You wake up in the morning, and you’re already exhausted. Twenty-eight tabs are open in your head, fighting for your attention. The kids, the work, the laundry, the finances… An endless checklist of all the things you need to do starts running through your head: what to wear today, wake up the kids so they have time to have breakfast, if the laundry is really a priority…
Minutes pass. You get out of bed. The checklist gets longer, and you find yourself leaving the bathroom unable to remember if you brushed your teeth. You wake up the kids. Think that their room really needs to be tidied. Then you remember the groceries. And then the laundry. So you find yourself making a grocery list, then a to-do list, then you start thinking about the travel agency project that you put off for three weeks and your boss’s voice pulls you back to reality. You are not ready for this one. Not this early.
You call out to the kids that you are already late, prepare breakfast and the lunchboxes at the same time. You took your shower the night before, so you decide that this is fine, you just get dressed, drive the kids to school, and go to work.
You arrive, sit at your desk and remember you didn’t have coffee yet! You walk to the machine, check your phone while waiting, nod with a smile to say hi to some colleagues. And walk back to your office, thinking your smile was probably a bit too much.
Back to your desk, you ask yourself where to start, knowing that the answer to this question had been living inside you for three weeks. And each time you think about it, you feel your body freeze. It feels physically untouchable. The knot in your throat gets bigger, and your belly tightens for real. So you look away, you answer emails, and get busy with other little tasks.
In some way, this makes you feel better. Your mind tricks you into thinking that you are being productive. And even if you’re aware that you aren’t doing what you need to do, it still feels like you’re accomplishing something. So you feel half relieved. But half guilty too.
When Everything Feels Like a Threat
But neither feeling really lasts. A meeting notification just came in, and it’s for this afternoon. The relief vanishes, the guilt intensifies, the freeze comes back and something inside you literally drops. You pause for a moment, staring at the wall, your thoughts racing at high speed, until one specific image comes up: the meeting room’s grey chairs, the long, cold boardroom table, the harsh lighting and all the faces looking at you, impassive, waiting. Your stress instantly spikes under the considerable weight of this image alone, so much that the huge project starts looking like the shield you need against your boss’s pursed lips and Bernard’s judging look.
So you open it. Spend about fifteen minutes planning it. Look over the requirements three times. Start making a checklist. Then a second one. Recall the client briefing. Find yourself daydreaming about what it would be like to work in tourism. Then about what it would be like to be on an island. And just as you are stepping onto a beach in the Seychelles, a noise startles you back to reality. You check your watch and just throw yourself into the work.
Two hours later, you lift your head. Check your to-do list and realize you’ve just finished something you’ve been putting off for three weeks. Not the whole project, but enough to defend yourself in the meeting.
The Mask You Didn’t Know You Were Wearing
Lunchtime comes, and you find yourself at your casual table with your colleagues, listening, chatting, eating… At some point the world around you goes quiet. And for the first time in an hour, you slip back inside your body. It’s as if you were pushing to your maximum capacity to be able to stay focused on the conversation.
But only once everything around you settles—the music has faded, the room has emptied, everyone has left or started scrolling—do you finally allow yourself to breathe and retreat into yourself.
You never feel it in the moment when you are in the middle of the conversation, only at the end. And the conversations never require real effort: a planned holiday, the new school rules, the latest trends…
This happens often. And it makes you wonder why you have to push yourself beyond your limits for something you used to do effortlessly.
The questioning only lasts a few minutes before you have to head back to the office. You feel your whole body pulling itself together for the last stretch. You smile, nod, and play the role again.
The Switch You Can’t Control
You arrive at your desk, you sit for a moment to gather a bit of energy; you are depleted. Having always blamed heavy meals for your post-lunch fatigue, you ate light today. Yet, here you are, just wanting to give in completely and sleep. Not a quick little nap to recover, no, you really crave your bed and blanket for a solid eight hours of sleep.
But you have no time for either. The meeting is in three minutes. You grab your laptop, and before you walk out the door, it happens again. That internal switch flips. You don’t know what it is, you don’t even know if it has a name.
You are confused, the work is done. It’s not perfect but you felt totally confident just hours ago. And still, your body is really tense, and you can’t think straight.
You keep walking with a knot in your belly, trying to look normal. You start forcing yourself to breathe while repeating some positive affirmations: “There is no need to stress that much. I did the work. It will be fine.” You really do believe what you are saying, yet the tension in your body remains the same. At some point, you start wishing they would just forget about you. Hoping they get so caught up in a debate that the meeting ends before your turn.
But as you already know, it never happens that way and you end up hearing your name. You stand up. Walk to the white board. Display your presentation on the screen. Stiff body. Focused gaze.
And you just start: where you are at, what you did, why you did it that way, and finally, what next steps you’re taking.
And it’s only once you reach that last part, where you don’t have anything left to prove, that you suddenly realize: it’s over, and you nailed it in one continuous stream.
You didn’t even blink. But you didn’t feel anything either. It’s like it wasn’t even you. It’s as if you weren’t even there—like you stepped out of your body during the presentation and only slid back into it for the final slide.
You walk back to your seat while your boss says something like, “Fine, that’s good. We can move to Sandrine now.” And in that moment, something in you whispers: “Why all that stress when three weeks of progress takes you less than a morning’s work?” You tell yourself that you belong to the most stressed generation in history, this is just how life is. And you focus on Sandrine’s part.
The meeting ends with your boss listing all the things to do before the next meeting. You listen to your part while mentally mapping out how you’ll go about it: “This section comes first, and that one isn’t really needed but if he wants it that way, it will be done that way. The last part needs to summarize the whole thing…” Completely unaware that this isn’t normal, to be in two places at once, listening to the present while actively planning for the future, feeling the urge to be ahead, as if your mind needed to anticipate in order to feel safe.
You stay in the meeting room for the rest of the afternoon, working on the project. When it’s finally time to leave, you receive a message. “I will pick up the kids from school, see you at home.” Grateful and relieved, you say thanks, grab your bag from your office, and head to the exit.
You get into your car thinking about the dinner you still need to prepare; you start making a list of what’s left in the fridge. You couldn’t go shopping this weekend, your youngest had diarrhea and you all just stayed home. He has a fragile stomach, mixing up foods easily makes him sick, and what you have in the fridge can only make pizza, pasta or any other Mediterranean dishes. Which means the sauce would have to be rich to have any flavor. Forget the sauce, it will be vegetables, rice and meatballs with little to no butter for everyone tonight.
Glad to have finally been able to wrap this up, now all you have to do is boil the rice, take the meat out of the fridge, you have bananas for the dessert, “Yeah banana is good for what he’s got.” you think to yourself, “It’s not all that bad in the end now that the dinner is locked.”
And before you even realize it, you’re in the middle of your kitchen, getting the meatballs from the fridge.
The Drive You Don’t Remember
And this sudden realization makes you freeze. Your thoughts start racing: “How did you get there? Who drove? When did you leave? How come you walked from your car to the kitchen without even noticing it?”
Your husband joins you in the kitchen and says, “Hi, how was your day?” You answer something like, “Fine and you?”
Because what else can you say? That you just drove all the way back home without thinking? THINKING! Can one even drive without thinking? Is that even possible?
So you quickly make the decision to focus on his day—on how his office move is going, about his assistant who forgot to turn off the oven again and had to rush home to check on it, about the kids who want a race car and a giant doll for their next birthdays, and any other thing that will make you forget what you just experienced.
So you nod, you smile and you answer things like “Oh again” and “Oh yeah sure sure,” while setting the table. Your husband helps you carry over what’s left on the counter and you call out to the kids that the dinner is ready.
They don’t make you yell twice, they must be really starving. The little one looks really fine, you ask him about his belly and he says that it doesn’t hurt anymore.
You ask the oldest about his school project, he says that the teacher was happy with it, and like any good parent, you ask more questions, so he tells you the whole story. And without missing a single detail, you gently ask his little brother to finish his vegetables.
Not Fully There
In the middle of the dinner, while listening to what should be the best part of your day, you realize you are not fully there. It’s as if you were totally activated when you needed to rush and do things, and once the surroundings settled, a part of you switches off. Literally.
You just detached in a second. And now it feels like you are watching it all from a distance, unable to fill the void, unable to reach the presence where all of this exists.
You do your best to focus, to stay mentally where your body is. You move forward, get closer to the table, widen your eyes, your eyebrows go up and you start nodding along to what’s being said, convinced that nodding will help you stay present.
And at this moment you realize that you feel exactly how you did at lunchtime. Forcing attention, unable to focus. Making all this effort for half presence.
You end up confused, and guilty. You start thinking: “Why does this happen?” “Must be me. I need to manage my life better.” “I don’t know what I need to do.” “Are there things I can do?” “Does this happen to anyone?”
After dinner, kids and their father go upstairs so he can help them with their homework. You finish clearing the table, and while you load the dishwasher, you make the final call in a negotiation that lasted all day: laundry will wait. So once you finish the dishes, you just push the basket under the table, and look away as quickly as possible, running from both the guilt and the possibility of seeing something that can change your mind and make you do it.
The Noise That Won’t Let You Rest
Exhausted, you drag your feet to the sofa, and just reach for your phone naturally. Scrolling isn’t your favorite activity, you even promised yourself to quit. But in a certain mysterious way, you just keep coming back to it.
It takes hold of all your attention, makes everything around fade, and finally lets your brain stop racing. And for just that moment, you become nobody, nobody counts on you, nothing waits for you. You are just not here anymore.
So once you have a little moment in the evening, you reach for that screen, and it offers you all that different content, chosen specially for you by an algorithm that knows you well enough to give you exactly what you need: some free time from this really demanding and never satisfied reality.
And at the end of the day, it gives you what nothing else could: a pause—from others, from your mind, from expectations.
But the relief only lasts a second, it’s bedtime. You go into the kids’ room. Pull their pajamas from the closet. Get the shower ready. Help the youngest brush his teeth. And tell them a bedtime story before you turn off the light and finally head to your own bed.
Bedtime, and Then It Isn’t
You thought about this exact moment this morning. You promised yourself that you would sleep early, that you wouldn’t go on your phone. So here you are finally, you say good night to your husband who is focused on his screen. You put on your sleep mask, turn onto your favorite side and close your eyes.
Thoughts begin to drift by like clouds. You let them pass at first. Then you think about the project of this morning for a moment, but you interrupt yourself quickly. You need to sleep, you remind yourself. You stay quiet for a moment, and then it’s the laundry. Kids have nothing to wear tomorrow. Your heart starts beating really fast, “They’re just clothes,” you tell yourself, “You will end up finding something in their closet, as usual.” Plus you need to sleep. Nothing is more important than your sleep.
And before you can help it, you remember that the fridge is empty, you turn to ask your husband if he can handle the grocery shopping the next morning, but he’s already asleep, so you turn back to your position. And from that moment it isn’t about sleep anymore.
Everything you tried to keep yourself from thinking about suddenly resurfaces, drowning you in an endless loop of self-judgement and self-defense, with a mix of guilt, resentment, and exhaustion.
At some point, you become so harsh on yourself that you can’t take it anymore. You need to get out of your head. You open your eyes, your breath is shallow, your muscles tense, air is hard to grasp and almost unconsciously you start looking for your phone.
When you finally find it, you unlock it as fast as someone rushing toward an emergency exit. You start scrolling a little and the tension in your muscles starts to ease, you are not in your head anymore. A few reels later, you are now totally absorbed by the screen, and you are not in bed anymore.
You end up sleeping without locking your phone.
You will wake up the day after, and you will blame yourself for this. You won’t be able to recall why you needed it so badly, or that you didn’t even have a choice.
And this will be your first tab. It will last some seconds and it will end with the same old and well-known promise: “tonight I won’t scroll, tonight I will sleep early.”
And before you even have time to blink, another tab will open in your mind: the project, the laundry, the kids… And what was supposed to be a new day, full of new promises, will end up being managed by the same background noise that dictated your life the day before.
The noise that never lets you pause, rest or recover. The one that is so present, that it steals all your focus, your attention and your energy, acting like a thick block of glass between you and the world. And between you and yourself.
What’s Actually Happening: A Dysregulated Nervous System
You have a system inside you that manages pretty much everything essential: breathing, blinking, making your heart beat, digesting food, and protecting you; both from what is happening inside—filtering toxins, healing wounds, fighting off infection— and from the outside world.
And in order to do that properly, that system devotes all its waking time to scanning, monitoring and trying to predict if there is any threat around you.
A threat can be anything from your boss’s pursed lips to Bernard’s judging look to the huge project that you nailed in less than a morning. Yes, nothing that seems really dangerous.
And yet, once the nervous system perceives one, it becomes “activated” and turns on the loop: the muscles tense, the breathing accelerates, the heart beats faster, the focus narrows, the overthinking becomes unstoppable… And once it deems you are out of danger, it just switches off the loop and settles again to the recovery state—where it can scan, monitor and predict, at a steady pace.
The issue is when threats start coming back-to-back, not giving your system time to rest. In order to not waste time and energy, the system just stays activated, and the loop stays on.
So you start living in a state where your system stays alert all the time. This is where the background noise begins. And with time, it starts humming in the background. Constantly. Every minute of every day. It never settles, never recovers, never comes back to the baseline. And everything becomes a threat.
This is when you pass from activated to dysregulated. From a state you enter when something triggers you and leave once things settle, to a permanent state where everything around you becomes triggering. From a loop that switches on and off when needed, to a loop that never stops.
Everything becomes too much, little stress starts looking huge, a weekly meeting becomes terrifying and overthinking starts needing an emergency exit.
