‘Everything has a Load limit’
“Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes, including you.” (Anne Lamott)
“I’m at the end of my tether.” We say it without really thinking about it, and it turns out to be more accurate than we realise. A tether only has so much length. Reach the end of it and the rope pulls taut, and no amount of straining or wishing gives you another inch. You have simply run out of tether.
That taut, stretched, nothing-left feeling is not weakness. It is a limit. And everything that carries a load has one.
You Are Not the Exception
Push any material past its limit and it fatigues. Steel, timber, concrete, all of it. Load it beyond what it was rated to carry, for long enough, and it bends, it cracks, it lets go. Not because the material is weak. Because that is simply how the physical world works.
You are made of that same physical world, and you are not the exception to its laws. When you reach the end of your tether, you are not failing, and there is nothing wrong with you. You are just built like everything else that carries a load. A beam that sags under too much weight is not a bad beam. It is a beam asked to hold more than any beam can hold.
What Are You Tethered To?
Here is the question most of us never stop to ask when we hit that point. What exactly are you tethered to? Because the length of our rope is often set by what we’ve tied ourselves to. The belief that we have to carry it all. Everyone else’s expectations. The old idea that asking for help is somehow going soft. Being the strong one, always, no matter the cost.
When you reach the end of a tether like that, straining harder against it only cuts the rope deeper into your hands. The smarter move is to look at what you’re tied to in the first place, and to ask whether some of it can be loosened, lengthened, or untied altogether. A good part of the relief you’re looking for isn’t at the far end of more effort. It’s back at the post, in what you’re roped to.
Rest Isn’t Weakness. It’s Maintenance.
You would never run a machine flat out, day after day, with no service and no cool down time, and expect it to last. You maintain your gear precisely, so it doesn’t fail on you when it matters. Rest is exactly that for a person. It is not going soft. It is basic maintenance on the one piece of equipment you can never replace.
I say it plainly in my book, because I know how it lands for people like us: self-care is often misunderstood as selfishness, when the truth is there can be no peace if you don’t take care of yourself first. In the book I also picture your daily energy as water in a bucket. Waking up a full bucket of water, then every worry, every bit of strain, every load you carry is another small hole leaking water out. Getting rest and maintenance are how you patch the holes and fill the bucket back up. Skip them long enough and you run the day on empty. How many of us have the 3:00pm drop in energy?
A Tool Left Running Hot Burns Out
A tool left running hot burns out. You already know this. You have watched it happen at home, an office worker or a building site. You have never thought to apply it to yourself.
The warning signs are there if we are willing to read them as warnings, rather than character flaws. The short fuse of anger over nothing. The flat, grey mood. The sleep that won’t come. That is the engine running hot. Mental exhaustion is every bit as real as the physical kind, and it asks for the same response: ease off before something seizes.
Where Ignoring the Limit Takes Us
When we override the warnings and keep loading ourselves anyway, we drift into ‘The Tip,’ the cluttered, heavy place I map out in my book. One of the places you can end up in there is ‘The Overwhelm Ocean,’ that flooded feeling of mental tiredness and brain fatigue where everything is simply too much. Rest, maintenance and easing the load are how you climb back out of the water and start heading toward ‘The Garden,’ the clear, steady place where you can actually function again.
Service the Operator
You maintain the Ute. You maintain the tools. You service everything on the job, so it keeps running true. It is well past time you gave the same care to the operator running all of it.
Ask yourself honestly: ‘where am I at the end of my tether right now, what am I tied to that’s keeping it short, and what would easing the load actually look like this week?’
Rest before the breakdown, not after it. Loosen the rope before it snaps. That is not weakness. That is exactly what a good operator does with anything they want to last.
Have a great week.
Michael
Need a hand? Book a session with me. I’ve been where you are.
📖 Where the F*ck Do Our Minds Go? → https://getbook.at/WhereDoOurMindsGo