When Overwhelm Starts Making the Decisions
Sometimes the wave begins long before we realise we’re drowning in it. Nervous system overload often shows up quietly — in exhaustion, overwhelm, and the small decisions that become harder to make.
There are times in life when it can feel as though you are carrying far more than you were ever designed to hold, like a bag stuffed so full that things are spilling out in all directions.
It’s not always dramatic, either. Sometimes it’s simply the steady accumulation of things — decisions to make, uncertainty humming in the background, sensory overload, emotional strain, interrupted routines, or too many moving parts all at once.
You keep going because you have to, and because women like us often do. We carry. We manage. We adapt, and we keep stuffing things into our bags.
Eventually, somewhere beneath the surface, the tsunami begins to build, becoming a monster wave you’re unable to ride.
If you’re both highly sensitive and high sensation seeking — what I call dual-wired — that wave can become particularly difficult to recognise in real time, because part of you is still fully engaged with life while another part is quietly moving towards overload.
That’s the paradox of it.
You can be functioning beautifully on the outside while your nervous system is already beginning to fray beneath the surface.
In my last post, When Eating Is About Relief, Not Hunger, I wrote about the moment the wave tips — when the nervous system begins reaching for relief because it has crossed a threshold.
This post sits just before that point.
Because what I’ve noticed, both in myself and in so many other women like me, is that long before we reach for comfort through food, shopping, scrolling, overworking, alcohol, or any of the other ways humans try to soothe themselves, something else has often already started happening first.
Our decision-making quietly and gradually changes, driven by our body chemistry.
The Quiet Shift You Don’t Always See
It rarely feels dramatic at first.
More often, it arrives as a subtle narrowing of capacity. You feel a little more tired than usual, a little less patient, a little less able to hold all the moving pieces comfortably, and things that would normally feel manageable suddenly seem noisier, harder, and heavier somehow.
Without even consciously noticing it, your choices start to shift.
You skip the pause that might have helped you reset and move towards what feels easiest or quickest because your system no longer has the bandwidth for endless decisions. You stop responding from steadiness and start responding from depletion.
None of it feels particularly significant in isolation, but when it’s all layered together, that’s where the wave starts building momentum.
A Real-Life Example
I saw this very clearly the other day.
It had already been a full day — lots of movement, lots of sensory input, lots of emotional energy humming underneath everything. They weren’t necessarily bad things, either; in fact, some of it was genuinely lovely. There was connection, conversation, stimulation, colour, and movement, so the high sensation-seeking side of me was very much alive and engaged with all of it.
But underneath that, another part of my system was becoming increasingly overloaded, so by the time I pulled into the supermarket car park late in the afternoon, I was done.
There were students everywhere pouring out of the nearby schools, people moving in every direction, noise, traffic, trolleys rattling across the concrete, fluorescent lights already waiting for me inside. I sat in the car for several minutes just trying to gather enough energy to walk through the doors.
And eventually, I did.
But I wasn’t walking into that supermarket with a calm, regulated nervous system — I was already feeling drowned by the tsunami, and from that state, the decisions I made weren't the same ones I would have made on a steadier day.
I reached for things that felt comforting rather than things that would genuinely nourish me. I justified choices I would normally think twice about because my brain simply wanted ease, relief, and reward.
By the time I got home and actually ate some of what I’d bought, it didn’t even taste good. It was just an ultra-processed sweet overload masquerading as comfort.
That’s the part I think many women miss. We’re not suddenly weak, lazy, undisciplined, or lacking in knowledge — the truth is that our nervous system changes the conditions under which the decisions are being made.
It’s Not About Willpower — It’s About State
We’ve been taught to think about food, habits, and self-care as though they exist inside neat little boxes labelled “good choices” and “bad choices.”
But human beings don’t function in neat little boxes because our physiology matters.
The state of our nervous system matters.
When our body has been carrying sustained emotional, sensory, or cognitive overload for a long time, it begins to respond accordingly.
Stress hormones rise. Cortisol and adrenaline keep us functioning, coping, and pushing through the endless list of things that need to happen, but eventually the body starts compensating for that prolonged state of activation.
Energy drops
Digestion changes
Blood sugar becomes less stable
Sleep often becomes patchy and unrefreshing.
