> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.withlovesm.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # The science behind overwhelm, overreacting, stress, and burnout: your brain has a limit, and it's probably lower than you thought - URL: https://www.withlovesm.com/the-science-behind-overwhelm/ - Published: 2026-08-12T00:47:31.000Z - Updated: 2026-08-12T01:50:45.000Z - Description: August 12, 2026 - Author: sasha mekker - Tags: blog I'm not an audiobook gal, I like to hold a book in my hands and reread the same paragraph 5 times. I like to fold over the pages I wanna come back to, scribble my notes in the margins, and highlight until there's more color than white space. So pressing play on my first audiobook last week was a big deal. Long story short, I'm holding myself to 1 walk outside a day. It's hard to actually get up from a flowstate at work and go, but usually I can put on headphones and use music as my motivator. That's another reason I never listen to audiobooks, because if I was gonna put something on, why wouldn't it just be one of the hundreds of curated playlists I spend hours making? Rare... but nothing was hittin right last week, so I decided to scroll Spotify's audiobook page (ofc I auto piloted and clicked the "self-improvement" category). A few days later, here I am 3 hours and 44 min into "Stop Letting Everything Affect You" by Daniel Chidiac (linked at end of this article) \[1\]. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/34/81/34819328-4f18-4378-909b-2a66141df7bf/content/images/2026/08/Screenshot-2026-08-11-at-5.06.46---PM.png) I will say, the amount of times I've had to use the 15 second rewind button, or open my notes app and write something down is absurd. But I guess that just means the book is good. I chose this audiobook because for a lot of my life I've felt like I react way bigger than a situation actually calls for, then I spiral about my reaction. And most of this is internal, but naturally, it doesn't always stay internal. It shows up in how I treat the people around me and in how I move through my own life. In those moments I don't really recognize myself. My actions become out of alignment with my values and the self work I've done. I know it's human to get frustrated and annoyed and it's more than okay to express that. But the version of me who knows better also knows how much time and energy gets wasted staying stuck in it, and giving everything the opportunity to affect me so deeply. This book has already presented me with sooo much real research and science on why this happens. It's been eye opening and really a reminder to zoom out. To stop looking at everything from such a narrow, self centered lens and basically go touch grass. That sounds harsh. But I think the best "self-improvement" books are gonna challenge you and make you want to argue back or come up with an excuse. That's when you know you've gotta keep reading. If anything piece of writing or art makes you irritated like that, there's your reason to dive into it even deeper. This thing called "cognitive load theory" was briefly mentioned in one of the early chapters and I had noted to look more into it. So here's me doing that. It was developed by psychologist John Sweller \[2\] in the late 1980s, originally to study how people learn. His research kept pointing to the same conclusion = our working memory has a hard limit. Working memory is your brain actively handling whatever you're doing right now. We're too weak to hold more, the system itself is just literally built with a ceiling. Based on older research from the 1950s, that ceiling was seven things \[3\]. A 2001 study revisited that number and found it was actually smaller. FOUR \[4\]. That's the actual room you're working with before your brain starts struggling to process anything well. Working memory doesn't only hold facts and tasks, it holds unprocessed emotions too. Every unresolved conversation, every feeling you didn't have time to sit with in your crazy busy day, every thing you added to your mental to do list... it's all competing for that same small amount of space. So if you're already carrying a full plate of that stuff, there's very little room left for whatever new thing life throws at you. Which is exactly why the same exact situation can barely affect you one day and completely wreck you another day. Example: something as small as spilling your coffee on yourself can be a "that sucks but whatever" one morning, and it can be the reason you're crying in your car next week. Same coffee, same spill. That never changed, how much room you had left when it happened did. There's also a stress piece to this that I think explains a lot. A researcher named Amy Arnsten \[5\] studies what stress actually does to the prefrontal cortex, which is the part of your brain responsible for rational thinking, planning, and regulating emotion. She's found that under stress, your brain essentially shifts power away from that rational part and toward more primitive systems, like the ones responsible for fight or flight. So when you're already stressed and something small happens, you're not reacting from your most clear headed self. You're reacting from a brain that's temporarily handed control over to its most reactive parts. I feel like everyone knows this on some level, maybe just not the actual science behind it. Personally, learning that made me feel better. Like alllllright this is literally neurochemistry and I've been calling it a detrimental character flaw. So now I feel like there's something I can actually work with here. Buuuutttt knowing the science doesn't mean it instantly changes. These reactive patterns are actual neural pathways that have been getting reinforced for so long. I wish undoing them was a switch I could flip now that I understand it a bit more intellectually. I know it'll take actually practicing a different response, over and over until it becomes the pathway that fires first instead. Story of my life (re: my last article). A few standouts from the solutions chapter of the book. **Naming what you're feeling as it comes.** It's not just a vibes thing, this actually does something measurable in your brain. Matthew Lieberman \[6\] ran a study out of UCLA using brain scans and found that when people put a specific word to an emotion they were experiencing, activity in the amygdala, which is the brain's alarm system, actually calmed down. At the same time, activity increased in the part of the prefrontal cortex. Which means naming a feeling shifts some of the control back to the calmer, more capable part of your brain. Not "I feel bad." It's gotta be something more specific. Disappointed. On edge. Overstimulated. Since the specificity of the feeling is doing the real work, [here's this feelings wheel ](https://www.calm.com/blog/the-feelings-wheel?ref=withlovesm.com)I used in therapy a few months ago. A few standouts from the solutions chapter of the book. **Attention restoration theory.