Are You Bad at Managing Stress, or Have You Stopped Noticing Yourself?
- 7 days ago
- 7 min read
Updated: 6 days ago
Amanda Neiley is the founder of StillGrounded Labs and creator of the Return to North™ framework. Drawing on her experience as an educator and school leader, she helps high-capacity women and leaders recognize overwhelm earlier, reconnect with what they need, and make more intentional choices before depletion becomes burnout.
There is a particular kind of woman I recognize almost immediately. She is capable, and people rely on her for it. She remembers the appointments, answers the emails, solves the problem, notices what everyone else needs, keeps the project moving, makes the decision, and somehow figures out what to do when the plan falls apart.
She might be a leader, a mother, a business owner, a caregiver, a professional, or several of those at once, and from the outside, she often looks like she's doing remarkably well. Sometimes she is. But there's something very capable women can become exceptionally good at, functioning while no longer noticing themselves.
I know because I've done it.
For much of my life, I thought strength meant being able to handle things. I loved goals and loved challenging myself. I trained for endurance events, built a career in education and leadership, raised children, kept pursuing my own education, and navigated some genuinely difficult personal seasons. When something was hard, my instinct was always the same, keep going, solve it, adjust, do what needs to be done.
There are wonderful qualities inside that kind of strength, and I still value ambition, responsibility, discipline, and resilience. The problem wasn't that I was strong. The problem came when strength stopped including the ability to hear myself.
When "I'm fine" becomes a habit
There have been seasons in my life when my calendar was full from morning until night. I was accomplishing things I genuinely cared about, showing up for people I loved, doing meaningful work, and yet somewhere inside all that functioning, I had stopped asking some very basic questions, "How am I actually doing? What's happening in my body? How much capacity do I have today? What do I need?"
Eventually, my body began answering those questions for me. I went through a period of significant physical depletion that forced me to stop and recover. At the time, I experienced that as something going wrong. Looking back, I see it differently. My body had been communicating for a long time. I simply hadn't learned to listen early enough.
That experience changed how I understood strength. I didn't need to become less ambitious. I needed a different relationship with my own capacity, and I needed to notice sooner. That became one of the beginnings of what I now call Return to North™.
What if stress is information, not failure?
One of the things that troubles me about some modern wellness messaging is the idea that calm is the goal. It can subtly create one more standard for women to fail at. You're already managing work, relationships, family responsibilities, deadlines, and the completely unpredictable nature of life, and now you're supposed to remain perfectly regulated while doing it?
That isn't realistic.
Life activates us. We become anxious, frustrated, tired, and overwhelmed. We move through grief, conflict, uncertainty, responsibility, and change. The goal isn't to eliminate those states. The goal is to become better at recognizing them.
That's why I began imagining our internal state as a compass.
The return to North compass
At the top of the compass is North. North doesn't mean blissful, stress-free, or perfectly calm. It simply means you're steady enough to choose. You have enough capacity to respond rather than react. You can think, connect, make decisions, and hear yourself.
But no human being stays North all day.
Sometimes we move East. East is activation. Your mind is racing. You're rushing even though no one is actually rushing you, and your shoulders creep up toward your ears. You replay conversations, check your phone repeatedly, and may be physically exhausted while still unable to switch your brain off.
Sometimes we move South. South is where emotions get bigger, frustration, fear, anger, sadness, and overwhelm. You might snap at someone and immediately realize your reaction was larger than the moment. Tears sit unexpectedly close to the surface.
Then there's West. West is depletion, flat, drained, disconnected. It's the state where you catch yourself thinking, "Please don't ask me for one more thing."
Here's the part I believe we need to talk about more, you can still be extremely functional in West. You can attend meetings, answer emails, parent, lead, organize, smile, and help everyone else. That's exactly why depletion is so hard to recognize in highly capable people. Everyone around you may think you're fine. You may even think you're fine because you're still getting things done.
None of these directions are bad
This may be the most important part of the framework. East is not failure. South is not failure. West is not failure. They're information. Your internal state is giving you clues, and instead of asking, "What's wrong with me?" we can learn to ask, "Where am I right now?" and then, "What might I need?" That shift sounds deceptively small, but judgment and curiosity take us in completely different directions.
