When Small Things Feel Like Too Much

Dr. Stephanie Shelburne
May 19
6 min read

The other day someone asked me a simple question, and for a brief moment I could feel my whole system recoil. The question itself was ordinary. What was not ordinary was the state in which it arrived. Life had already been moving at a pace that felt just beyond what I could comfortably hold, and that one small request landed with the force of one thing too many.

I recognized the sequence almost immediately. Irritation rose first. Then overwhelm. Then the fleeting but familiar impulse to either snap or disappear. What mattered in that moment was not that I felt those responses. What mattered was that I caught them early enough to understand what they were actually pointing to. The moment was not really about the question. It was about capacity.

This is a moment many women know well. A text message, a logistical problem, a request from someone they care about, a conversation that would ordinarily be manageable suddenly feels enormous. Afterwards, shame often enters quickly. Why did that bother me so much? Why am I reacting like this? Why can I not just handle things better?

Those are understandable questions, but they often begin from the wrong premise. The premise is that something is wrong with your character. More often, what is happening is that your physiology is telling the truth. Your system is already carrying more than it can easily metabolize, and a small additional demand exposes that fact.

Your body is not failing. It is communicating.

The vagus nerve is deeply relevant here. It is the longest cranial nerve in the body, extending from the brainstem into the heart, lungs, and digestive tract, and it plays a major role in parasympathetic regulation and communication between the brain and the body. In more lived terms, it is part of one of the body’s primary listening pathways.

This is why I do not think of the vagus nerve as something to trick. It is often described in the language of stimulation, optimization, or quick regulation. But if the aim is to build trust within the system, the better frame is relationship. The vagus nerve is part of a coherence highway that carries information about safety, load, orientation, and internal state. It helps the body register not only what is happening around you, but what is happening within you.

This matters because the nervous system is not simply reacting to events in a psychological sense. It is also constantly processing physiological demand. Vagal pathways are involved in autonomic regulation, in aspects of stress recovery, and in signaling connected to inflammation and metabolic homeostasis.The body is not just deciding whether something feels annoying. It is calculating whether it has enough available capacity to receive one more thing.

When the pace exceeds your body’s ability to metabolize

There are seasons when life moves at a speed the body can no longer match gracefully. Many women know this intimately, especially in midlife, when stress physiology, hormonal shifts, sleep disruption, and accumulated load can begin to converge. In those seasons, ordinary experiences often begin to feel less ordinary.

A small request carries disproportionate weight. Light feels harsher. Decision-making feels more effortful. The mind may still be willing, but the body has less room. Sometimes this gets described as being tired but wired, which is an imperfect phrase but an accurate enough one. The system is exhausted, but not settled. Sleep may still occur, but the deeper quality of restoration does not reliably follow.

Research supports the intuition many women already have in their bodies. Presleep stress in perimenopausal women has been associated with faster heart rate, lower vagal activity, and alterations that extend into the first hours of sleep. The menopausal transition has also been linked in the literature to autonomic changes that may contribute to symptoms such as insomnia, vasomotor instability, mood shifts, and cognitive difficulties.

This does not mean that every moment of irritability is hormonal, or that every experience of overwhelm can be reduced to a mechanism. It does mean that many women are trying to interpret their lives morally when there are also clear physiological realities in play.

Coherence is not calm

One of the reasons the language of coherence matters to me is that it is more precise than the language of calm. Calm can sound like a mood, or a performance, or an idealized state that only counts if it is sustained. Coherence is something different.

Coherence does not mean that nothing difficult is happening. It does not mean the body never reaches its threshold. It means there is enough internal organization for perception to remain available. There is enough openness in the body’s listening pathways to register what is happening while it is happening. Not after the fact, when regret has already arrived. In the moment itself.

When coherence is present, even partially, the outside world does not have to become perfect. The inbox is still full. The family still needs something. The conversation is still inconveniently timed. But there is just enough room to notice, I am nearing my edge. There is enough room to choose a softer tone, to delay a response, to ask for a pause, or to step out of the room before reactivity speaks for you.

That is not positivity. It is perception. And perception changes the story.

The cost of self-judgment

Many thoughtful women suffer twice in these moments. First, there is the overwhelm itself. Then there is the interpretation of it. The reaction becomes evidence of being too much, not enough, insufficiently regulated, insufficiently evolved.

That second layer often drives the system further from coherence. Stress research in midlife women has repeatedly emphasized the cumulative effects of chronic activation and delayed return to baseline, sometimes described through the framework of allostatic load. When the body is already carrying repeated activation, harsh self-judgment can function as one more demand layered onto an already taxed system.

A more accurate question is often this: what if the reaction is not proof of failure, but evidence of load?

That question does not erase responsibility. It does not mean every sharp tone is excusable. But it introduces grace without collapsing discernment. It allows a woman to respond to her physiology with curiosity instead of immediate condemnation.

A small practice for the moment things tip

When a small thing begins to feel like too much, the first intervention does not need to be dramatic. In fact, dramatic interventions are often too much for an already overloaded system.

A more useful beginning is simple. Pause before making the feeling mean something about your character. Let the exhale lengthen slightly. Feel your feet on the ground, or the weight of your body in the chair. Then ask, quietly and honestly: is this about the moment in front of me, or is this my system telling me it is already at capacity?

This is not a performance of self-regulation. It is an act of listening. And listening matters. Controlled breathing, grounding, and other low-intensity regulatory practices are often recommended because they can support parasympathetic function and stress recovery. Their value is not that they make a person flawless. Their value is that they sometimes create just enough space for accuracy to return.

Trust within the system

Trust within the system is built less through force than through repeated experiences of being heard. If the body says this is too much, and the response is always override, push through, do better, be nicer, calm down, then the system learns that its signals are unwelcome. If, instead, the response becomes I hear that this is too much, let me slow this down for a moment, a different relationship begins to form.

That relationship is not sentimental. It is practical. It changes how a woman moves through conversations, decisions, evenings, mornings, and transitions. It changes how quickly she interprets herself as the problem. And over time, it may allow her to distinguish more clearly between the moment that is truly difficult and the moment that simply arrived when her system had nothing left to give.

Sometimes that distinction is where healing begins.

Science references

Breit S, Kupferberg A, Rogler G, Hasler G. Vagus Nerve as Modulator of the Brain–Gut Axis in Psychiatric and Inflammatory Disorders. Front Psychiatry. 2018.
Mass General Brigham. The Vagus Nerve: A Key Player in Your Health and Well-Being. 2024.
Cleveland Clinic. Vagus Nerve: What It Is, Function, Location & Conditions.2022.
Pavlov VA, Tracey KJ. The vagus nerve and the inflammatory reflex—linking immunity and metabolism. Nat Rev Endocrinol. 2012.
Bonaz B, Bazin T, Pellissier S. Exploring the vagus nerve and the inflammatory reflex for gastrointestinal disorders. 2022.
Ingersoll Dayton B, et al. Stress and midlife women’s health. Womens Midlife Health. 2018.
International Menopause Society. Autonomic nervous system dysfunction throughout menopausal transition: a potential mechanism. 2024.
de Zambotti M, et al. Acute stress alters autonomic modulation during sleep in women approaching menopause. Psychoneuroendocrinology. 2016.
Gurel NZ, et al. Application of Noninvasive Vagal Nerve Stimulation to Stress-Related Psychiatric Disorders. 2020.