Your Body Is Warning You! — The REAL Reason You’re So Overwhelmed

Roughly one out of every three people — and a far larger portion among younger folks — report feeling so overwhelmed by stress that most days they say they can’t cope. I used to live like that every single day. The usual advice people offer — take deep breaths, talk to someone, take a bath — while well-meaning, didn’t come close to resolving it for me. Over the past decade, and especially during the pandemic, nearly everyone has lost some of their ability to concentrate. It becomes harder to feel alert, calm, and able to get things done. If you’ve experienced this, you know how crushing it is to keep trying only to watch your good intentions for the day dissolve into vague plans that never happen. It feels awful because you can see the potential inside you: you want to connect with friends, meet a partner or enjoy the one you have, pursue meaningful work — but overwhelm keeps filling you up. There are too many demands on your attention, too many painful or difficult experiences land on you, and at some point you may simply shut down. Problems pile up because you can’t solve them in that state, and soon you feel drained, depressed, and hopeless about change. That voice of hopelessness is the overwhelm talking. I know many of you are carrying heavy things and trying to push through, pretending you can shake it off like others seem to. But here’s a crucial point: when stress hits, some people respond in a much more intense way than others. For many of us, our stress response is massive. Plenty of bloggers and podcasters have far smaller stress reactions and thus tell people it’s easy to recover — be kind to yourself, breathe, talk it out — and for them those steps are often enough. Those suggestions are useful, and you shouldn’t abandon them, but for people carrying a much higher level of stress they don’t suffice. There’s an additional factor that most people aren’t aware of: neurological dysregulation. That’s when the nervous system, which controls bodily functions and shapes thoughts and feelings, can’t keep up with incoming stimulation. A sudden loud sound can knock your nervous system off balance — that is dysregulation. When that happens you might go blank, zone out, feel numb, or else react in a wildly intense way. Your thoughts might race, throwing you into fight-or-flight just because someone raised their voice or because you’re running late. Hurrying can be a major trigger for people with trauma. Trauma makes us more likely to become dysregulated whenever anything stressful occurs. Someone shouts, you lose a job, or a new stressor appears, and it can feel like a switch flips and a wave moves through you. Dysregulation creates overwhelm: your perception becomes cluttered, you can’t tell if you’re being harmed or overreacting, emotions blow up or collapse, and sometimes you find yourself saying things you don’t mean or going completely blank. In that state you’re almost guaranteed to make mistakes, lose your boundaries, lose focus, and have your physical energy plummet right when you most need stamina and clarity. All that noisy input drains you. That’s overwhelm — you spike, you crash. With productivity you get frantic and then exhausted; emotionally you explode and then fall into despair; physically your stress system runs nonstop and wears you down. This is one reason why a history of trauma is associated with so many health conditions: chronic pain, migraines, diabetes, obesity, hypertension, heart disease, cancer, autoimmune issues — your body, thoughts, and feelings become overloaded and can’t function as they should. You may never have heard of dysregulation and assumed you were simply failing to handle life like everyone else. You didn’t fail. People who experienced childhood trauma are more easily and more deeply dysregulated. Sometimes it’s obvious when it happens, other times much of it slips beneath awareness, which makes the constant flood of information feel unbearable. When people tried to help me earlier in life they were showing what worked for them and, if it didn’t help me, they often assumed I was difficult, slow to learn, unwilling to heal, or even “crazy.” Until relatively recently, not many knew that what’s happening for many — especially those with past trauma — is nervous system dysregulation. Even during ordinary times we can become overwhelmed, and then overwhelm breeds more life problems in relationships, health, family, work, and money, which in turn increase the stress and deepen the dysregulation. But there’s good news: simply recognizing the signs of dysregulation can be a relief. If you can name it — “Oops, I’m overwhelmed; this is dysregulation” — that naming alone can remove a large portion of the pressure in the moment, sometimes half. That makes the situation much more manageable, and then you can begin to notice how overwhelm manifests in you and build a plan to dial it down. What does overwhelm look like? Here are common signals: racing thoughts; trouble solving problems or finishing tasks; extreme irritability ranging from snapping to full-blown rage; feeling urgent even when nothing is urgent; ADHD-like symptoms such as poor focus and incomplete tasks; constantly reacting to emergencies and losing sight of the big picture. You might be chronically on edge, buzzing with adrenaline, or the opposite — stuck on the couch, depressed and unmotivated. Procrastination and avoidance are also signs, as is persistent exhaustion and feelings of defeat or hopelessness. Physical symptoms may include digestive problems