Have you ever heard yourself say yes to something?
Moreover, in the same breath you know you had no room for it, anxiety in women.
There is usually a split second before it comes out, where some part of you registers the tiredness, the week you have already got ahead of you, and the two or three things you are carrying that nobody else knows about, and then you say yes regardless.
It takes a second to say and you feel the weight of it sapping your energy for the next couple of weeks.
Many anxiety in women cases I work with have persisted for years. They are seldom labeled as problems. These patterns begin in early adulthood and recur through life stages. Moreover, they can feel normal to those who experience them. This makes recognition difficult.
Indeed, it is simply who they are—the one who manages everyone else’s crises. They keep the household running and organize daily life. People ring them when something has gone wrong.
They come to me because they are anxious. They can tell me that much straight away. What they have not connected, at least not until we look at it together, is that the anxiety and the yes they cannot stop saying are the same thing.
You were taught that yes was who you are
One woman I worked with grew up in a loving family where both her parents worked extremely hard, and she learned early that getting things done was something to be proud of. There was nothing wrong with that lesson, and it served her well for most of her life.
The difficulty with being praised for being capable is that capable stops being something you do and becomes something you are, and once it is who you are, every request carries more weight than it should. Saying no is no longer a practical decision about your week, it has become a statement about your character.
By the time somebody reaches me, the yes has usually become automatic, quick enough that there is no decision left in it at all. Extra hours, other people’s needs, other people’s moods, all of it picked up without a pause.
The belief underneath it all, is that doing less would make her less, this is the story that she keeps telling herself, and the story that keeps her stuck in the constant yes cycle.
The bucket with no tap
I use the Stress Bucket with nearly every client I see, and most of them recognize it straight away. You are the bucket, every demand and every worry you pick up on somebody else’s behalf is water going in, and it does not empty itself.
What I notice with the women who cannot say no is that there is rarely a tap on the side at all. Rest is something they intend to have once everything else is done, and there is always one more thing to do first.
So it fills up unseen in the background, for years, and then something quite small goes in and the whole thing spills over.
It tends to come out in one of two directions. Outwards it looks like reactivity: short with the people she loves, small comments feeling enormous, taking things personally that would not have touched her a year ago. Or she goes the other way entirely, shuts down to keep the peace, and the tension stays in her body with nowhere to go.
Somewhere in all this most people do find a tap, it is just rarely a healthy one. A drink in the evening, food, scrolling until one in the morning, shopping, gambling, cigarettes, vaping, something stronger. It works, and that is precisely the problem. It takes enough pressure off to get through the evening, whilst doing nothing at all about what is filling the bucket, so over time you are left carrying the original load with a second problem sitting on top of it.
I worked with a young woman who was running a course, an apprenticeship, a second job and near daily exercise, with almost nothing in her week left unscheduled. Her days regularly ran late into the night, and what little free time she had went on scrolling in bed. She held that for around two years. Then on a day she had been running on empty and had not eaten properly, she suddenly could not get her breath.
Her nervous system had been on high alert for so long that it never got the signal it was safe to stand down. In that moment an ordinary bodily sensation was read as danger, and once that happened the fear had something to attach itself to. She became watchful for the sensation, and watching for it kept her primed, which made it more likely to happen again.
From there her world began to shrink. She stopped driving further afield, stopped shopping on her own, stopped going to places she did not know well. A passing ambulance, or somebody simply mentioning their health, became evidence that something terrible was about to happen.
The one place she could fully relax was her own bed at night, away from the stressors and pressures of the outside world. Her body knew perfectly well how to relax, it was just rarely given the chance.
The thing you reach for
Another woman came to me wanting to stop drinking too much.
She had been to therapy previously but her anxiety kept returning. It had started simply enough. Home from a long day, shattered, wanting a beer. Over about twenty years that turned into a habit, and became a hidden one, which became shame.
At first she made great progress, and through using mindfulness techniques started to notice the urge before acting on it, to pause, and to choose differently. She even stood in a supermarket aisle for ten minutes, felt the pull, and walked away.
Then a few months later life got busy again. Demands went up, and life stressors increased, personally and professionally, and she found herself reaching once again for the drink.
