What Happens When Your Nervous System Hits Overload
When your body and nervous system have been overloaded for too long, from stress, misdiagnosis, or a system that never helped you stabilize, it stops sending clear signals. What you feel instead is fog, panic, or emotional flooding. But those states aren’t failures or disorders. They’re mechanical outcomes of how the body handles survival load. Once I stopped treating them like random symptoms and started reading them like patterned outputs, I could finally map what was breaking down and what helped bring me back.
Mental Fog: When Your Brain Goes Quiet Under Load
Mental fog is what I felt when my thoughts slowed down but not in a peaceful way, more like being underwater. I’d sit down to focus and my brain just wouldn’t boot up. It wasn’t a lack of effort, it was like my cognitive bandwidth had been hijacked. What I eventually learned is that this fog wasn’t just “in my head”, it was a physiological redirection. When the nervous system is in a prolonged fight‑or‑flight or freeze state, blood flow and metabolic energy get pulled away from the prefrontal cortex (thinking center) and rerouted to survival systems. (clevelandclinic.org)
For me, fog showed up after poor sleep, dehydration, high stress, or heavy food combined with dysregulated breathing. It also hit hardest when I’d been “running on willpower” for days and then suddenly stopped. I used to fight it by pushing through, but that only made it worse. What helped was recognizing fog as a low-signal warning, a prompt to pause, hydrate, breathe low and slow, and reduce stimulus. Within minutes, I could sometimes feel my thoughts sharpen just from getting my body into a more regulated state.
Anxiety: A Fast Nervous System with Nowhere to Go
Anxiety was the opposite, not slow and foggy, but fast and scattered. My heart would race, my chest would tighten, and I’d feel like I needed to do something but couldn’t figure out what. Sometimes there was no real trigger, just a sense of buzzing or urgency. Over time, I learned that this wasn’t just “anxiety” in the psychological sense. It was my autonomic nervous system in a sympathetic surge, my body was acting like there was danger, even if there wasn’t. (mayoclinic.org)
I tracked this pattern repeatedly: shallow breathing → rising heart rate → poor digestion → jittery mind. The more I ignored the early signs, the worse the wave would hit. What helped was preemptive grounding: long exhales, humming to activate my vagus nerve, and noticing if I had skipped food or water. I also learned that sometimes, anxiety was a misinterpreted energy spike, my body trying to power up but getting misread as panic. Once I understood that, I could direct that energy instead of fearing it.
Overwhelm: Too Many Inputs, No Clear Priority
Overwhelm wasn’t just emotion, it was what happened when too much input came in and my system couldn’t decide what to do first. Thoughts would stack up, tasks would pile, and suddenly everything felt impossible. For me, this usually followed mental fog and anxiety, once the fog broke and the anxiety rose, overwhelm showed up as the crash when I realized how much had built up. My body would go stiff, my mind would freeze, and I’d feel stuck. And because I’d been through trauma and medical gaslighting, even small decisions could feel high-stakes.
The fix wasn’t more motivation, it was less input. I had to learn to shut off nonessential tasks, remove choices, and focus on the next single mechanical step. Not the whole day. Just the next glass of water, the next 5-minute pause, or the next body scan. That’s when I saw it clearly: overwhelm is not a character flaw. It’s what happens when your brain has no regulated buffer left. It’s a bandwidth problem. And you solve bandwidth problems by closing tabs, not by trying to power through.