at either end, headaches, chronic pain with no clear cause, frequent illness. Attempts to escape — retreating into fantasy or abruptly leaving without warning — are common, whether by ghosting people or through unhealthy soothing behaviors like binge eating, drugs, or drinking. Letting boundaries slide is dangerous and costly. Social withdrawal, dark pessimistic thoughts, loss of interest in former pleasures, and growing shame about being overwhelmed are other frequent indicators. Before I understood dysregulation and complex trauma, I carried a lot of shame because I couldn’t figure out why I was always frantic and seemed to attract drama. Later I realized I’d been carrying huge amounts of childhood abuse and neglect and had lived for years in a disregulated way. The guidance I received early on was often off-target; if I hadn’t discovered methods to heal my regulation, I might not have made it. So here’s a key insight for beginning to heal overwhelm: if there’s no real emergency demanding frantic action right now, your overwhelm is probably your nervous system’s inability to process all the inputs — bright lights, loud noises, many people talking at once, financial fears, deadlines — all at once. I call those stimuli “inputs,” and they can accumulate until they’re simply too much for a sensitized nervous system. When you’re regulated, you can observe stressors, feel them, and allow them to pass into memory; they don’t hijack you. But trauma can leave you vulnerable to being tipped into dysregulation more easily, for longer, and with a harder time returning to baseline, blocking that downstream flow of thoughts and feelings. Instead of moving on, yesterday’s worries keep spinning in your mind, and it becomes overwhelming. Not every overwhelming circumstance stems from dysregulation — real crises do happen: job loss, natural disasters, illness, breakup. Even then, coping requires help, care for responsibilities, steady action, and that’s extremely difficult when you’re dysregulated. It becomes a vicious cycle: stress triggers overwhelm; overwhelm prevents solving the problems that created the stress; inputs jam your nervous system; the system tips into dysregulation. I still become dysregulated sometimes. It spreads through my body like a blot of ink in water; I can feel it, like the beginning of a migraine, and once it starts I can’t instantly halt it. Yet there’s another encouraging fact: you can learn to re-regulate. With practice you can quickly recover some mental clarity and emotional steadiness so you don’t lash out or wreck relationships while you’re upset. You can return to a normal, balanced state — well- “whelmed” rather than overwhelmed. Because dysregulation touches nearly every part of life, the pathway back can begin anywhere you find an opening. You don’t need to fix everything in perfect order, nor fix the root cause first. You don’t have to have full self-love, lose weight, secure a job, or see a therapist before starting. Change can begin now. Start where you are and begin to feel better. Here are practical moves you can try. First, notice the sensory inputs that push you over the edge: parties, loud sounds, many conversations at once. You don’t need to avoid all triggers, but acknowledging them can give you distance. Saying to yourself, “This room is noisy and it’s making me feel overwhelmed,” is sometimes enough to start the calm returning. When you’re overstimulated, take a short break from input: put on comfy clothes, dim or turn off the lights, silence your phone or put it in another room. You can extend that break to an hour or a whole day when necessary — a fast from stimulation to rest your nervous system. If you’re driving, try driving without music, podcasts, or phone calls — focus on the driving itself. If you walk, skip headphones; the walk is often stimulation enough and you’ll notice more of the world when you remove competing inputs. Walking, particularly outdoors, is re-regulating. In meditation practices, if you already meditate, try resting simply — focus on the breath or a short mantra, and while you’re trying to lower inputs avoid recorded music or guided meditations with talking. Sometimes you simply need rest rather than being pushed through a guided script. Also consider not voicing your agitated thoughts aloud. Talking about trauma or distress can trigger you further; sometimes what you need more than talking is a felt experience of support and connection. Being supported doesn’t require narrating every distressing detail. When I try to talk my way through distress while dysregulated, I can become catastrophically negative — convinced the world is terrible — and that only undermines my ability to return to the present and choose helpful actions. If you haven’t tried the daily practice techniques I teach, they provide a structured way to express and release distress on the page before meditating, giving your nervous system meaningful rest and recovery. Many trauma survivors struggle with meditation because their minds are so noisy; writing beforehand to release fearful and resentful thoughts reduces that chatter so meditation becomes more accessible. Writing aids meditation, and meditation supports the writing practice: you process the hard emotions on the page and then allow rest afterward to consolidate the healing. If you want to try the daily practice, it’s linked below in the description and on my website at crappychildhoodfairy.com. Staying regulated and reducing overwhelm is more of a lifestyle than a one-time fix, but even tiny changes can bring noticeable relief