If I notice I'm irritable and immediately tell myself I shouldn't feel like this, I've added another layer of pressure. If I get curious instead, I have somewhere to go. Maybe I haven't eaten, maybe I've had six difficult conversations back to back, maybe I need movement, ten quiet minutes, sleep, or help. Maybe something genuinely hurt me. Maybe I've said yes too many times.
The answer isn't always a three-minute breathing exercise. Sometimes what you need is a boundary. Sometimes you need support. Sometimes the problem isn't your ability to cope with an unsustainable situation. Sometimes the situation needs to change.
The question is not always "How do I get back to North?"
This is where I want Return to North to be different. When you notice you're struggling, the immediate goal doesn't have to be to get calm. If you're depleted, you don't necessarily need another productivity strategy. If you're overwhelmed, you don't need to shame yourself into becoming more resilient. If you're angry, that emotion might be telling you something important.
Before fixing anything, notice, "Where am I? What do I need?"
There are days when you won't be able to return to North immediately, and that's okay. Sometimes a small choice simply changes the direction you're traveling, three minutes outside, a glass of water, movement between meetings, calling someone, canceling something, closing the laptop, eating lunch before 3 p.m., taking five slow breaths before you walk through the front door, saying, "I can't take that on right now," or going to bed instead of pushing through.
Small choices interrupt momentum. Over time, those choices build something far more valuable than constant calm, they build self-trust.
Returning, not arriving
North isn't a destination, and that idea matters enormously to me. We aren't supposed to become perfectly regulated people who never feel anxious, depleted, or emotional again. A compass is useful precisely because we move. Life changes, we drift, something happens, we orient again, we adjust, and eventually we drift again. That's not failure. That's being human.
Progress might mean that ten years ago, you lived in an activated state for three weeks before realizing something was wrong. Today, maybe you recognize it after three days. Eventually, you might notice it after three hours. Sometimes you'll catch yourself in the moment and think, "There I am, I'm moving East."
That's awareness. Awareness creates choice.
A two-question practice
For the next week, try asking yourself two questions three times a day, "Where am I right now?" and "What do I need?"
You don't even need to act on the answer right away. Simply notice. You may start to see patterns. Maybe you begin most mornings North and drift East by lunchtime. Maybe you operate in East all workday and crash into West the moment you walk in the door. Maybe certain environments reliably pull you South, or you notice you feel more like yourself outdoors, after movement, when you've slept enough, or around certain people.
This isn't data to judge. It's information to use, because you can't respond to something you haven't noticed.
Strong women need to be included in their own lives
There is something I want capable women to hear clearly, you do not have to become less strong. You don't have to stop pursuing meaningful goals, and you don't have to abandon ambition, leadership, motherhood, business, or whatever matters deeply to you.
But you do need to exist inside the life you're working so hard to create.
You can be capable and tired. Grateful and overwhelmed. Strong and in need of support. You can love your work and still need boundaries around it. You can adore your family and still need an hour when nobody needs you. Two things can be true at once.
For years, strength meant seeing how much I could carry. Now I think strength includes knowing what I'm carrying, noticing what it's costing me, and trusting myself enough to decide what should happen next.
Sometimes the journey back to yourself begins much earlier than we imagine, not with a dramatic life change, not with a retreat, not with becoming a completely different person. Sometimes it begins with one quiet question, "Where am I right now?" And then another, "What do I need?"
Because you don't need to know the whole way back. You just need to know where you are before you can begin finding your way North.
Read more from Amanda L. Neiley
Amanda L. Neiley, Founder of StillGrounded Labs & Creator of Return to North™ framework
Amanda Neiley is the founder of StillGrounded Labs and creator of the Return to North™ framework. Drawing on more than two decades in education and leadership, along with her own experience of endurance training, burnout, recovery, and caregiving, she helps high-capacity women recognize what they need before stress becomes depletion. Her work focuses on self-trust, sustainable leadership, boundaries, and practical tools that help women care for themselves without stepping away from the lives and ambitions that matter to them.
