door open, and nobody is coming to give you back the hours that you've been handing out to other people. There isn't a person in your life who's going to sit you down and say, "You've done enough. Take the day off." Your boss won't, your kids won't, your mother won't.

And not because they're cruel, but because it has never once occurred to them that you need it, since you have spent 20 years making sure that they [00:25:00] never had to wonder. Nobody is going to do this for you. It's you or nobody. Here's the part I refuse to be glib about. That is a hard thing to hear, and it's a harder thing to do because you can't just walk out on these people.

They are real. Your mother is really... Your mother really is 83. Your kid really does need you. The work really does have to get done, and you really are the only one who knows how. I'm not telling you to stop loving them or to stop showing up for them. That's not what this episode is about. I'm telling you that the way you love them has quietly become the reason that you never show up for yourself, and you can see that now, probably for the first time.

And I'll be straight with you. Seeing it is not the same as being able to work through it. You can understand everything that I just said completely and still put the yoga mat down when [00:26:00] the phone rings on Thursday. Understanding a thing that you've been running since you were nine doesn't undo it. If it did, you'd have this handled years ago.

You're smart. That was never the problem. So here's what I want you to do next. I made a quiz. It's called Why Do Your Healthy Habits Keep Falling Apart?

It's called Why Do Your Healthy Habits Keep Falling Apart? And it takes about three minutes to complete. Because capacity may be what's costing you the most. Or it might be something else running underneath all of this, and you can't always tell from inside it.

Now, the quiz finds your specific pattern. It tells you what's actually breaking your follow-through and what to look at first. Your results come straight to your inbox. To take the quiz, go to elizabethsherman.com/quiz. It takes three minutes. And don't do it for your family, do it for you. That's all I have for you today.

Have an amazing day, and I will talk to you next time. Bye bye.

Hey, before you go, [00:27:00] if you are someone who says, "I know exactly what I should be doing, I just don't do it," hey, if that's you, I made something for you. It's a free three-minute quiz that gets underneath that exact problem, not to give you more information, but to show you the specific reasons your follow-through keeps breaking down, because it's not the same for everyone.

And once you can see your pattern clearly, everything else seems to change. Head to elizabethsherman.com/quiz. It's free, it's fast, and it's honest