right away. Small steps accumulate into major improvements over time. You may feel your problems are too big for little actions to matter, and I’ve been in that place, but when your nervous system is regulated more often there are fewer problems that can take hold. You’ll start spotting red flags in people earlier and preventing fires before they begin. Life grows gentler; you gain space and bandwidth to deepen healing, take next right actions, strengthen connection with others, and express the unique gifts you carry. Learning to recognize dysregulation and quick methods to re-regulate is essential. Research shows cluttered homes are linked to higher rates of anxiety, depression, isolation, and ADHD-like symptoms. But I find those studies frustrating because they often assume clutter causes those symptoms and therefore that cleaning will cure them. There is some truth to the benefit of tidying, but clutter is more likely one of many symptoms of trauma — not the root cause. Trauma affects the brain and body, shaping feelings and behavior. It can drive compulsive habits, fill the mind with stress, immobilize productivity, and express itself as clutter: hoarding unused items, piles of papers, or a messy living or work space. I see clutter as an amplified version of a normal nesting instinct — making your home warm, stocked, and comfortable — pushed into excess by trauma. That overflow then causes more overwhelm and reduces your capacity to organize. You may have too much food (some of it rotting), too many jackets, stacks of papers you mean to sort, or misplaced tools buried under other items. My hypothesis is that clutter sits alongside depression, anxiety, and attention problems as a sibling symptom caused by trauma, rather than being their direct cause. Do you find that resonates? These symptoms interact, which is why healing trauma doesn’t always require starting with the deepest root. You can begin anywhere you feel enough inner strength to act. So, are you ready to toss old vegetables from the fridge or tackle the drawer that’s been driving you nuts? Great. Do you have a couple of spare hours to sort unsorted papers into “trash,” “file,” and “to-do”? Excellent. These small acts of order will almost certainly lift your mood and sharpen your focus. Decluttering can be a powerful way to re-regulate with practical side benefits — like getting bills paid — but you’ll usually need to heal dysregulation to find the inner power to start. Often the barrier isn’t knowing what to do; it’s lacking the energy to do it. Hoarding is a different, more complex issue that often combines lack of energy with distorted beliefs that everything must be kept. Today I’m speaking about clutter in the sense where you recognize it’s a problem and want change, but feel powerless to begin. Once that inner power moves, decluttering becomes possible and your emotions lighten, thinking clears, and you’re more open to people and new experiences. Clutter for trauma survivors isn’t just physical — it can be mental clutter (too many thoughts in a jumble), emotional clutter (old feelings popping up from long ago and derailing you), relationship clutter (people in your life who don’t belong), and time clutter (an overbooked schedule that prioritizes urgent things over important ones). I’ll cover all of these because they’re common in childhood-affected PTSD and can improve when you learn to detect and heal neurological dysregulation. That healing reduces many trauma-driven behaviors, including the tendency to stay cluttered. Achieving space and order is deeply restorative. Practicing awareness of dysregulation and learning re-regulation techniques help the clutter — in all its forms — settle, creating a sense of peace and possibility. That peace fuels inner power: visual space clears your mind and gives you time to act. Let’s start with physical clutter: belongings scattered throughout your home, yard, car, or workplace that make the space visually chaotic and make it hard to find what you need. Do you hold onto multiple sizes of clothing “just in case” you lose or gain weight, while the items that actually fit lack a proper place? That’s a common pattern for people with a complicated relationship to food and body image. A pantry stuffed with uneaten cans bought during an anxious period is another common example — during lockdown many people stockpiled food and now have shelves full of items they won’t eat. Giving excess to a food pantry helps both others and frees up space. Visual space can be calming; even a shelf with a bit of breathing room between items can be deeply re-regulating. Broken cars left in the yard or long-standing disrepair in the home are powerful reminders of family chaos and can leave you embarrassed and ashamed; alcoholism and other family dysfunctions often drain the energy required to maintain a household. When you have trauma, tasks that involve many steps — like repairing and selling a car — can feel impossible. Tools such as a visible task board can break the process into manageable steps and make it doable: clean the car, repair it, list it for sale, complete the paperwork. If you truly can’t manage the multi-step process, donating the item, even without perfect paperwork, might be the simplest solution. For items that might be sold, a practical rule of thumb is to weigh the effort required to sell against replacement cost: if something could be replaced cheaply, give it away; if it’s valuable, plan a sequence of concrete steps and timeframes to sell it, or partner with someone who can help and split proceeds. Food