It started to become apparent that the drink wasn’t the problem, but taking on too much was, as the situations only seemed to arise during moments of stress. She takes on too much and says yes before she has thought about it. The pressure builds with nowhere to go. Then she reaches for the one thing that has always relieved it.
The part of her reaching for it was not trying to ruin her life. These coping strategies all start out as a solution to something, they move you from pain to relief, and that internal part of you has a protective function. It has simply chosen a dysfunctional way of doing the job.
Shame shows up here when you feel you’ve failed again, it makes you feel unworthy, less than, a flawed and broken individual, and it is that shame that fuels the story keeping you stuck.
If you can recognize that even the habit you are trying to change once existed to help you, you release some of the weight that holds it in place, and loosening the grip of shame gives things the chance to breathe, to move and to change.
Anxiety in women begins with a belief about saying no.
When I ask a client why she said yes to something she had no capacity for, she finds it hard to answer, like there’s an inbuilt automatic response that has been ingrained over the years.
Underneath it there is a belief, and it tends to sound something like this: “if I say no then I am letting somebody down, and if I am letting them down then I am not the person they believe I am. If they stop believing in me, then I am nothing.”
The core wound at the heart of this and at the heart of so many of these habits and beliefs is the “I’m not good enough wound.” which is usually formed by an over reliance on external validation.
Your no says nothing about your worth. It says something honest about your capacity, your understand of self, and the worth you give to your own inner peace and well-being. Your capacity is finite, you’re a human being, not a machine, welcome to the club of imperfect beings.
When you believe that doing less would make you less, you cannot afford to have a limit, so you override it, over and over, and somewhere along the way your own needs disappear underneath everybody else’s.
That is usually the point at which a woman tells me she does not really know what she wants any more, only what everyone around her needs.
You were not born believing this. It was installed a long way back, and like any other program running in the background, it can be brought into the light and looked at again.
Owning your no
Recovery here begins with subtraction rather than addition. Saying no asks you to get comfortable with doing less, allowing space.
The young woman I mentioned earlier reduced her hours so her shifts finished earlier in the evening, and she took one full day off a week. That was the whole intervention. Within a few weeks she was far less tired, the feeling of being on edge eased, and her anxiety at work dropped noticeably even though the work itself had not changed at all. Her world started to open up again and she was doing everyday things she had been avoiding, without the self-criticism that used to come first.
She did not need fixing so much as she needed room to stop.
The next part is learning to sort what is yours to carry from what is not. I use the Serenity Prayer with clients as a sorting question, because a good deal of what fills your bucket belongs to somebody else: their mood, their opinion, their need to be right. You can influence your own choices, your own words, and how you look after yourself. You cannot influence whether somebody else feels disappointed.
Then there is the no itself, and it does not need to be a confrontation. A calm, kind “not this time” is usually enough, and the response you get is far less dramatic than the one your mind had already predicted.
Rest belongs in here too, taken because you need it rather than because you have earned it. If you wait until it is deserved you will wait a very long time, and something else will always keep filling the space.
One of the clearest signs that somebody is finding their way back to themselves is that their sense of humor returns. Emotional reactivity in the form of short and snappy responses are good signs that it’s gone and when it comes back, life stops being something just to get through.
You were enough before any of it
The women I work with are not trying to be martyrs. They are just trying to be good, to be of service and support others, but somewhere along the line service got tangled up with self worth.
You were already enough before, you are enough now, and you will always be enough, just for being you. That’s not a nice idea but as a plain fact, and no amount of carrying other people’s weight will ever change that. The validation you are looking for outside yourself was never going to be found there, it always comes from within.
So, the next time the automatic yes comes up, catch the half second before it, and ask whether this is actually yours to carry. If it is not, try a calm “not right now” and see how that feels, usually like a heavy weight has been lifted.
You do not have to fall apart before you are allowed to put something down. Saying no, asking for help, and letting other people carry what belongs to them will not make anybody think less of you, and it may well stop you reaching the point where you have nothing left to give to any of them.
Ready to Put Something Down?
If you recognize yourself in this and you have been carrying more than you have capacity for, we can look at what is actually filling your bucket and what is genuinely yours to carry.
If you’d like to talk this through, you can book a free 45 minute call with me.
