The Weight We Carry Quietly

What happens when the weight you’re carrying doesn’t have a name? In this episode, Dr. Lisa Carter-Bawa gets personal about the exhaustion that hides behind high performance—the low hum of too much, for too long, with no clear endpoint. Drawing on her work as a behavioral scientist and her own experience navigating an impossible spring, Lisa explores why we stigmatize our own distress, what it means to be connected but not truly held, and what it looks like to set the weight down—not to abandon it, but to finally see it clearly. If you’ve been carrying something quietly, this one is for you.

Soul to Soul with Dr. Lisa Carter-Bawa is a podcast for anyone who is in the middle of becoming — doing the inner work, asking the harder questions, and learning to live from the inside out.

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Not role to role. Soul to soul.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

You're listening to Soul to Soul with Lisa Carter Boba, where science meets soul. Hey everybody. Welcome back to Soul to Soul. I'm Dr. Lisa Carter Bawa, and I'm glad you're here. I want to start today a little differently. I'm not going to open with a quote or a framework or a teaching point. I'm going to open with the truth. I am tired. Not the kind of tire that a weekend fixes. Not the kind that sleep solves, though Lord knows sleep would help. I'm talking about the kind of tire that lives underneath everything else. The kind you carry so long you almost forgot it's there. Until one morning you're standing in your kitchen looking at a to-do list that seems to have its own gravitational pull, and you think, when did all of this become so heavy? I'll tell you where I've been. I have a major federal grant application due, then another, then a manuscript revision, then a course I built that's scaling faster than I expected, which is a beautiful problem, but it's still there. I'm in the middle of a residential move, boxes everywhere, decisions about what stays and what goes. My longtime assistant moved on after a personal crisis, and the work that person held, it just quietly redistributed itself onto my shoulders. I'm running an institute and I'm showing up for community. I'm still writing these Monday essays. I'm still trying to be a good wife and a mother and stepmother and a decent dog mom to a 27-pound mini golden doodle who I promise you has no idea any of this is happening. And through all of that, here's the thing I almost missed. I never stopped to ask myself how I was doing. I just kept going. Because that's what we do, right? We keep going. I'm guessing some of you know exactly what I'm talking about. So today's episode is called The Weight We Carry Quietly. And I chose that title because I think there's a particular kind of exhaustion that doesn't announce itself. It's not dramatic, it's not a breakdown, it's the low hum of too much for too long with no clear endpoint. And right now, a whole lot of people are living in that space. The data tells us that over half of Americans say they're anxious about the future. Nearly 60% are anxious about finances. Two-thirds are anxious about what's happening in the world. But here's what the data doesn't fully capture: the texture of what people are feeling. The brain fog, the emotional flatness, the scrolling at midnight, not because you want to, but because your nervous system just cannot settle. The going through the motions of your day while something inside you feels muted. As a behavioral scientist, I have a name for this. It's called chronic anticipatory stress. The state your body enters when uncertainty becomes the ambient condition of your life. Your nervous system never fully calms down. You're not in crisis, you're not in danger, but you're never quite at rest either. You're in a constant state of bracing. And what I want you to hear, what I need you to hear, is that this is not a personal failing. This is a rational response to an irrational amount of demand. The weight is real. The world is genuinely asking more of us than it used to. And the fact that you're feeling it, that doesn't mean that you're weak. It means you're paying attention. Now, here's where my work in stigma comes in. And I promise you, I'm not going to give you a lecture, but I want to make a connection because I think it matters. I've spent a good part of my career studying how stigma operates as a force in people's health. How the labels we attach to people, the labels that people attach to themselves shape whether they seek care, whether they feel worthy of care, whether they even name what they're going through. I've seen this in lung cancer where people who smoke are reduced to a single behavior and then blamed for their own illness, where the word smoker becomes an identity instead of a description, and that identity carries so much judgment that people delay screening, avoid doctors, and suffer in silence sometimes. And I've started to notice that we do something very similar to ourselves with our own exhaustion. Think about the language. When you're overwhelmed, what do you say to yourself? I should be handling this better. Other people manage. What's wrong with me? I'm not doing enough. I'm not enough. We take the weight, this weight that the whole world is carrying, and we treat it as evidence of personal inadequacy. We stigmatize our own distress. We turn I'm carrying too much into I'm not strong enough. And then we do what people always do under stigma. We hide it. We perform wellness. We say, I'm fine, with a smile that could win an award. I've done this. I've sat in meetings, running on fumes, and performed competence so convincingly that no one thought to ask if I was okay. And I'm trained in this. I study this for a living, which tells you just how deep this goes. So the same way I insist in my research and my teaching and every room I walk into, that we say people who smoke instead of smoker, because language shapes how we see humanity, I want to insist on something here too. Can we stop calling ourselves overwhelmed like it's a character flaw? Can we start recognizing that feeling the weight of this moment is not a dysfunction, it's awareness. And I think part of what makes the weight so heavy right now is that we're carrying it with less support than we realize. We are more connected than any other generation in human history. We have phones that buzz all day, inboxes that never empty, social media that lets us witness the highlight reels of a thousand lives before breakfast, and yet loneliness is at epidemic levels. Fifteen percent of men now say they have zero close