hoarding and leftover canned goods often come from scarcity conditioning; when you once lacked food it becomes hard to trust that you can resupply. If you now have some savings, you can let go of excess. Removing stockpiles you won’t use frees up both space and imagination. Clothes from decades past that no longer fit can carry sentimental weight; packing them away neatly or donating them prevents repeated reminders of a younger era while preserving memories in photos rather than in piles of fabric. Sentimentality and thriftiness are understandable — I grew up poor and learned to hold onto things — but it’s okay to let them go when they no longer serve you. Similarly, toiletries and old makeup can become clutter with emotional attachments. If something is old or unsanitary, it needs to be discarded even if it feels wasteful to throw it away. Getting rid of outdated cosmetics can feel freeing, as if you’re letting go of a past identity and making room to enjoy the present. Power — the inner capacity to take decisive action — is what enables these changes. Next, consider mental clutter. Childhood trauma often makes it hard to sort and prioritize thoughts; ideas and worries can crowd the mind, making planning and focus difficult. To cope, use tools like to-do lists, timers, calendars, and task-tracking boards. Write plans down so you don’t waste energy holding them in your head. Even if you don’t perfectly follow the plan, the act of prioritizing reduces mental load. I personally use daily practices to move fearful and resentful thoughts out of my head and onto the page so my cognitive space is free for doing and imagining. If you’re curious about the daily practice, try the free course linked in the description. Emotional clutter is the residue of old beliefs and resentments that have outlived their usefulness — the “should’ve, could’ve, would’ve” narratives that keep you stuck. Holding grudges or dwelling on past slights freezes you emotionally and forms a limiting identity. Part of healing is recognizing that trauma is an injury but not your identity. Some losses can’t be undone, but you can build workarounds and new life structures that allow flourishing even with difficult histories. Emotional clutter can also appear as addictive patterns of media consumption: constantly scrolling news and outrage fuels anger and separation and keeps you in a cluttered emotional state. If the media you consume isn’t useful for solving real problems, informing your responsibilities, or genuinely uplifting you, it’s clutter. Prioritize information that helps you be practical or nourishes you, and discard the rest. Relationship clutter is another major drain. If you have CPTSD, you may have very few people with whom you feel safe, seen, and understood, and many people in your life who make you feel bad but are hard to avoid. Decluttering relationships means making room for people who energize and support you, and gently stepping away from those who don’t belong anymore. You don’t need a dramatic justification to step back, but clarity helps; some programs and workshops help people identify who to keep and who to release. Time clutter — an overfull schedule — is common among “overfunctioners” who earn approval and meaning through busyness. If your calendar leaves no room for friends, exercise, sleep, or healing, it’s too cluttered. You need unscheduled space: time that is open and flexible, where ideas and rest can emerge, even if that time is simply sitting and staring at a wall. Down time allows your batteries to recharge and new inspiration to appear. As life becomes less cluttered, openness and responsibility will arrive together. Sometimes clutter functions as covert avoidance — a low-grade barrier to keep life manageable by keeping it limited. Debt, overcommitment, and staying stuck are all strategies that pretend to protect you from risk while actually trapping you. Opening to something better — even without knowing exactly what that is — is worth considering because there is creativity and capacity inside you that wants to grow beyond the trauma. Decluttering can be a first step: clear one closet, remove an item from your calendar, end a friendship that no longer serves you, or let go of a grudge. As you do this, old trauma-driven feelings will surface; to keep the process steady you’ll need tools for processing those emotions rather than stuffing them back down. Again, the daily practice techniques I teach are one helpful approach. One of the most underestimated triggers for CPTSD symptoms is hurrying. Everyone hurries, but for trauma survivors haste is a frequent path to overwhelm. Procrastination creates rushes, and procrastination itself is often driven by dysregulation — so the cycle continues: procrastinate, hurry, dysregulate, repeat. Slowing down is remarkably regulating. Do you remember the simple pleasure of a shower without pressure, or brushing your teeth without rushing? Mindful, unhurried activity soothes the nervous system. Trauma can make people fear slow attention because it can invite painful feelings up. Sometimes the feeling driving your haste is like being chased by wolves — a vivid sensation that you’re being pursued by uncomfortable emotions. Sit with that image in meditation and you’ll often find nothing catastrophic happens: you may cry briefly, feel the emotion pass, and then move on. When you no longer have to flee emotional experience, you can slow down. Hurrying often makes everything take longer: keys are misplaced, coffee spills, mistakes happen, and then you’re later than before. For those with