Why Nothing Ever Feels Like Enough (Until This)
I want to talk about a particular kind of tired. This is more than the understandable exhaustion at the end of a busy and chaotic day.
You can feel this depletion, for sure, but it's hard to understand because nothing on your calendar justifies the intensity of the exhaustion.
As frustrating as it is to not be able to find a culprit, it's beyond maddening because all the productivity tools and burnout recovery tools completely miss what's going on.
I'll do my best to unwind this ball of yarn for you.
And if you allow me to take a stab at some inner thoughts, I may be able to save you some energy and time.
When the reason for the problem is laid out, we can go about adjusting, fixing, healing (whatever’s necessary) so we can move forward.
So, if you're like I was and you want an explanation for why you're so tired and why all your extraordinary efforts never feel enough… the explanation and fix follows.
You're conscientious and you work hard. You've carefully curated the life you've wanted. The things and people in your life are all important and valuable to you. You've done the hard work of editing your life so that it reflects who you are what you value.
So when you're told that your exhaustion is a boundary or priority issue, it just doesn't fit.
Because as you've built your life, you've also been carefully weeding out things that don't align for you. You've already done the important work of prioritizing.
And for many of us, we're left wondering how we're supposed to choose between our child, our health, and the business we care deeply about.
You already know each of those deserves your utmost attention. It's a current day "Sophie's Choice". It can be excruciating. And many of us are making these painful choices daily.
That's where my clients find themselves and I wonder if you're similar.
Maybe you've built the career, raised the kids, shown up for the people who needed you. And by all measures, you're doing everything right.
And still, somewhere inside your head, there's a quiet question that seems to bother you most when you're trying to sleep.
"Why doesn't any of this ever feel like enough?"
I know that question well because it circled my brain for decades before I understood the source.
How Not Enough Lived In My Life
When I was a young mom of active girls and active myself with church, civic and school committees, it felt like I was playing a perpetual game of whack a mole.
In order to get anything done, I'd need to switch things around, or adjust in order to do anything. In order to complete a task once needed to be rescheduled.
Like the time I finally committed to joining a yoga studio. It had taken me years to finally see the reality… I wasn't getting my workouts in at home.
So, when I finally decided to pay money to do something I could have done myself, in my living room, with equipment I already owned…. Well, that took a while to justify.
And as it went, literally the first day of that yoga class I paid for, my daughter got sick at school. The nurse called and I needed to pick her up.
Yoga class skipped. Yoga fee lost. And I've got to say, in addition to being concerned about my daughter's health, I felt defeated.
It felt like no matter how hard I tried to take care of myself, life stepped in and I needed to switch my plans. Every. Darn. Time.
So, I told my husband at the time, "I'm so frustrated. I wanted to get to that yoga class and I had to miss it today."
His reply, "Of course you had to miss it. The priority was Lindsay's health. You'll get to yoga again."
While his comment wasn't mean. And it wasn't wrong. It also wasn't fully right.
What he missed was the cost to me: the money, the time, the effort, the emotional labor that I put into committing to that class. It all disappeared in an instant. And no one seemed to care.
I had a chronic case of feeling misunderstood.
I thought, "If they only understood how much I put into it, how much I gave up, then they'd really get me. I need to come up with better words to articulate it."
For most of my life, comments that told me they didn't get it, made me question myself.
I'd think, "What else am I looking for… a trophy? They acknowledged what I did. Why do I feel so misunderstood?"
But, here's what comments, like my husband’s, miss.
While they acknowledged what you did, they completely missed the cost you paid to do it. And that leaves us feeling incomplete and exhausted.
The Part I'd Been Missing
When I first started practicing what I now call The Check In, I wasn't trying to build a framework.
I was just trying to figure out why I could accomplish everything on my list and still feel like I was failing. I wanted to know why I could never relax, even on vacation. Why was I always on?
I couldn't name it, but it felt like I was never enough, like I was looking for acknowledgement.
And yet I also knew I wasn't someone who needed the atta girls. I had a solid self esteem. I didn't need a trophy to feel good about myself.
So, I dug further, trying to figure out what was really going on.
I'm a doer, a planner, a thinker. I see problems and fix them, often before anyone else even notices them.
I'm a dot connector, seeing seemingly disparate things, finding the connection, and making sense out of a once complicated issue.
This is how I talked about myself. As if those traits were my true personality. It felt like there was no other choice. Maybe you feel similarly.
But after I read Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor's book, Whole Brain Living, the lightbulb went on for me.
The book's premise is that we have four physiological parts of our brain, and each physical part corresponds to a psychological state.
Stick with me, here, as this part will explain what was missing for me, and perhaps what’s missing for you, too.