friends. Not a few, zero. People are literally turning to artificial intelligence for emotional support because they don't have a human being to talk to. There's a world of difference between those two things. Connection is a Wi-Fi signal. Being held is someone sitting with you in your mess and saying, I see you. I'm not going anywhere. I think about this in my own life. I'm blessed, genuinely blessed to have a partner who holds space for me. There are nights when I come home from work and Rowitt doesn't try to fix anything. He doesn't offer a solution. He just says, tell me. And sometimes that's the only thing that gets me through. Not advice, not a plan, just someone who is willing to sit in it with me. But I also know what it's like to not have that. I haven't always had this. There were seasons in my life when I was the one holding everything together, building a career, raising children, navigating hard transitions, and the only person I debriefed with at the end of the day was myself. I remember nights where I'd sit in my car in the driveway for an extra five minutes before going inside, not because anything was wrong in there, but because the car was the only place no one needed anything from me. That was my version of rest. Five minutes of silence in a parked car. I know what it's like to be the strong one, the capable one, the one everyone leans on, and to feel the quiet terror of wondering who you get to lean on. I know what it's like to hear, I don't know how you do it all, and think, neither do I, and I'm not sure I am. So when I tell you that having someone who says, tell me, changed my life, I don't mean that lightly. I mean it the way someone means it when they've been thirsty for a long time and finally finds water. And if you don't have that person yet, if you're still in the parked car season, I want you to hear me. That doesn't mean you're unworthy of being held. It means the world has not given you what you deserve yet. If that resonates with you, I want you to know that weight you're carrying, it was never meant to be carried alone. So what do we do? I'm not going to give you five tips for managing stress. You've heard those, you know them. You're probably already doing most of them and still feel exhausted. That's because the issue is not a lack of coping skills. The issue is a world that demands more than any coping skill can ever cover. But here's what I found in the research and in my own life that actually makes a difference. I think the first thing, and maybe the hardest, is to name it out loud to someone. Not on social media, not in a journal, though journaling helps too. I mean to another human being, face to face or voice-to-voice. Say the words, I'm caring a lot right now, and I'm tired. I said that sentence to Road about three weeks ago. I hadn't planned to. I just said it. I'm caring a lot, and I'm tired. And I watched his face change, not to worry, to recognition. Like he'd been waiting for me to say it. That sentence is not weakness. That sentence is the beginning of honesty. And honesty is the only ground from which real healing grows. The other thing I'm learning, and I say learning because I have not mastered this, is to stop performing wellness. I mean this with love. Stop saying I'm good when you're not. Stop curating the version of yourself that other people are comfortable with. I was at a conference recently and someone said to me, You always seem so put together. And I smiled and said, Thank you. But what I wanted to say was, you're seeing the performance. You're not seeing the 3 a.m. The people who truly love you, they don't need your performance. They need your presence. And you need theirs. And then there's this one. And I almost don't want to say it because it goes against every instinct I have as a high achiever. Let something be imperfect. Let the email wait. Let the house be half unpacked. And yes, I am literally saying this as someone with moving boxes stacked in my living room right now. Let the deadline be the deadline without making it a referendum on your worth. I want everything to be excellent. I want to show up fully formed. And the truth is, sometimes showing up imperfect is the most courageous thing you can do. Sometimes good enough is not settling. It's survival. And survival is not a small thing when the load is this heavy. And the last thing, and this is the one that surprises me the most, is to protect the small anchors. I didn't used to understand this. I used to think resilience was about big moves, grand strategy, a new system, a new plan. But what I've found is that resilience lives in the small things you don't let go of. For me, it's the Soul-to-Soul Monday essays. Even in my most compressed weeks, I write it. Not because anyone is grading me, but because the act of putting words to my experience is how I stay tethered to myself. It's the early morning before the inbox takes over. It's Tolly climbing into my lap when I'm on my couch with my laptop in my lap, completely unimpressed by my deadlines, just warm and present and needing nothing from me but my hand on her back. It's Rowitt making me an amaretta sour in the evening without being asked. Not because I need the amaretta sour, even though it is my favorite drink, but because he saw me. These are not small things. These are the things that remind your nervous system that not everything is a demand. Some things are just grace. So I want to close with this. If you are listening to this and you are carrying something heavy, something you haven't named, something you've been performing your way through, something that sits in your chest when you wake up at three in the morning, I want you to hear me say, I see you. You are not failing. You are not behind. You are not too much or not enough. You are a human being living in a time that asks an extraordinary amount of its people. And the fact that you feel it, that's not your weakness. That's your humanity. So here's my invitation, not my advice, my invitation. What would it feel like to set down the weight for just a moment? Not to abandon it, not to pretend it isn't there, but to set it down beside you. Look at it honestly and say, yes, this is heavy, and I'm still here. You are still here, and that matters more than you know. This has been Soul to Soul. I'm Dr. Lisa Carterbawa. Thank you for being here. Thank you for listening. And if something in today's episode resonated, do me a favor. Don't just save it. Share it with someone who needs to hear it. Because sometimes the most powerful thing we can do for another person is say, you're not alone in this. Until next time, take care of your soul.