The Cost of Override
Halfway through a conversation your shoulders tighten, and you tell yourself to stay composed. You realise you have not eaten since morning and think you will just quickly finish this one thing before you make lunch, have a glass of water or even go to the bathroom. You are tired, yet you open the laptop again because it will only take ten minutes. In my experience, that quick thing is never quick. The small postponements accumulate and your own needs slide further down the list until they show up later as a headache, irritability or a heaviness you cannot quite explain.
When this pattern becomes familiar it stops feeling like a choice, because the negotiation happens so quickly that you no longer register it as one. You assume you can catch up later, that you will rest at the weekend, that the headache is coincidence rather than accumulation. What began as small postponements gradually shapes how your nervous system expects to function. In your thirties and forties, as hormonal rhythms shift and resilience narrows, that accumulated pattern carries a greater cost than it once did.
Over months and years those repeated decisions alter your baseline. Activation becomes more frequent because fuel is inconsistent and rest is delayed, and sleep begins to lighten because the body has not fully settled before the next demand arrives. Blood sugar dips require compensation, adrenaline fills the gaps and recovery stretches out rather than resolving overnight. None of this feels catastrophic in isolation, yet the margin you once relied on narrows quietly in the background of your life.
The years you knew and still stayed sit underneath this pattern. You sensed when something was draining you and you recognised the strain in your body, yet you told yourself it was manageable, necessary or temporary. Each time you remained in something that felt misaligned, whether that was a role, a relationship dynamic or a daily habit, you strengthened the habit of placing external expectation above internal signal. Over time you still sense what is happening in your body, but the reflex to act on it weakens because you have repeatedly chosen not to. When the nervous system has been asked to absorb repeated override over years, flexibility reduces even if competence remains intact, and while you may still be able to activate, perform and show up, the speed and completeness of the return begins to change. A conversation lingers in your body longer than it once did, a disrupted night of sleep carries into the following day and a week of pushing through compounds rather than resolving, so that recovery gradually becomes something that requires intention instead of happening automatically.
This is often the point at which self-doubt creeps in, because it can feel as though your resilience has diminished, when in reality the system is simply asking to be treated in accordance with the load it has been carrying. Slower recovery is not a sign that you are less capable; it is information about capacity and about the accumulated effect of years spent over riding your own signals.
Understanding this means you cannot continue overriding those signals without consequence, because a system that takes longer to recover needs different pacing, space between activating interactions, consistent nourishment and honesty about the moments you remain seated when your body is urging you to stand up and leave. It requires fewer internal bargains and more direct responses to what you feel in real time.
This does not require you to withdraw from your life or shrink your world, but it does require accuracy, because noticing the tightening in your shoulders before it becomes a headache, eating when hunger first registers and leaving the conversation when you feel the internal shift are all forms of responding in real time rather than negotiating afterwards. When you begin to treat your own cues as credible, recovery shortens gradually, activation softens more quickly and trust rebuilds through repetition rather than willpower.
The cost of override accumulates slowly, and the restoration of margin happens in the same way, through small, repeated decisions that honour what your body has been signalling all along.
If you recognise yourself in this progression, you can explore working together here
This article is part of the Resilience Series.
Start here: When resilience changes.