If You Live in Clutter... It Could Be Hidden Trauma Destroying You

About one in three people — and a much larger share among younger generations — report feeling so stressed that most days they are utterly overwhelmed. I used to be in that group, every single day. The usual advice people hand out — breathe, talk to someone, take a bath — often barely scratches the surface. Over the past decade, and especially through the pandemic, almost everybody's ability to concentrate has taken a hit. It gets harder to feel steady and calm inside and to actually get things done. If you're living with this, you know how crushing it is to set good intentions and then watch them dissolve into thin air. It hurts. You want to live up to your promise: connect with friends, find or enjoy a partner, pursue meaningful goals — but overwhelm keeps filling you up. There are too many demands on your attention, too many painful or stressful events keep hitting you, and eventually you may simply shut down because it’s too much. Problems accumulate unaddressed, and soon you may feel depressed, exhausted, and hopeless that anything can change. That despair is the voice of overwhelm, and I recognize that many of you are dealing with really difficult circumstances while trying to push through like everyone else does. Here’s the crucial point: stress can trigger a response that many people don’t experience. Some folks have a relatively small stress reaction and so the usual tips — be kind to yourself, breathe, chat with friends — are often enough for them. Those suggestions are fine, and you shouldn’t avoid them, but for those of us carrying a higher level of stress they’re simply insufficient. There’s another factor that needs attention: neurological dysregulation. That’s when your nervous system, which coordinates everything in your body and shapes your thoughts and feelings, is unable to keep up with incoming stimuli. A loud sound can throw your nervous system off balance — that’s dysregulation. When it happens you might zone out, feel numb, overreact emotionally, or experience your thoughts racing so fast you slip into full fight-or-flight over things as small as a noise or rushing to work. Hurrying can be a major trigger for people with trauma histories. Indeed, trauma makes you more likely to become dysregulated when stress appears: someone yells, you lose a job, and it’s like a switch flips and a wave runs through you. Dysregulation produces overwhelm: your perception grows cluttered, you can’t reliably tell whether someone actually harmed you or whether you’re overreacting, your emotions either explode or go dead, and sometimes your mind goes blank. Ever experienced that? In that state you’re very likely to make mistakes, to lose track of your boundaries, to lose focus, and to drain your physical energy — just when you need boundaries, stamina, and concentration to solve the problem. All that frantic input saps you; you go high, then crash. Productivity turns into frantic bursts followed by collapse. Emotionally, you might blow up and then sink into despair. Your stress response keeps running and slowly wears you down. This helps explain why histories of trauma are strongly linked to so many health problems: chronic back pain, migraines, diabetes, obesity, hypertension, heart disease, cancer, autoimmune conditions — when your body, thoughts, and feelings are constantly overloaded they can’t function the way they should. You may never have heard of dysregulation and so might assume you simply failed to cope like other people. That’s not true. If you grew up with trauma, you’re more prone to becoming dysregulated, often without even noticing all the ways it shows up. No wonder life feels so full and information so overwhelming. People who tried to help me when I was younger shared what worked for them and assumed that if it didn’t work for me I was being stubborn, slow, unwilling to heal, or even “crazy.” Back then few people understood that for many — especially those with past trauma — the nervous system is dysregulated. Even during periods when life isn’t objectively hard, we can still feel chronically overwhelmed, and that keeps creating bigger problems in relationships, health, family, work, and finances — problems that in turn increase the overload on your nervous system. Recognizing dysregulation can help. Simply naming it to yourself — “Oops, I’m feeling overwhelmed; this looks like dysregulation” — can take a huge slice off the pressure in the moment. That reduction is significant: it makes the experience more manageable and lets you notice how overwhelm manifests so you can plan ways to lower it. So what are common signs of overwhelm? Here are many of them: racing thoughts; trouble solving problems or finishing tasks; excessive irritability or anger, ranging from snapping to raging; a constant sense of urgency even when none is needed; attention and completion problems that look like ADHD; living in crisis mode, jumping from emergency to emergency and losing sight of the bigger picture; chronic adrenaline and a wired feeling (or, conversely, collapsing into depression and inability to get off the couch); procrastination and avoidance; persistent fatigue; feelings of defeat and hopelessness; digestive problems; headaches and unexplained chronic pain; frequent illness; attempts to escape — whether via fantasizing, running off without telling anyone, or “ghosting” — or through unhealthy self-soothing like overeating, drugs, or alcohol; easily giving up boundaries (which can have serious consequences); withdrawing socially; dark or pessimistic thoughts; loss of interest in once-enjoyed activities; and growing shame about being overwhelmed. Before I understood dysregulation, CBTSD, and the mechanics of overwhelm, I carried a lot of shame, baffled as to why I was constantly frantic and seemed to attract so much drama. With time I forgave myself, because I realized I was burdened by childhood abuse and neglect and by decades of living in a dysregulated way. The advice I’d received from doctors and therapists was often incomplete. If I hadn’t discovered how to heal dysregulation