And this is when you start driving on autopilot, you dissociate from yourself while presenting your work, you force yourself to stay present in conversations that require no effort, you misjudge a normal project as huge and untouchable and avoid it for three weeks, you scroll to escape yourself, the laundry basket tells you how to feel about yourself, everything becomes a negotiation, and all of this starts to distort how you see yourself…
Dysregulation is also what makes you crave eight hours of sleep, what gives you the knot in your throat, then in your belly, the exhaustion, the heart racing, the muscles tensing, the breath that feels impossible…
All the masking and performing you do are symptoms of dysregulation too, the smiling that you know is too much, the nodding along when all you need is to shut down, the amount of effort you have to make in order to be half present…
Plus all the sacrifices you make every day to survive in this situation. The sacrifices can look like choosing to eat light in order to feel less tired, listening and planning at the same time, and over-preparing by making endless checklists and to-do lists in your head and on paper. And the huge amount of time, energy and authenticity you waste.
What a Regulated Nervous System Actually Feels Like
A regulated nervous system, on the other hand, isn’t you being calm and peaceful about everything. You still feel anger, stress, sadness, fear. But none of these makes you disconnect from yourself.
Concretely, this would look like being present while driving home, having full capacity while presenting your work. You don’t force conversations, and they don’t drain you.
You start the project once you receive it, you can still feel a little stressed about it, but not to the point where you avoid it for three weeks.
The laundry doesn’t tell you anything about yourself, whether you do it or don’t. No shame, no guilt, just something that needs to be done and will be done once you decide to do it.
Rest is rest when you are regulated, not planning, not thinking, not scrolling. Because you don’t need to run from yourself anymore. Your body doesn’t hurt anymore, your throat isn’t tight anymore. You can just lay down, and your muscles relax.
And because your body doesn’t send any alert messages to your nervous system, your mind stays calm, your thoughts steady, they don’t come at you all at once.
The fatigue you feel decreases, because your internal system doesn’t take all the energy anymore. So you feel less heavy, less rushed.
You start eating food that really nourishes your body, and stop compromising in order to keep functioning normally. You become more aware of what your body is trying to tell you.
Emotions, feelings and body sensations become real messages about what you need at that moment rather than discomforts you try to run from.
The self-critic’s voice goes low, it doesn’t disappear completely, but it doesn’t have any control over what you believe about yourself anymore. So you stop asking yourself why you smiled that way, or if your nodding looked weird, or whether you should have talked more, or less.
You start seeing things as they are, no longer filtered by a dysregulated nervous system.
You know yourself better when regulated. Nothing tells you who you are anymore—not the laundry, not what you do or give, not your thoughts or your work. And this happens because regulation gives you back the capacity to see things for what they are.
When dysregulated, your nervous system always decides in emergency. It needs to put you out of danger first, no matter what this makes you think about yourself. The priority is safety. Even if your nervous system doesn’t see safety as you do. It’s just a bunch of nerves at the end; it doesn’t think.
The prefrontal cortex does: analyze the situation, decide which response is most logical and rational and then execute it. But when your nervous system is dysregulated, none of these can happen—thinking is just unreachable.
The bridge that takes you from dysregulation to regulation, or from survival to choice, lies in your nervous system. And the door is your body—not the thoughts as a lot of people seem to think. The more relaxed your body is, the safer your nervous system feels.
It takes time, a lot. Practice. And patience. But it’s the most meaningful expedition towards the most valuable thing you can ever have. Choose your practice, your pace and love yourself extra every day—it won’t always feel like you deserve it but you do!
Disclaimer: If these physical sensations or patterns feel too heavy to bear, please do not fight them alone. Talking to a professional can help you navigate this effectively. Your mental health matters, and there are people trained to support you. Please reach out to them.
Sources
- Sirois, F. M., & Pychyl, T. A. (2013). Procrastination and the priority of short-term mood regulation: Consequences for future self. Social and Personality Psychology Compass
- Killingsworth, M. A., & Gilbert, D. T. (2010). A wandering mind is an unhappy mind. Science
- Chi, N.-W., Chang, H.-T., & Huang, H.-L. (2015). Workplace surface acting and marital partner discontent: Anxiety and exhaustion spillover mechanisms. Journal of Occupational Health Psychology
- Arnsten, A. F. T. (2009). Stress signalling pathways that impair prefrontal cortex structure and function. Nature Reviews Neuroscience
- Cerezuela, G. P., et al. (2004). Wertheim’s hypothesis on ‘highway hypnosis’: Empirical evidence from a study on motorway and conventional road driving. ResearchGate
- Cannon, W. B. (1915). Bodily Changes in Pain, Hunger, Fear and Rage.
- McEwen, B. S. (1998). Stress, adaptation, and disease: Allostasis and allostatic load. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences
- Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990). Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience
- Payne, P., Levine, P. A., & Crane-Godreau, M. A. (2015). Somatic experiencing: using interoception and proprioception as core elements of trauma therapy. Frontiers in Psychology
and if you ever wondered…
Written by someone who’s spent a lot of time trying to understand her own reactions, and who believes the more we understand our nervous system, the gentler we can be with ourselves and the world.
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