The Myth of Multitasking
The invisible labor behind “she can handle it” and the path back to being in your own life.
Unpopular opinion: women aren’t more capable of doing it all.
We’re just more conditioned not to fall apart while we try.
Somewhere along the way, “she can handle it” became both a compliment and a curse.
We carry the mental tabs of everyone we love, who needs a dentist appointment, which kid is low on snacks, whether the thank-you note got sent, whether we’ve been distant from a friend.
We’re constantly toggling between nurturing and achieving, caring and performing, anticipating and repairing.
And we do it all while pretending not to be bone-deep tired.
The Myth
We were sold a lie that being able to juggle everything at once is strength.
But multitasking isn’t mastery. It’s fragmentation.
The brain doesn’t actually do tasks simultaneously; it switches rapidly between them.
Each switch comes with a cost, a surge of cortisol, a hit to memory, a drop in focus.
That invisible toggling between roles and emotions is why so many of us lie awake at night with racing thoughts and fried nervous systems.
We’re not wired for this kind of relentless mental gear-shifting.
We’ve just been told it’s normal.
And because we’re good at it, at managing chaos while making it look graceful, no one sees the toll.
The Cultural Script That’s Breaking Us
Women have been taught that competence is care.
That the better we manage everything, the more loving we are.
That exhaustion is simply the tax for being needed.
We’ve internalized it so deeply that even when no one’s asking, we’re still anticipating.
We don’t just carry our own to-do lists, we carry the emotional weight of everyone else’s.
Who’s upset. Who might be. Who will be if we say no.
We’re not multitasking.
We’re managing worlds.
And when the cracks show, when we forget, or snap, or finally say “I can’t”, we don’t see it as a warning sign.
We call it failure.
We apologize for it.
When really, it’s our biology waving a white flag.
The Neuroscience of Our Exhaustion
The prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for focus and decision-making, was designed for short bursts of attention, not constant interruption.
Every “just one thing” we toggle to burns more glucose, floods the brain with stress hormones, and leaves less energy for presence or rest.
That’s why so many of us feel foggy, irritable, or numb by mid-afternoon.
It’s not lack of willpower. It’s depletion.
Cognitive overload masquerading as competence.
And yes, hormones shift as we age. Estrogen, the regulator of serotonin and dopamine, dips and focus wanes.
But maybe the fog isn’t just hormonal.
I actually think it’s decades of overdrive finally catching up.
Years of holding the invisible load, the family schedule, the team deadlines, all the open tabs that never truly close.
Maybe brain fog isn’t decline.
It’s accumulation.
A lifetime of mental residue from being everything to everyone, except ourselves.
The Truth No One Names
We call it “balance.”
But most women aren’t balancing, we’re bracing.
We hold the world still with one hand while texting reminders with the other.
We absorb the noise of everyone’s lives until we can’t hear our own.
And when we finally break, we don’t rest.
We blame ourselves for not being more efficient at falling apart.
That’s what guts me most, how fast women turn exhaustion into shame.
We’ve mistaken endurance for worth.
We’ve mistaken depletion for devotion.
The Invisible Labor of Holding It All
We don’t just work hard, we feel hard.
We absorb tension, patch cracks before they spread, and remember everything no one else does.
We call it love. But sometimes, it’s fear, fear of what will fall apart if we stop holding it.
Every time we shift from one identity to another, mother, partner, professional, friend, we perform a micro-act of shape-shifting.
And that performance is metabolically expensive.
It’s why so many women feel invisible in their own lives.
We’re everywhere and nowhere at once, woven into everyone else’s story but rarely present in our own.
That’s what multitasking really does.
It doesn’t just splinter our attention.
It dilutes our presence until we can barely feel ourselves in the room.
What We’re Actually Starving For
We think we’re craving time.
But what we’re really craving is singularity.
To do one thing fully.
To finish a thought before another interrupts it.
To be inside our own lives instead of hovering above them, managing every moving part.
We don’t need more hours.
We need fewer divides.
The Wake-Up Call
The danger isn’t that women are doing too much.
It’s that we’ve normalized disconnection and called it strength.
We keep thinking the problem is external, the job, the kids, the chaos.
But what’s breaking us is internalized:
the belief that our worth is measured by how much we can hold without breaking.
We don’t need to be better jugglers.
We need to stop pretending the act was ever human to begin with.
The Invitation
What if focus, real, undivided focus, became our quiet rebellion?
What if, instead of proving how much we can hold, we asked: What’s worth holding at all?
Because women were never built to be machines of efficiency.
We were built to be conduits of attention, intuition, and care.
Attention isn’t performance.
It’s presence.
It’s humanity.
Maybe that’s the revolution,
not more balance, not more hacks,
just women remembering we are not the bandwidth.
We are the beings.
So maybe that’s the revolution, not balance, not better systems, but women finally refusing to trade their sanity for significance.
“Maybe it’s not that women can do everything.
Maybe it’s that we’ve forgotten we shouldn’t have to.”
— Dr. Zelana Montminy
Finding Focus is here. And it’s for you. Order your book today!
With you in this.
Love,
Zelana