Dr. Bolte Taylor is a neurosurgeon and stroke survivor herself, and she found that each physical quadrant of our brain corresponds to a distinct part of who we are.
One of those parts, the top left quadrant, is the doer. The thinker. The one who works and drives and gets things done.
After learning this, I realized that I was only using one part of my brain. And it had been running the entire show, my entire life. The top left part. The Smart One. The brilliant, capable, and relentless one.
That part of me showed up for every deadline, every crisis, every person who needed her. She just never showed up for me.
I didn't realize how long that part of me had been carrying everything alone until I finally asked her to put some of it down and share the load with the other three parts.
There was The Little One (bottom left, holding the memory of what needs protecting), who'd been waiting quietly for someone to notice she was tired.
There was The Creative One (bottom right, full of ideation and innovation), who hadn't been invited to anything in years because there was never enough time for creativity. And besides, I told myself, I'm not creative.
And then, there was The Wise One (top right, home of wisdom and discernment), who'd been there the whole time, quietly observing the noise, waiting to be invited into the conversation.
I'm not going to lie. This was hard. I didn't expect the grief.
Grief, when I realized I'd been essentially ignoring three key pieces of me my entire life, without ever noticing it.
I've worked with a lot of people, and I can honestly say I believe myself to be highly self aware. And still, I missed this one. Yet, it makes sense to me now, how I missed it.
I grew up steeped in an environment where I was the one who needed to read the room, hold things together, and keep the peace. My role was to attune to everyone's emotions and adjust the situation so they would be comfortable.
I never considered my early childhood traumatic. As a matter of fact, I would have told you I had a lovely childhood. My parents loved me and I had everything I needed.
And yet, when a little nervous system isn't consistently, fully witnessed, it adapts to the situation.
And my system adapted to the lack of attunement until it just felt like normal. I liken it to a frog boiling to death in a pot of water getting hotter by the minute, never noticing the environment is toxic.
I never noticed the lack of attunement, the lack of complete witnessing.
I was that frog. I wonder if you might be, too.
You don't need to have experienced ‘capital T’ trauma for your childhood to have left a mark.
For women who are chronically exhausted despite doing all the right things, I find that childhood experiences are at least worth exploring.
I needed to become the witness I didn't have growing up. I needed to fully acknowledge not only what I did, but understand the cost I paid to do it as such a high level.
The witnessing didn't need to come from someone else. It needed to come from me and it needed to start with my own inner dialogue.
So I started paying attention to how I talked to myself when no one else was around to hear it.
The lack of Complete Witnessing is what's been making us feel "not enough".
And for those of us who missed consistent witnessing as children, this feeling is even more intense. Most people don't even notice it, but we do. We can sniff out the lack of witnessing like a hunting dog.
For many of us, we've been unconsciously hunting for validation and complete witnessing from those around us. And THAT'S exhausting.
OOF. It can feel overwhelming, once you see yourself in this pattern. And if that's you, give yourself a beat here. I get it. Once we see something that's been invisible for years, there can be grief.
But, here's the thing when you're ready to move on from the grief. There's good news here.
We get to be our own witness. As a matter of fact, we ARE our own best witness. And self witnessing is the only way to fully heal the lack of enoughness.
We can offer ourselves what others never could.
We need to acknowledge not only what we did, but also the cost we paid to do it. And it starts with our inner dialogue.
That's Complete Witnessing, in its most personal form.
Once I began seeing my brain as four separate characters, I was able to have healthy conversations that completely witnessed me. And because the four distinct parts of the brain are scientifically backed, it no longer felt like crazy talk.
I now had a framework to ground my inner conversation.
In general, for us to feel fully seen and witnessed, the response needs four parts.
I see what you did.
It mattered.
I see what you gave up to do it.
And that cost matters to me.
Once I committed to speaking to myself this way, something in my body settled that no amount of re-explaining myself to the other person, ever did.
I wasn't finding better words to explain myself. I wasn't managing my exhaustion more efficiently. I wasn't more disciplined about rest.
I was, for the first time, actually present with all four parts of myself instead of running everything through the one part that never stopped working.
That's the piece I never received from a boundary workshop or a better calendar system.
And this is what's missing in traditional professional and personal development work.
This is what makes working with a person who's been where you are now, and has figured out a path forward, different from anything you'll get from a framework, a book, or a tool alone.
THIS is why ChatGPT hasn't helped you fix your exhaustion and feelings of not enoughness. AI doesn't have the nuance of lived experience as a high achieving, deeply attuned person.
For me, it required that I went further than just a strategy or tool.
I needed to go back to the foundation, where my need to overexplain developed. And I needed to talk to myself in a way that I hadn't experienced as a child.
