When Caring Costs Too Much

Capacity, Boundaries, and the Mental Health of the Reliable One

Welcome to the May newsletter of The Wellbeing Equation. As May is Mental Health Awareness Month, I find myself thinking as a therapist about the difference between feeling connected to ourselves in ways that feel healthy and alive, and gradually losing contact with that aliveness. I know this not only from my work with patients, but from my own life outside the office. There are times when I wonder what happened to the freer version of myself, the one who could laugh with abandon, feel less burdened by the time I spend online each day, and return to walking in the mountains as I remember doing years ago.

From talking with others about their lives and what they care about most, I know I am not alone in wrestling with this question. What I have come to understand is that many of us only begin asking this question after some part of life has begun to feel overly complicated and difficult to manage. As we move through our lives, our access to that freer version of ourselves tends to wax and wane. We go through periods when enjoyment feels more available to us, followed by others when we feel more stressed, get caught up in deadlines, and keep pushing on toward the next thing on our to-do lists. Sooner or later, if we have not learned how to care for what helps us feel alive, we can end up living more from the stressful demands of adult life.

Part of what makes this so difficult is that many of us already know our lives tend to go better when we take time out of our day to care for ourselves, slow down our physiology, treat ourselves and those around us with more kindness, and feel safer in our mind and in our body. But what modern life teaches us over and over again, at least in my case, is that knowing this does not make us immune to the difficulty of putting it into practice on a regular basis.

We do not have to work at the stressful parts of life in quite the same way. We know stress will continue showing up in one form or another, but what is not guaranteed are the things that give back to us and help us feel better. Those are the things we have to put time and energy into if we hope to live with less stress and difficulty. For those of us who are used to being the person other people depend on, putting these things into practice can be even more complicated.

I know what it feels like to be counted on, to want to show up for the people I love and care about, to do my part to make the world a better place where I can, and to be responsible in ways that feel true to how I want to live. But like many of us, I have also begun asking myself a difficult question: what happens when my responsibility to others starts rubbing up against my responsibility for myself? I have always had an ambivalent relationship with responsibility, and I find myself wrestling with guilt along the way, because there is never a shortage of people who need care, love, and support.

For me, and I imagine for many of you as well, this is where guilt can become one of the more difficult parts of caring to sort through. Because when someone needs me, I was raised to answer the call. Taking care of myself may be needed, but it can also feel as though I am taking care away from someone else who needs it. And once that feeling enters the picture, it can become harder to take my own needs seriously without feeling as if I am leaving someone else behind.

Of course, I know that we experience guilt for a reason. Sometimes it lets us know we have hurt someone we love or acted in a way that does not sit right with us. But I also know guilt can appear when I begin making room for myself after a long time of not doing so, like pulling back on the amount of engagement here on this platform for personal reasons and for my own mental health. In those moments, my guilt is less about having done something wrong, and more about feeling as though I might be letting someone else down. Sometimes guilt is not only responding to the situation in front of us. It is also carrying older expectations about who we are supposed to be for other people.

More recently, I have found myself wrestling with guilt in a more personal way than I would like. A few months ago, my father broke his hip and needed care in a rehabilitation hospital. I decided to go back home, several states away, to visit him and help figure out what came next, including looking at assisted living and independent living options. Of course, this also meant sorting through the time and money logistics that come with being self-employed, since I do not get paid when I take time off. But after I returned home, my guilt about not being there more and my anger around my relationship with my father growing up felt more intense than I expected. In my own therapy, I have had to acknowledge that caring for my father is not a simple matter of showing up or not showing up. It brings me into contact with older feelings of love and frustration toward him, and with the painful question of my limits around what I will be able to give him.

This situation with my father has left me with an unsettling realization. Guilt can point me toward what I care about, but it cannot tell me how much I am able to give, or whether giving as much as I can is actually wise. For that, I have had to make room for another necessary part of caring: boundaries. Over time, and certainly in my work as a therapist, I have had to wrestle with my own boundaries as a way of being more honest with myself about when caring begins to cost me too much. In this sense, guilt has not only brought discomfort. It has also pointed me toward the hope of providing ongoing care for the people I love without forgetting my own needs or disappearing from my own life.

From my own therapy, and from providing therapy for other therapists and medical care specialists in my community, I know what the stress of providing care looks like up close. From the outside, being one of the reliable ones in our families and communities can make it look as though we are holding everything together. But holding things together is not the same as having an endless capacity to do so. Over time, the strain of being counted on can begin to wear us down.

As that strain builds, caring can start to feel different. We can still love the people we care for and believe in the work we are doing, but our patience can wear thin and resentment can show up in ways that are hard to ignore. Requests that seem ordinary from the outside can become harder to respond to when something in us is already worn down. This does not mean we have stopped caring, but it may mean that caring itself has begun to take more of a toll on us than we would like to admit.