Nausea
Dizziness
Chronic fatigue
Emotional fragility
All of these states can emerge when our nervous system has been running too hot for too long.
At the same time, our brain starts to scan for relief, and that’s where the compulsive pull can suddenly grip you.
For some women, it’s food, the heady hit of high-calorie, highly dense foods. For others, it may be alcohol, shopping, scrolling, gambling, overworking, relentless busyness, or simply never stopping long enough to feel what’s underneath everything.
Some women stop nourishing themselves properly at all, running on caffeine, adrenaline, and stress, while their bodies quietly become more depleted.
The behaviour itself can vary enormously, but the pattern underneath it often doesn’t.
A nervous system under pressure will reach for whatever it has learned might bring even temporary relief, and when those pathways have been reinforced over years or decades, they become very difficult to override through logic alone.
It’s not failure — it’s because your body is hardwired to respond to nervous system overload this way.
Catching the Wave Earlier
This is why I think the real question is not:
How do I control myself better once I’m already overwhelmed?
It’s:
Can I recognise the wave a little earlier?
Can I notice when my capacity is narrowing before I’m already deep inside the spiral?
Can I see the physiological signs for what they are, rather than treating them as personal weakness?
The earliest signals are surprisingly physical and can be quite subtle, things like:
Clumsiness
Forgetfulness
Quick temper
Feeling nauseous
Wanting everything and everyone to go away
Craving intensity while simultaneously feeling incapable of handling any more input.
That’s often the nervous system speaking long before conscious awareness catches up.
What Helps Before It Escalates
First, identify the key stressors and get really clear about what’s adding to the tsunami — it could be physical exertion, work and home-life stresses, emotional turmoil, or beliefs that drive you to push harder or be there for everyone else.
If possible, remove some of these, start offloading where you can, set some boundaries, delegate, and review what’s really necessary and important.
Of course, these things take a bit of time and conscious effort, but there are small tricks that can help you to turn down your nervous system just a notch or two when the major stressors are impossible to remove.
Turn the radio off on the drive home or sit quietly in the car for a minute before walking into another stimulating environment. Drink water — you would not believe how much of an impact being dehydrated has on your nervous system.
If your ingrained response to stress and nervous system overload is to reach for quick, high-calorie, highly dense foods, eat something grounding before you become desperately hungry (like nourishing soups), and reduce the number of decisions your brain has to make when you already know your system is overloaded by being prepared early in the day.
Sometimes it means lowering the bar entirely and asking:
What would most kindly support my body right now?
It’s not about perfection — it’s about figuring out what works best for you and having that on hand.
Sometimes nourishment has very little to do with food at all, and what we really need is rest, movement outside in nature, quiet, tears, or breathing deeply enough that your body realises it is safe again. Sometimes it’s about releasing the emotional energy that's been sitting heavily in the system for far too long.
All of it matters.
Because nourishment, at least in the way I think about it, is not just about nutrition.
It’s about helping the nervous system return to balance after life has pulled it too far in one direction for too long.
The Bigger Picture
This is where all the branches of A Balanced Life begin weaving together.
Grounded gives us awareness — the ability to notice the wave building in the first place.
Embodiment helps us reconnect with what is happening in the body instead of trying to think our way through everything.
Nourishment becomes the collection of tools, supports, rhythms, and choices that help us care for ourselves inside the reality of being human and dual-wired.
We use our Breathe to help regulate and find safety, and explore our Emotions and our Beliefs, which are often in the deepest trenches of our being, consistently building bigger and bigger waves.
There will absolutely be times when everything you know, all those nourishing routines and practices, go out the window because life piles up, grief arrives, stress accumulates, and big transitions happen. Our nervous systems get overwhelmed despite all the tools we have.
That isn’t failure.
It’s life!
The goal is not perfect balance at all times.
The goal is learning how to ride the wave with a little more understanding, a little more gentleness, and a little less shame.
And slowly, over time, learning how to come back to ourselves.
PS. In the next post, I’ll explore what happens when overwhelm becomes something you can physically feel trapped inside the body — and how movement, breath, and somatic release can sometimes help the nervous system finally let go of what it has been holding.
You’ll find more in the Nourishment series here:
