It’s Not You—It’s the System: Why Capacity Collapse Keeps Happening

“Maybe you’re not broken. Maybe you’re just trying to survive a world that our human body wasn’t built for.”

Last week’s article got a lot of attention, and I think it’s because it really resonated not just as an idea or concept but as an embodied experience. An experience that we felt in our bodies before we could consciously identify, name, or make sense of it with our minds.

One reader in particular reached out with an incredibly insightful and important question: 

Is it that people’s capacity just needs to be restored or did people even have sufficient capacity to begin with?

The capacity collapse I referred to in the last article is about more than individual people experiencing capacity depletion.

The capacity collapse is a collective collapse of our societal systems and their inability to sufficiently support the needs of human beings in the world today.

We are collectively discovering that our current capacity is insufficient for the challenges we created in our modern technologically advanced world.

What do I mean? 

It’s not simply that our systems have been depleted, and we need only restore them to a previous state of wholeness. It's that the capacity to thrive in today’s world never existed.

We’re experiencing the disconnect between the design of our systems (individually and collectively), and the demands we've placed upon them.

It’s not about how we rearrange our jar of life to be more efficient or how we remove things from it to get capacity back within it, it’s about getting a bigger jar.

It’s answering the question: 

How do we expand our capacity container to hold the challenges created by constant change, trapped traumas, chronic stress, and the increasing crises we are encountering in our lives and world?

Human Beings Weren’t Designed for This

As human beings, we have not evolved to thrive in the modern-day world. Not only do we lack sufficient capacity to navigate the challenges of today’s world, but our innate unconscious human survival states are making it even worse.

The very unconscious patterns that are meant to protect us from pain and predators are perpetuating the problems.

The human body's primary objective is survival and to keep us alive they prioritize: 

• Ensuring we have sufficient resources (food, shelter, connection). Human babies (unlike other animals) cannot care for themselves, which is why they cry to get their needs met - to be fed, protected, and loved. Studies show, if babies do not get their needs met, they stop crying and it creates significant long-term damage.
• Avoiding predators and threats to our safety. Our bodies have evolved to unconsciously detect threats or potentially painful experiences and have patterns to protect us from them. 

The human body's autonomic nervous system states help us survive by automatically and unconsciously shifting our bodies into the states deemed most likely to help us based upon our individual and collective past experiences. 

When faced with a threat of pain or predator, the stress activates neural connections sending messages of fight, flight, freeze, or fawn. For example:

• Fight: A predator must be fought off or it might kill or harm us.
• Flight: If a predator is stronger than us, running away is more likely to keep us safe. 
• Freeze: If a situation is severe enough, shutting down our system to either convince the predator we are already dead (not a threat to them) or protect us from feeling the pain of an attack is the best option.
• Fawn: As we evolved, we discovered that sometimes the best way to survive is to please or appease the potential threat or predator. 

When we experience the stresses of today’s world, these survival states get triggered and past patterns of protection are activated like arguing, blaming or deflecting (fight), disassociation or numbing (freeze), isolation or avoidance (flight), or people pleasing or overworking (fawn).

Do any of these patterns of protection sound familiar to you?

These very strategies meant to help us survive are exacerbating the problem, making it worse, not better. We utilize these coping strategies that further perpetuate the collapse of our capacity causing us to have even less of it.

• Our bodies and nervous systems were wired for short bursts of threat, not chronic stress.
• Our survival states require stress to be moved through and out of the body, not get stuck as we sit and scroll through screens or social media.
• Our brains evolved for deep focus and relational connection—not multitasking, information overload, and 24/7 productivity.
• Our hearts were built for connection and belonging, not for suppressing and ignoring our emotions, isolating from one another with online interactions, division, and polarization.
• Our guts were meant to mobilize us for safety and authenticity—not for being drowned out by noise and doubt, freezing under pressure, dissociating from danger, or numbing what we feel with comfort foods and quick fixes.

Our Systems Keep Us Stuck in Cycles of Crashing

A few years ago, I could hold very little stress before my body would collapse causing me to be sick and unable to get out of bed for days. 

Despite knowing the signs of and contributing factors for burnout, my past patterns of performance kept me in a continuous cycle of crashing from insufficient capacity.

The many years of stuck stress and trapped traumas in my body became too much for it to carry while navigating the pandemic with twin babies. Each time I recovered and reengaged in my normal ways of being, working, and living, I would quickly find myself crashing yet again.

The issue isn’t individual failure—it’s that our systems are built to keep us in unsustainable loops that continually lead to collapse.

