We were standing in the kitchen when he said it.
He had just come home from a college tour. Backpack dropped. Shoulders slightly rounded in a way only a mother clocks. I asked how it went.
He said, “I just don’t have it in me.”
I assumed logistics. Essays. Travel fatigue.
“Why not?” I asked.
He looked at me and said, “Because I don’t have the social currency.”
I actually paused.
Social currency.
I knew exactly what he meant.
What Is Social Currency?
The term “social currency” has been used in marketing and behavioral economics for years. Jonah Berger popularized it in his 2013 book Contagious, describing social currency as the value people gain from sharing information or engaging in certain behaviors that enhance their status within a group. Pierre Bourdieu, long before that, described forms of capital beyond money—social capital being one’s network and relational power.
But my son wasn’t talking about status.
He was talking about his bandwidth.
He had spent the day networking. Introducing himself. Asking for internships. Reading rooms. Modulating tone. Performing competence. That kind of social navigation requires continuous prefrontal engagement and autonomic flexibility.
It requires ventral vagal access.
Polyvagal theory tells us that social engagement—eye contact, vocal prosody, facial expression—depends on the ventral vagal complex. When that system is online, we can connect without losing regulation. When it’s taxed, social interaction becomes metabolically expensive.
He was describing depletion.
Not insecurity.
Not laziness.
Depletion, and I Get It!
The Cost of Social Performance
There is real cognitive load involved in impression management. Research on self-regulation (Baumeister et al., 1998) shows that social self-control draws from limited cognitive resources. While the “ego depletion” model has been debated and refined, the principle that sustained self-monitoring requires energy remains robust.
Add to that the physiological component: social evaluation activates the same neural circuitry as physical threat. Studies using fMRI show that social rejection and exclusion activate the anterior cingulate cortex—the same region associated with physical pain (Eisenberger et al., 2003).
When you are networking, pitching, or trying to “make things happen,” your nervous system is tracking micro-threats constantly. Am I being accepted? Am I being dismissed? Am I safe here?
Cortisol does not distinguish between a predator and a room full of evaluators.
My son had spent the day spending social currency. He came home, definitely overdrawn, and then the next day hit us.
The Ferry Building and the Edge of Shutdown
The next day we were at the Ferry Building Farmers Market in San Francisco. If you’ve been there, you know it’s a sensory event. Dozens of vendors. Fresh strawberries stacked, layers of fresh greens, fish right off the boat from that morning, and a long line waiting for the hand-cut porchetta sandwich. Fresh oysters shucked in real time. The smell of cherry blossom branches, sourdough, fish, and lavender soap. Musicians playing. Tourists stopping mid-walkway. Lines everywhere.
It is beautiful.
It is chaos.
Halfway through weaving between stands, he turned to me and said, “This is too chaotic for me.”
Not dramatic. Not embarrassed.
Just data.
From a nervous system perspective, that environment is a perfect storm of input. Visual stimulation from multiple directions. Auditory unpredictability. Olfactory overload. Navigational complexity. For a system already taxed from social exertion, that level of input can push someone from sympathetic activation into dorsal vagal shutdown.
Shutdown does not look like a tantrum.
It looks like withdrawal.
Reduced eye contact. Slower speech. Flat affect. A desire to leave.
What struck me was not that he was overwhelmed.
It was that he knew.
Interoception Is Intelligence
Interoception—the ability to sense internal bodily states—is mediated by the insular cortex. Research shows that stronger interoceptive awareness correlates with better emotional regulation (Craig, 2009). Many adults lose this awareness over time. We override fatigue. Ignore hunger. Power through overstimulation.
My son named his limit.
He recognized the shift before it became dysregulation.
That is regulatory intelligence.
We talk about resilience as endurance. But nervous system resilience often looks like accurate self-assessment and timely exit.
At the Ferry Building, he did not shame himself. He did not push through for optics. He did not perform extroversion.
He said, essentially, “My system is at capacity.”
And we left.
Where Overwhelm Comes From
Overwhelm is not weakness. It is a mismatch between input and processing capacity.
The brain is a predictive machine, constantly trying to minimize prediction error. In high-stimulation environments, prediction error increases. Too many variables. Too many micro-adjustments required. The prefrontal cortex works overtime to organize chaos.
For some nervous systems—particularly those with heightened sensory processing sensitivity or slower catecholamine clearance (think COMT Met/Met variants, which break down dopamine and norepinephrine more slowly)—that stimulation lingers.
The body does not immediately reset.
If the system cannot find safety cues, it shifts into defense.
And defense conserves energy by narrowing engagement.
That narrowing is what my son felt.
Social Currency in 2026
We are asking young adults to constantly market themselves. LinkedIn profiles before they can legally drink. Internships before they’ve figured out who they are. Personal branding as baseline expectation. What is happening in our world?!
That requires enormous ventral vagal stamina.
Social currency is not just charisma. It is autonomic flexibility under scrutiny.
Some people replenish it quickly. Others need silence, predictability, low-input environments to reset.
Neither is wrong.
But pretending they are the same leads to burnout.
What I’m Learning From Him
I have spent years teaching nervous system regulation to professionals who ignore their internal signals until collapse forces attention.
My son is doing something different.
He is listening early.
He is noticing when his social account is depleted.
He is identifying when sensory load exceeds capacity.
That awareness is not fragility.
It is skill.
A Few Practical Thoughts
If you find yourself depleted after social or sensory-heavy environments, consider tracking what specifically drains you. Is it evaluation? Noise? Unpredictability? The number of micro-decisions required? Awareness precedes adjustment.
Build in deliberate recovery. Slow walking. Controlled breathing at five to six breaths per minute to enhance vagal tone. Time in low-stimulation settings. Research shows that even brief exposure to natural environments reduces sympathetic activation and lowers cortisol (Ulrich et al., 1991).
Most importantly, stop moralizing your limits.
Capacity fluctuates.
At the Ferry Building, and as we walked back toward the Embarcadero, with the bay open and wide on my left, I thought about how often I ignored those signals at his age. I overrode them in the name of opportunity. I confused depletion with weakness.
He is not doing that.
So here’s what I’ll leave you with:
Where are you spending social currency faster than you replenish it, and do you know the moment your nervous system starts to withdraw?
That moment is information.
And information, if you honor it, becomes regulation. :)
Join me in my next Masterclass.
