Reviewed and Updated, September 2026 by Iris Hogan, MSW, LICSW

Why So Many Women Miss the Early Signs of Stress

She had already survived a blowout diaper, a toddler meltdown, and the usual morning scramble to get everyone out of the house.

She hadn’t really eaten breakfast. Her shoulders were somewhere near her ears, and a headache had started behind her eyes.

But everyone made it to daycare.

She was doing fine.

She stopped for coffee on the way to work. The barista handed her the cup, smiled, and asked a completely ordinary question:

“How are you today?”

And she burst into tears.

Not a few discreet tears either. The kind where you suddenly realize you are crying in a coffee shop and have absolutely no idea why.

The barista hadn’t done anything wrong. The coffee certainly wasn’t the problem.

The tears seemed to come completely out of left field.

But did they?

I work with women who have busy lives and balance a lot. They’re bright, insightful, and often remarkably self-aware. And still, they’re sometimes genuinely surprised by how much stress they’ve been carrying without realizing it.

The signs may have been there long before they consciously noticed them.

That is what interests me about emotions that seem to come out of nowhere.

Sometimes the better question isn’t Why am I suddenly feeling this way?

It’s:

What was happening before I noticed the emotion?

But I Know Myself Pretty Well

Many of the women I work with know themselves very well.

They can tell you what they’re worried about. They recognize their triggers and understand where some of their patterns come from. They’ve read the books, listened to the podcasts, and thought carefully about themselves.

And yet I regularly hear some version of:

“I didn’t realize how overwhelmed I was until I completely fell apart.”

There’s an interesting distinction here.

Being self-aware isn’t necessarily the same as noticing what’s happening in your body.

You can understand perfectly well that this is a stressful week and still not notice that you’ve been running on very little food, barely taking a full breath, or moving through the entire day as though everything is urgent.

That doesn’t mean you aren’t self-aware.

It means there is more than one way of knowing what’s happening with you.

For women whose anxiety tends to hide behind competence and getting things done, I wrote more about this in High-Functioning Anxiety in Women: Calm Outside, Chaos Inside.

So What Happened in the Coffee Shop?

There is actually a word for our ability to sense and make sense of what’s happening inside our bodies: interoception.

It includes things like noticing hunger, fatigue, tension, breathing, heartbeat, temperature, pain, and other internal sensations.

Interoception isn’t simply something you’re either good or bad at. We can be very tuned in to certain sensations and surprisingly unaware of others. Anxiety can make this especially complicated. Some people become intensely focused on physical sensations when they’re anxious. And at other times, especially when we’re focused on getting through a busy day, quieter signals may not get much of our attention.

Think back to the woman in the coffee shop.

Her tears may have surprised her, but there had been signs that morning.

The headache. The tension. The empty stomach.

Those weren’t proof that she was about to cry.

They were information.

And that distinction matters.

The goal isn’t to start monitoring your body for evidence that you’re about to fall apart. It’s simply to become a little more curious about the information that’s already there.

Which brings me to a very small experiment.

The 60-Second Body Check

This doesn’t require twenty minutes of meditation or a perfectly quiet room. You don’t even have to feel calm.

Give yourself sixty seconds.

Once or twice a day, stop whatever you’re doing and check in with a few places where stress often leaves clues.

One important caveat: paying close attention to body sensations isn’t comfortable or helpful for everyone. If focusing on your breathing, heartbeat, or another sensation makes you more anxious, you don’t have to stay with it. This isn’t an exercise in forcing yourself to notice everything.

1. What Is My Jaw Doing?

Are your teeth touching? Is your jaw clenched? Are your lips pressed together?

You don’t have to relax it.

Just notice.

2. Where Are My Shoulders?

Are they relaxed, or have they somehow migrated toward your ears?

Again, you don’t have to fix anything. You’re gathering information.

3. How Am I Breathing?

Don’t change your breathing yet. Just notice it.

Is it comfortable? Shallow? Are you holding your breath without realizing it?

You may discover you’ve been answering emails for the last twenty minutes while barely breathing.

4. When Did I Last Eat?

This one sounds almost too obvious.

And yet plenty of competent, intelligent adults discover at 3:30 in the afternoon that they’ve been increasingly anxious and irritable while expecting their brain to function on coffee and whatever they ate seven hours ago.

Sometimes the information your body is giving you is remarkably ordinary.

You need lunch.

5. What Is My Energy Level?

Not your productivity level.

Your energy level.

They’re not the same thing.

You can be getting an impressive amount done and still be exhausted. If you’ve ever found yourself cleaning the kitchen at 10:30 at night while simultaneously thinking, I am so tired, you probably know what I mean.

Being able to keep going doesn’t necessarily mean you have energy left.

Sometimes it just means you’re very good at keeping going.

If that sounds familiar, you may also recognize yourself in Why It’s So Hard to Stop Overfunctioning — Even When You’re Exhausted.

6. Do I Feel an Urge to Push Through?

Ask yourself:

What would happen if I stopped right now?

Maybe the answer is, Nothing. I could take ten minutes.

Or perhaps your brain immediately says you don’t have time, you just need to finish this one thing, or you’ll rest when you’re done.

And then there’s the ever-popular:

If I don’t do it, who will?

Sometimes things genuinely do need to get done. The point isn’t that you should always stop.

But your reaction to the idea of stopping can be interesting information.

The Goal Isn’t to Make Yourself Relax

This is important, because otherwise a body check can become one more self-improvement assignment.

Apparently I’m stressed. Now I need to calm down.

Not necessarily.

The first goal is simply to notice.

And with time, you may begin to recognize your own particular pattern earlier.

For one woman, it might be realizing that she starts rushing when nobody is actually rushing her. For someone else, every perfectly reasonable request suddenly feels like one request too many. Or maybe you find yourself scrolling on your phone, not because anything on it is particularly interesting, but because you don’t want one more person to need something from you.

Those moments can be clues too.

And sometimes you stop and check in and discover you’re actually doing pretty well.

That’s useful information too.

And if you finally do stop but discover that relaxing itself feels strangely difficult, I wrote about that experience in Why Rest Feels Hard Even When You’re Bone-Deep Exhausted.

Sometimes It Really Does Feel Sudden

Of course, we don’t always catch the signs early.

Sometimes the first thing we notice is the emotion itself.

You snap at your partner over a perfectly reasonable question. You start crying in the car. Something small goes wrong at work and suddenly you feel like you absolutely cannot handle one more thing.

And if you’re usually pretty good at understanding your emotions, that can be especially confusing.

Where did that come from?

This is when I think it can be helpful to look backward instead of immediately trying to explain the emotion.

What was happening before I noticed it?

Not just what happened five minutes ago.

What has the day been like? How much have you been juggling? When did you last eat? How did you sleep? Have you been rushing all day? Has something been worrying you in the background while you were busy doing everything else?

You may discover that the emotion wasn’t quite as sudden as it felt.

The woman in the coffee shop didn’t walk in thinking, I’m about to burst into tears.

She thought she was doing fine.

And in one sense, she was. She had handled the morning. The kids were where they needed to be. She had kept going.

But functioning and feeling okay aren’t always the same thing.

Sometimes we don’t realize how close we are to our limit until something very small opens the door.

What “I’m Fine” Can Hide

Once you start paying attention, you may begin to recognize your own pattern.

Maybe “I’m fine” reliably appears about two hours before you become completely intolerant of everyone in your house.

Maybe you start waking up at 3 a.m. when you’ve taken on too much. Or everything begins to feel urgent. You stop taking breaks. Small decisions become irritating. You notice yourself wanting everyone to please stop talking to you for five minutes.

None of these signs means you’re doing something wrong.

They’re information.

And recognizing them a little earlier gives you more choices about what to do next.

Sometimes the answer is embarrassingly basic. You need food. You need ten minutes when nobody is asking you for anything. Something on today’s list can wait until tomorrow.

Other times, there isn’t an easy way to reduce the stress. You still have to pick up the child, finish the workday, care for the aging parent, deal with the medical problem, or simply get through a difficult season.

Noticing doesn’t magically make any of that disappear.

But it may give you a chance to respond to yourself before your body has to start shouting.

A 60-Second Experiment

Try it once today.

Stop for a minute and notice what is happening in your body. Your jaw. Your shoulders. Your breathing. Your stomach. Your energy.

Then ask yourself:

Do I feel an urge to push through right now?

And maybe one more question:

What was happening before I noticed how I was feeling?

That’s it.

You don’t have to fix what you notice. Sometimes you may realize you need lunch, a break, or to let something wait until tomorrow. Other times there may be absolutely nothing you can change about the demands of the day.

You’re simply getting the information a little sooner.

Because the goal isn’t to become someone who gets even better at holding everything together and never getting overwhelmed.

It’s to get a little better at recognizing yourself on the way there.

If stress, anxiety, or overwhelm have become so familiar that you don’t always recognize them until you’re already at your limit, anxiety therapy for women can help you understand your patterns and notice your needs earlier. Not so you can become better at carrying an impossible amount, but so you have more choice about how you respond to yourself.

Until we meet again — breathe gently, walk slowly, and treat yourself with kindness.

— Iris

Research & Sources

Chen WG, et al. (2021). The Emerging Science of Interoception: Sensing, Integrating, Interpreting, and Regulating Signals within the Self. Trends in Neurosciences, 44(1), 3–16.
Read the article on PubMed

This review provides a broader scientific framework for understanding interoception as the sensing, interpretation, integration, and regulation of signals from within the body.

Clemente R, Murphy A, Murphy J. (2024). The relationship between self-reported interoception and anxiety: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 167, 105923.
Read the study on PubMed

This meta-analysis of 71 studies found that anxiety is associated with differences in how people attend to, experience, and evaluate bodily signals. The findings support a more nuanced understanding of interoception and anxiety rather than assuming that anxious people simply have less body awareness.

Adams KL, et al. (2022). The association between anxiety and cardiac interoceptive accuracy: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 140, 104754.
Read the study on PubMed

This preregistered systematic review and meta-analysis of 55 studies found no overall association between anxiety and objectively measured cardiac interoceptive accuracy—an important reminder that anxiety does not simply mean being less accurate at sensing the body.