“Anxiety and trauma impair decision making.  The fear of making the wrong choice creates analysis paralysis.  The feeling of being stuck is not a character flaw.  It’s cognitive overload.  When someone feels stuck, and I’ve done this to myself, they often blame it on their own weakness, their own laziness, or emotional instability, but the truth is stuck-ness is usually just the result of too many competing internal demands.  Your brain isn’t broken, it’s overwhelmed. Cognitive overload happens when your brain’s working memory is trying to juggle too much at once. Emotionally, mentally, or even physically.  I know you understand because your brain is going a thousand miles per hour and keeps you stuck in a situation.  A 2011 study published in Psychological Science shows high emotional stress impairs the pre-fontal cortex, the part responsible for decision making, planning, and impulse control. When overwhelmed emotionally, clarity is neurologically blocked.  What triggers emotional overwhelm is stacked unresolved emotions, lack of boundaries, neglecting basic physical needs, unmet needs for safety and validation, overintellectualizing instead of feeling, and toxic relationships that keep you in a state of hypervigilance,” JB Copeland. 

Recently there’s been an influx of information shared about the nervous system and regulating it.  The goal is to create understanding around body function and how we can work with our nervous systems to regulate and make better choices.  It explains how our body is wired and the things we do either help or hinder it—and how we can get back to a neutral state to better make decisions.  We live in a society that is always on, always moving, always striving, always proving, always trying to make sense of something.  The human mind and body aren’t designed to function like that.  We need the ebbs and flows, the on and the off so we can recharge.  We make each other feel like we are weak if we somehow can’t keep up with an impossible expectation of doing it all.  Even when we don’t know what doing it all means.  We put ourselves into a state of anxiety where we can’t make logical decisions only to be taught to blame ourselves for not functioning in a way we weren’t designed to function in the first place.  Overwhelm is a dangerous thing.  Multiple drives, directives, desires pull people in multiple directions and we can’t focus. And we make ourselves sick.

We need to understand that mental health is synonymous with self-regulation and awareness.  It doesn’t mean anything is wrong with us, it means we are trying to function in a system not designed for us.  We put too much on our plates and are critical of ourselves and then put more and more on there until we are buried and have no way out.  It’s important to slow down for our sanity and for our actual function.  We need to change the story around the premise that we are supposed to be in constant motion, always doing, always productive.  If we don’t address the root cause of that overwhelm we will constantly find ourselves in that state, unable to move.  Don’t mistake what I’m saying—we are indeed meant to move, we just aren’t meant to move how we do now.  Slow down, take it all in, breathe.  The better we take care of ourselves the better we can make decisions.  So move, flow, don’t force—and in that context it has nothing to do with attracting—it just has to do with getting on track, our own track.