The truth is: many—if not most—of today’s people-related practices in organizations, leadership, parenting, education, and even personal development are rooted in survival responses like fight, flight, freeze, or fawn.

Our systems create self-reinforcing cycles that cause people to keep crashing:

Performance-Driven Systems Prioritize Output Over Well-Being: 

• The system rewards the appearance of productivity, not actual effort or outcomes. 
• Success is doing more, faster, and better often at the expense of long-term sustainability. 
• Rest, regulation, and recovery are only allowed after the collapse, never in advance.

The Result: people override their limits again and again—until the crash forces a stop.

Survival States Become Institutionalized Norms

• Fight = Hustle culture, micromanagement, toxic accountability, blame and shame.
• Flight = Constant busyness, distraction, avoidance of deep work or emotion, isolate and avoid.
• Freeze = Numbness, disengagement, “just get through the day” mentality, disengagement.
• Fawn = Over-pleasing, saying yes to everything, burnout from boundary collapse.

These states become normalized and even rewarded—so people stay constantly dysregulated without realizing it.

Feedback Loops are Broken

In true ecosystems, feedback allows for adjustment and recovery. But in our current systems:

• We ignore or punish emotional signals (“suck it up” culture).
• Metrics replace meaning. 
• There’s no pause to reflect, reassess, or repair.

Result: People keep pushing and repeating the same patterns—even when they’re not working.

The Fixes are More of the Same

When things start breaking down, we reach for the latest performance trend:

• Time management or productivity hacks
• Webinars on grit, resilience, or wellness
• Incentives or punishments

These are control-based solutions applied to a complex, living problem. 

Fear-Based Motivation Keeps Us Compliant

• Fear of falling behind, being seen as weak, or losing income or identity keeps people stuck.
• Systems are designed to extract energy, not replenish it. Slowing down feels like failure.
• Even rest becomes strategic (“so I can perform better”), rather than restorative. 
• People internalize: “I’m only valuable if I’m productive." Work becomes self-worth. 

Result: The system doesn’t need to enforce burnout—we do it to ourselves, conditioned by culture. We simply recharge enough to repeat the cycle.

The Crash Isn’t a Personal Failure. It’s the System Working as Designed.

Evolving & Expanding Human Capacity

Now that we’re finally waking up to this new challenge, we can begin to change it.

How do we build the capacity that we need to navigate the world that we built and created around us? Specifically, how do we balance our bodies and rewire our brains to expand our capacity and tolerance for navigating today’s world?

I’ve spent the last three years studying this phenomenon and researching strategies for successfully solving it. We must evolve and grow our bodies and brains such that we possess more capacity than we ever had in the past.

The cure to this challenge exists but it requires we have the courage to honestly evaluate and redesign our systems to support the bodies and brains of human beings.

I have worked to build my capacity, and as I do my window of tolerance (for our stressful world) is expanding. As I implement better ways of living and working, my capacity expands. 

I am becoming and being better at recognizing messages from the neural connections in my brains and body telling me:

• I need to rest now.
• I need to nourish now.
• I need to regulate now.
• I need to release stuck stress.
• I need to feel my feelings.
• I need to process painful, shocking, or traumatic experiences.

Over time, with more capacity, I no longer get sick as often and when I do, I recover more quickly. 

Reflection Questions:

1. How has your body sent signals to stop? When haven't you listened and what happened?
2. Which survival state do you most frequently operate from—fight, flight, freeze, or fawn? How has it been rewarded by your environment or experiences?
3. What part of your daily life or system feels most out of sync with your nervous system’s needs?
4. Have you internalized the belief that your value comes from productivity? How has this shaped your identity and your ways of thinking, feeling, or behaving?
5. What would it look like to expand—not shrink—your capacity for life’s challenges?

Conclusion

This isn’t about doing less. It’s about becoming and being more whole. 

We can’t go back to how things were—not because we’ve fallen too far, but because we were never truly well-supported to begin with.

What is the good news? 

We can evolve.

We can build capacity—not as a hustle, but as a human birthright.

But to do that, we need to go deeper. For example, we might consider:

• Rebuilding systems on rhythms, not routines.
• Measuring sustainability, not just productivity.
• Normalizing nervous system literacy in leadership.
• Designing cultures for regulation, restoration, and relational safety.
• Using capacity—not compliance—as the cornerstone of performance.

What if the real work of our time isn’t doing more, faster—but learning how to live and work in ways that honor what it means to be fully human?

Ready to learn more? 

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