I think of these changes as signals that I need to reconsider how I am caring for myself or my loved ones. At that point, I have to ask myself whether I am still able to give in the same way, or whether I have pushed myself past my limits. If we do not ask ourselves this question from time to time, we may keep giving in ways that have begun to cost us more than we realize.

Changing the care we offer does not mean we care any less. It may mean the care itself has to change if we are going to keep offering it in a way that is healthier for everyone involved. This is where boundaries enter the picture and become necessary, not to make our guilt disappear, but to help us better see whether continuing to care in the same way is actually helping.

That question also leads us toward another one: whether the way we are caring for others is leaving enough room to support our own everyday needs.

The paradox is that many of us are not confused about what helps us cope with life. We know our lives tend to go better when we sleep enough, move our bodies, eat in ways that support us, spend less time pulled into our screens, and stay connected to the people and places that bring some level of enjoyment to our lives. And yet, somehow, we can “forget” how to put these things in place and keep them there long enough to feel less burdened by stress. Or maybe that is merely how we explain it to ourselves, since once life becomes too full, these are often the first things we let go of, even though their absence can affect the quality of almost everything else in our daily lives.

It can feel as though we are falling behind and need to focus on doing more with less time, until one or more of the basics gets dropped from our daily routine. But dropping the basics does not usually make the harder parts of life disappear. It usually leaves us with fewer resources for responding to them. The irony is that the habits that help us feel better and make life more manageable are often the ones we remove first. Over time, daily life can begin to feel harder than it needs to feel.

This is why I think of the basics as the cornerstone of our health and wellness. They affect our mood, our energy, and how well we are able to function across many areas of our lives.

Part of the problem is that these basic supports are often taken more seriously only after something has gone wrong. We return to the basics when the stress of life has already taken a toll, rather than recognizing that these are often the very supports that help us live better in the first place. In this sense, we can end up treating them the way they have often been treated in parts of modern mental health care: as secondary considerations, or as side notes that receive attention only after our mental health has already been called into question.

With this in mind, here are a few practices that may help the reliable one care for others without losing sight of their own needs.

1. Ask what you can reasonably give.
Before you say yes to the next request, ask yourself what you actually have available to give, if anything. There are times when we need to take care of ourselves before we can take on more. Caring does not mean we automatically answer before we know whether our time, energy, and patience can support what is being asked of us. And if you do not know yet, it is often better to say you need some time to think it over: “Let me sleep on it. I’d like to think it over so I can realistically tell what, if anything, I can commit to right now.”

2. Offer help without taking ownership of the whole problem.
There is a difference between supporting someone and becoming responsible for the entire situation. Before you offer your help, be clear about what you are willing to commit to and what is off the table. And if you are not sure, err on the side of offering less, not more. I would rather have someone be disappointed with me in the moment than later feel annoyed with myself for taking on more than is mine, or more than I can reasonably handle.

3. Use the basics to see how you are doing.
Pay attention to the difference between the days when the basics are in place and the days when they are not. Often, when I am sleeping well, moving my body, and eating in ways that support me, my body and mind tend to respond well. But if I still feel stressed, off, or unlike myself on the days when they are in place, that usually tells me something else may need my attention. Maybe I have taken on too much at once. Maybe I need a medical checkup to see whether something physical is contributing to how I feel. Or maybe I have not been putting the basics in place consistently enough for them to support me in the way they can.

4. Choose one thing that gives back to you and repeat it.
Try to figure out one thing in your day that gives back to you and rarely, if ever, lets you down. Maybe that is a walk around the block on your lunch break, going to the gym after work, taking a quick catnap on the sun porch, or, in my case, hiking for an hour in the woods and saying hi to my woodland friends along the way. For most of us, there is already too much stress in the world around us, and in our technological age, our attention is often pulled away from what actually helps us feel better. This means many of us have to put extra time and attention into the daily habits that give something back to us and help daily life feel less stressful.

🗓 Friday, May 22 | 2:00 PM ET | Substack LIVE: Author Spotlight with Caroline Wilke of Sacred Business Flow

Join me and Caroline Wilke, cofounder of Sacred Business Flow, for an author spotlight conversation about my journey in the book-writing world, my work on The Wellbeing Equation: The Art and Science of Living Well, and the process of getting my book proposal in front of publishing houses. Fingers crossed! 🤞

Caroline is an energy management expert and Master Bioenergetics Practitioner. Through Sacred Business Flow, she helps people bridge the gap between knowing and doing by working with both practical strategy and the deeper patterns that can shape visibility, follow-through, and growth.

You can find out more about Caroline and her Substack work HERE.

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In Closing,

Perhaps the difficulty is not simply that we give too much, but that we have been giving for so long that we have forgotten to ask what we still have left to offer. What begins as showing up for the people we love can, over time, quietly become a way of disappearing from ourselves.

👇 Comment below: Where in your life might guilt be driving your choices more than your actual capacity to give?

With care,

Bronce