Two Questions That Changed How I Spend Myself

Why "can I do this" was never the right question, and what to ask instead

For years, the only question I ever asked myself before agreeing to something was whether I could do it. If I could find a place for something on my calendar, I assumed that meant I had time for it. If something needed doing and I was capable of doing it, I did it, without a second thought about what saying yes was going to cost me. The truth is that the answer to that question was almost always yes. I am a capable person. Most of the people I work with are capable people. And that turns out to be exactly the problem, because whether you can do something tells you almost nothing about whether you have the internal resources to do it without pushing past limits your body has been quietly trying to protect.

I never considered, in all those years of deciding this way, that every single yes was being paid for out of an account with a finite amount in it. This is how capable people end up depleted without ever noticing it happening. We have enough sheer strength and willpower to keep saying yes long after we no longer have the capacity to fund those yeses honestly. The strength doesn't run out first. The resources do, quietly, underneath a life that still looks fine from the outside.

Whether you can do something tells you almost nothing about whether you have the resources to do it without pushing past your own healthy limits.

What changed for me wasn't becoming better at saying no, at least not directly. It was retiring the question that had been running my decisions for years and replacing it with two new ones. The first is simple to state and harder to sit with: do I have the capacity for this? Notice this isn't the same question as "can I do this." There are plenty of things I'm capable of doing that I don't have the capacity to do on a given day. When I ask whether I can do something, I'm measuring myself against my abilities, something I've already proven to myself a thousand times over. When I ask whether I have the capacity, I must consider something different, my internal account, what's already been spent today, what else is still coming, and what this particular thing is going to cost me. Some things cost very little. Others cost far more than the space they occupy on a calendar would suggest.

That distinction, between time and capacity, was one I hadn't understood for most of my life. You can have a wide-open hour and still not have the capacity for whatever someone is asking you to put into it. You can also have a completely full day and discover you still have capacity for something you love. I stopped looking at my calendar and counting available hours. I started checking in with myself instead, considering what I had available rather than what the schedule technically allowed.

The second question took longer for me to sit with honestly, because it asks something most of us were never taught to ask. Have I spent enough of my capacity on me and on the things that give me more capacity? Here's what so many of us do once we start learning about capacity at all. Say you wake up with a hundred dollars of it. We become more efficient at spending every last dollar on everything and everyone else and quietly assume that whatever's left at the end of the week, if anything is, is what we'll get. That's a familiar move for a lot of people, myself included for a long time. You look at what you have and think, good, now let me figure out how to accomplish everything I need to with the entire hundred. But you live here too. You deserve more than whatever might be left over after a gruelling week, and if you're honest about how often anything is left over, the answer is rarely encouraging.

Rest, movement, time alone, none of these are rewards I earn after spending my capacity responsibly on everything else. They're part of how I have the capacity in the first place.

Part of learning to work with capacity has meant understanding that I don't only ask what I have available to spend. I also ask whether I've spent enough on the person generating that capacity in the first place, which is me. Sometimes that means movement. Sometimes it means eating something that supports me instead of realizing at three in the afternoon that I've been running on nothing. Sometimes it's twenty minutes outside, or time alone, or a walk, or something creative, or reading, or simply going to bed early enough to recover, or enough space between commitments that my nervous system isn't being asked to spend from a reserve that's already thin. None of this is a reward I earn once I've responsibly spent every other dollar first. It's part of how the account gets replenished at all.

If you're used to putting yourself last, there's often a part of you that hears this and immediately starts doing the math on everyone else's behalf. But my kids need me. My job needs me. There are things I truly can't stop doing. I understand that instinct completely, and I'm not suggesting your capacity only belongs to you, or that you should stop spending it on the people and things that matter. I still spend a tremendous amount of mine on others, and I want to keep doing that. The real question isn't whether to stop giving. It's whether I'm included in the counting at all, because if I continually spend from the account without ever investing in what restores it, there's eventually less and less available for anyone, including the people I'm trying so hard to show up for.

I need capacity to be the mother, wife, friend, practitioner, lawyer, writer, and human being I want to be. I need it to create things, to have ideas, to deal with hard things when they show up uninvited, to enjoy my life instead of just moving through it, and to be present for the people I love instead of just occupying the same room as them. That's the whole reason any of this matters. It was never about managing your energy better for its own sake, like some kind of productivity hack. It's about having enough of yourself left over for the real purpose of your life, not just the maintenance of it.

None of this means the answer becomes no more often. Sometimes it's still yes, I just organize the day differently around what it will cost. Sometimes I realize I have plenty of open time but not the internal resources, which changes how I approach something, not necessarily whether I do it at all. These two questions were never about making the perfect decision. They're about finally including a piece of information I'd ignored for most of my life.

For a long time, I spent everything I had just getting through my life, the tasks, the responsibilities, the list, and assumed that whatever was left over was what I'd have available for the parts that were supposed to feel good. There's rarely anything left over after getting through. Getting through and living were never the same job, even though I spent years running them together. This isn't a case for doing less with your life. I still have things I care about that cost a great deal of capacity, and they're worth it. That's part of the entire point of asking these questions in the first place. I want capacity available for the things that matter, instead of discovering, after spending myself into the ground on things that didn't, that there's nothing left for the ones that did. The goal was never to shrink your life down to whatever you can manage without depleting yourself. It's to have more of yourself available to live the life you already have, not just to get through it.

The two questions in this piece, do I have the capacity, and have I spent enough on myself, are a practical entry point into something I write about at length in You're Not the Problem: the difference between managing your life from the outside in, by what needs to get done, and managing it from the inside out, by what your system truly has available. If retiring the question "can I do this" feels like it would change something for you, the book walks through why that shift matters far beyond any single decision.

Lori Montry is a somatic healing practitioner, author of You're Not the Problem, and the creator of the Freedom Framework, a nervous system-based roadmap for sustainable behavior change. She helps people who feel stuck in stress, overwhelm, or self-sabotage understand the survival patterns driving their choices so they can build the safety, capacity, and clarity needed to take aligned action in every area of their lives.