CPTSD, hurried driving or distracted multitasking can be downright dangerous; dysregulation can make routine sequences — pump gas, replace pump, close tank, start car — too fragmented to follow in order. In my own life, a particularly dysregulated period led to leaving the gas pump in the car and colliding with another vehicle on the freeway. Nobody was hurt, but the episode made it clear something was wrong and helped me pursue effective treatments like EMDR, which made a big difference. When dysregulated, people often fumble, drop dishes, or lose track of tasks. ADHD-like symptoms may show up, and clinicians who understand trauma sometimes see ADHD-like presentations driven by dysregulation rather than a primary attentional disorder. The good news is that you can learn re-regulation techniques and return to focused, one-thing-at-a-time work. Practical tools like Kanban-style boards or simple daily to-do lists help structure tasks into bite-sized steps, which is especially helpful when complex sequences overwhelm you. Slowing down even to half-speed for a moment can send a calming signal to your brain and pull you out of dysregulation. Learning to catch yourself in the hurry and to downshift regularly can change the course of your life, because dysregulation underlies so many PTSD symptoms and health problems. Re-regulation is the single most important skill in healing these areas. One of the deepest wounds children can suffer is not being recognized or cared for by their parents as distinct, lovable people. That wound often produces “romantic clutter” — a string of partial relationships where neither partner is fully present. A letter I received illustrates this pattern. A woman I’ll call “Be” describes a childhood where her mother was emotionally distant and critical, denying basic needs and humiliating her, while her father appeased the mother and excused the family dysfunction. As a result she became a caregiver to her mother and delayed romantic involvement until her mid-20s. She made a series of choices — a relationship with a married man who later married someone else, a long relationship with an older man who didn’t want marriage or children, a rapid pregnancy and marriage with a man she’d only known briefly — that fit an underlying pattern of seeking love in compromised ways. After years in a marriage with someone emotionally unavailable and controlling, she reached a breaking point and asked for a divorce. Her husband began remodeling the house, scattering her belongings in disarray, and she interprets the renovation as an attempt to appease others rather than a real commitment to change. During separation she took up pickleball, formed a connection with a teammate who later said he had separated from his wife and planned to stay out of state, and she’s now grieving the possibility of that companionship while managing the separation and parenting their child. Her friend advised against contacting the man out of caution and because she needs clarity for the divorce process. The story reflects classic trauma-driven patterns: giving everything to please an emotionally unavailable parent, repeating that dynamic in adult relationships, making hasty decisions under time pressure, and then getting stuck between hope and practical reality. The key lessons for this situation are written in many places: avoid relationships that require secrecy or moral compromise; take relationships slowly; cultivate boundaries and standards early (for instance, “I want marriage and children” is a non-negotiable that should be known before deep involvement); and seek supportive community during separation and divorce because isolation makes trauma-driven choices more likely. When trauma leaves a child without mirroring and attuned care, they don’t develop the internal structures that help evaluate others’ intentions and make safe relationship choices. That lack of internal guidance often turns into a pattern of half-relationships or relationships with unavailable partners. Healing requires both practical steps — say no to relationships that clearly contradict your values — and inner work: clear your priorities, define non-negotiables, and learn to move slowly. Love does arrive sometimes in sudden, unexpected ways, but when it does it’s crucial to proceed with patience and discernment. Rushing into another relationship without cooling off can replicate harm, especially if you have children. A child needs a parent who models boundaries, self-respect, and steadiness. Even if you feel desperate for connection, you can take actions that build self-worth: therapy, daily practices to clear emotional clutter, forming supportive friendships or groups, and joining communities that model healthy tools. Don’t try to shoulder big transitions alone. People with CPTSD tend toward trauma-driven decisions when isolated. Finding reliable support — a therapist, a group, a trusted friend — reduces the risk of repeating harm. There is a path forward. With small, steady steps — decluttering a closet, clearing a day from your calendar, letting go of a relationship that doesn’t serve you, or releasing an old grievance — you create space for new possibilities. As you make space, difficult feelings will surface; use tools to process them so you don’t backslide. Learn to notice dysregulation, practice quick re-regulation strategies, slow down the hurry, and build momentum through small wins. Over time, as regulation becomes more consistent, clarity and power grow, and you can make choices that protect you and help you thrive beyond the limits of past trauma.