for myself, I might not be here today. So here is an essential insight for healing overwhelm: if nothing in the present moment genuinely requires a frenzied response, your overwhelm is probably due to trouble processing the many inputs around you — loud sounds, bright lights, anxious thoughts about money, several people speaking at once. I call these things inputs, and they can accumulate until they exceed what an easily overstimulated nervous system can handle. When you’re regulated, you can usually notice noises and stressful events, let them pass, and they move downstream into memory without staying lodged in your nervous system. But trauma makes us more likely to become dysregulated; the reaction happens more easily, lasts longer, and impedes that natural downstream flow of experience. Thoughts and feelings from the current and previous days keep banging around instead of settling, and that builds into overwhelm. Of course, not every instance of overwhelm is dysregulation — real crises do occur: job loss, natural disasters, serious illness, relationship breakups. Yet even in those scenarios, you still have to seek help, manage responsibilities, and care for yourself, and that’s much harder when you’re dysregulated. It becomes a vicious circle: stress causes overwhelm; overwhelm prevents you from resolving the stressors; inputs jam up your nervous system; your system tips into dysregulation. I still get dysregulated sometimes. When it starts, it spreads through me like a blot of ink in water or the onset of a migraine — once it begins you can feel it moving and you can’t simply stop it. The good news is you can learn to re-regulate. With practice you can recover attention and emotional balance quickly enough to avoid lashing out or wrecking relationships. Instead of being overwhelmed, you can feel well-enough — a tolerable level of being “wel-lemmed” rather than drowning. Because dysregulation can affect every part of your life, healing can begin anywhere that opportunity appears. You don’t need to address things in a precise sequence. You don’t have to solve every problem at once. You don’t need to “love yourself” first, or be at a specific weight, or have a job, or feel better before you start. You don’t even need to see a therapist to begin. You can start easing out of overwhelm right now and start feeling better from where you are. Here are practical steps to try. First, notice the sensory inputs and other stimuli that overload you: parties, loud noises, many people talking at once. You don’t have to permanently avoid triggers to manage them; simply acknowledging them can help you step back a bit when you feel swamped. Telling yourself, “There’s a lot of noise here and it’s making me uneasy,” often reduces the pressure enough that the overwhelm begins to fade. When you’re overstimulated, take brief sensory breaks: wear comfortable clothing, dim or switch off lights, silence your phone or put it in another room. Sometimes you might extend the break into an hour, a day, or as long as you need — a fast from inputs to give your nervous system a rest. If you’re driving, try not listening to music, podcasts, or conversation; just focus on driving and see if that calms you inside. If you’re walking, skip headphones — the walk itself is often enough stimulation, and without competing audio you’ll find the world feels clearer. Walking outdoors is especially re-regulating. If you meditate, allow yourself to rest rather than forcing intense practices. You can focus on the breath or a mantra, but while you’re trying to reduce inputs, avoid recorded guided meditations with someone talking; you don’t need extra verbal stimulation pushing you. Sometimes the medicine you need most is simply rest. Also consider holding back from speaking your agitated thoughts. Going over trauma, anger, sadness, or worries can be triggering; what you might need more than talking is to feel supported and connected. Often the urge to talk is really a desire for connection, and being connected doesn’t require narrating every distress in detail. When I talk about distress while dysregulated, I can become very negative, like I’m hypnotized by a bleak narrative, and that undermines my ability to return to the present, see options, and take helpful action. If you want a structured approach, my daily practice techniques are designed to help you express and release distress, then give your nervous system rest through meditation and recovery — that’s precisely their purpose. Many trauma survivors find meditation hard because the mind is so busy; in my method you write first to release fearful and resentful thoughts before meditating, which quiets the mental chatter so meditation is more peaceful. Writing supports meditation, and meditation in turn helps sustain your writing practice. If you just face fear and resentment but don’t follow it with mental rest, people often end up more overwhelmed afterwards — so the release-plus-rest sequence is important. If you want to try the daily practice, it’s linked below in the description and available on my website at crappychildhoodfairy.com. Keeping your nervous system regulated and reducing overwhelm is more of a lifestyle than a one-time cure, but even small initial steps can produce relief today. Those small changes accumulate and become meaningful over time. It might feel like your problems are too big for tiny actions to matter — I’ve been there — but when your nervous system is regulated more often, fewer problems can take hold. You’ll start spotting red flags in people before you let them into your life, and you won’t be constantly extinguishing fires because the fires won’t be starting as often. Day by day, life becomes a little gentler and roomier. You’ll be able to go further in healing: solving problems, taking the next right steps, expanding your capacity for connection, and reclaiming the power to be yourself and contribute what only you can. It helps to know the signs of dysregulation and quick strategies to re-regulate; there’s a free PDF that walks you through these steps you can download right here, and I’ll see you very soon. [Music]