For the women I work with, this is what's been missing all along.
The foundational understanding of where the exhaustion is coming from and knowing that the fix isn't external. It hinges on our inner dialogue.
I've since built The Check In around Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor's four character brain framework, a compassionate, curious conversation with the four physiological parts of our brain.
The four parts: The Wise One (top right), The Smart One (top left), The Little One (bottom left), The Creative One (bottom right).
The goal isn't to live from any one part. It's full, yet fluid, access to all four at any given moment. That's rarely where any of us start. I certainly didn't.
In practice, The Check In is simple. Twice a day, you pause long enough to ask each part what it needs and offer it what it's been waiting for. Just a few honest minutes with yourself.
In time, it becomes a natural part of your inner dialogue through the day. Eventually, you'll notice the need to keep explaining disappears and your exhaustion dissipates.
How I Use It With Clients
I've found that most of my clients, myself included, were steeped in an early environment where they weren't fully witnessed, where attunement was inconsistent.
In my experience, that's often the reason nothing feels like enough now. At one point in her life, it wasn't enough. She was once in a situation where she had to ignore parts of herself in order to stay connected with the people she lived with.
Now, your life has since evolved. That situation is over, but your body is still operating the way it needed to back then.
Your inability to fully rest and relax, even when there's nothing on the schedule, makes sense. It's a direct result of being the one who read the room, held it together, or kept the peace for years.
It's brilliant, actually. And once our bodies get the message that they don't have to abandon parts of themselves to navigate life, we begin to feel more settled, more content, more at peace.
When I work with a client, I won't hand her a new habit to add to an already full plate. She's most likely tried more tools, strategies and hacks than most.
Instead, I'm introducing her to parts of herself she stopped consulting a long time ago, and teaching her how to ask those parts what they need in real time.
I saw this shift firsthand with my client, Dena.
When she first came to me, she described herself as living in constant crisis mode. Chronic headaches. A body that stayed agitated no matter what she did to calm it. Snapping at the people she loved most. She didn't want to snap, but she had nothing left in reserve.
"I am now clear with what I want," she told me later, "for the first time in my life."
That clarity didn't come from doing more. It didn't come from any boundary setting advice or calendar control hack I gave her.
Clarity, and freedom from chronic headaches, came because she tuned in to all four parts of herself.
She no longer ignored the Little One and the Creative One. She was finally able to have a curious, compassionate conversation with each part of herself. And she was then able to offer herself what she needed.
For high-achieving, deeply attuned women who are chronically exhausted, The Check In is a way back to feeling like your true self again.
The Check In Explained
The Check In is the daily practice of offering those four parts of Complete Witnessing to yourself. It's not all at once and it definitely doesn't need to be done perfectly.
But with consistency, you will build evidence that you can count on yourself to show up... for you. You'll show up for yourself with the same standards of compassion and curiosity as you do everyone else.
The Check In is not a meditation. It's the entry point to a necessary conversation.
If you'd like The Check In for yourself, reply and let me know. I'll send it your way. It's not on my website yet, so you can also just email me at lisa@livingfullybalanced.com
and I'll send it directly to you.
Practicing The Check In for a bit of time, just might be the missing piece for your exhaustion and depletion.
And if you already know you want to avoid the bumps that go along with DIY, if you'd like to save yourself time, and if you're ready to get clear on your specific situation now rather than working through it on your own, The Living by Design Session is where that happens.
The Living By Design Session is a 50 minute, fully customised coaching session with me. You bring me what's going on and you leave with an action plan. If we decide to work together, your $150 fee will be subtracted from future work.
There's never any pressure here. You know yourself best. And you know when and if you'd like to do something different about your exhaustion.
Either way, using The Check In on your own, or scheduling a coaching session with me, you'll be offering yourself something that traditional self care advice misses: Self Witnessing.
That exhaustion, that yearning after receiving an incomplete acknowledgement, won't sting as much, because now you're the one completely witnessing. You're no longer waiting for it to arrive.
You've built a lovely life and you deserve to fully enjoy it. You can absolutely retrain the parts of you that don’t feel enough.
I'm here, anytime.
Lisa
Lisa Bobyak founded Living Fully Balanced LLC because she got tired of watching brilliant women break themselves trying to maintain excellence, in part because she'd been one of them. For over a decade, she's worked with high-achieving, deeply attuned women who are doing everything right. Competent, disciplined, and highly self-aware. Armed with strategies, protocols, and solid habits. The level of their exhaustion doesn't match their effort to feel better.
If you're a high-achieving woman who's tired of working harder at your own wellbeing than you work at everything else... you don't have to break yourself to prove your worth.
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