** Not all rest is created equal, and there's actually research behind that. Rachel and Stephen Kaplan \[7\] found that certain kinds of rest restore your ability to focus, while others barely do anything. I'm gonna guess that scrolling reels "still demands your directed attention", so it doesn't give your brain the break it actually needs (rip). What does help is time in low stimulation environments where your attention isn't being pulled anywhere in particular. As someone who's very go go go, grind mode, especially at work, taking breaks scare me. But multiple studies show that with breaks, even as short as 5 minutes (spent actually restoring), come significant boosts in productivity and creativity \[9\], along with a reduction in stress hormones \[8\]. I guess my outdoor walks are a W. "Even brief periods of complete attentional rest, done regularly, can prevent the cognitive depletion that leads to emotional reactivity and mental exhaustion. This isn't indulgence. It's necessary maintenance for your most precious resource, your capacity for focused attention and emotional regulation." **Thought containment practice.** Also known as "the container method". Researcher Thomas Borkovec \[10\] studied this back in the early 1980s while looking into chronic worry and generalized anxiety. He found that trying to just suppress a worry usually backfires and tends to come back louder and more frequent. The opposite approach actually helped. Giving the worry a designated time instead of trying to make it disappear completely. The idea is you pick a specific time each day and treat that as designated worry time. When something pops into your head outside that window, you tell yourself "I hear you, I see you, I'll deal with ya later", and write it down instead of engaging with it right then. Then when worry time comes around, you go through whatever you wrote and ask, "is there anything I can actually do about this right now?" If yes, you take the most baby step possible. If no, you let yourself sit with the uncertainty instead of forcing an answer that isn't there. The theory is that over time your brain starts to trust that the thought will get its turn, just not immediately, which takes a lot of the urgency out of it. This whole instant rumination and needing answers NOW thing is something I definitely struggle with so I am 100% down to try this and report back. Also with this practice came the idea of a "counter narrative journal". It's writing down evidence that contradicts the more deeply ingrained thought patterns that show up on your worry list often. Then everyday, you're gradually building a case for a new perspective. "What you focus on expands, so by deliberately giving attention to these things that contradict the worries or negative beliefs you hold so closely, you are breaking neural pathways that don't serve you." I'm excited to try all this stuff. I still have days that feel impossible and I know they aren't gonna stop coming around. But this made me remember how much I love learning about self-improvement in research and science backed ways. And it's making me think about my last article too, about rewriting who we tell ourselves we are/what the voice in our head says. This stuff keeps helping me realize I'm not too sensitive, I just have a brain with limits like everyone else. You're really watching me piece things together article by article here lol. Understanding the science behind this doesn't excuse how you treat yourself and other people when you're overloaded, that part's still on you. But it does change what you do with a less than ideal moment as it comes and once it passes. Earlier I said this book felt like a reminder to zoom out. Chidiac uses the metaphor of how you can't see your hand clearly when it's pressed right up against your face. You have to move it back before it actually comes into focus. That's actually the whole point of all of this. The four items, the naming, the worry time, the counter narrative journal. No it's not that you have to "fix yourself". You just have to get enough space back to see past your own nose again. You can't see your life clearly when you're pressed that close to every single thing that happens in it. Now go touch grass and also read (or listen to!!) the actual book. I know it seems like I gave you a lot of it already (I do hope you're feeling intrigued and equipped w some new tools to try out), but genuinely, I barely scratched the surface of the first four chapters in this article. Dive deeper, learn how to free up some space in ya head. *with love, sm* --- **The actual sources, if you wanna go down the rabbit hole too** - **\[1\]** Chidiac, D. (2025). *Stop Letting Everything Affect You: How to Break Free from Overthinking, Emotional Chaos and Self-Sabotage.* Undercover Publishing House. [https://www.danielchidiac.com/](https://www.danielchidiac.com/?ref=withlovesm.com) - **\[2\]** Sweller, J. (1988). *Cognitive load during problem solving: Effects on learning.* Cognitive Science, 12(2), 257–285. [https://doi.org/10.1207/s15516709cog1202\_4](https://doi.org/10.1207/s15516709cog1202%5F4?ref=withlovesm.com) - **\[3\]** Miller, G. A. (1956). *The magical number seven, plus or minus two.* Psychological Review, 63(2), 81–97. [https://doi.org/10.1037/h0043158](https://doi.org/10.1037/h0043158?ref=withlovesm.com) - **\[4\]** Cowan, N. (2001). *The magical number 4 in short-term memory: A reconsideration of mental storage capacity.* Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 24(1), 87–114. [https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X01003922](https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X01003922?ref=withlovesm.com) - **\[5\]** Arnsten, A. F. T. (2009). *Stress signalling pathways that impair prefrontal cortex structure and function.* Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 10, 410–422. [https://doi.org/10.1038/nrn2648](https://doi.org/10.1038/nrn2648?ref=withlovesm.com) - **\[6\]** Lieberman, M. D., Eisenberger, N. I., Crockett, M. J., Tom, S. M., Pfeifer, J. H., & Way, B. M. (2007). *Putting feelings into words: Affect labeling disrupts amygdala activity in response to affective stimuli.* Psychological Science, 18(5), 421–428. [https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2007.01916.x](https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2007.01916.x?ref=withlovesm.com) - **\[7\]** Kaplan, S. (1995). *The restorative benefits of nature: Toward an integrative framework.* Journal of Environmental Psychology, 15(3), 169–182. [https://doi.org/10.1016/0272-4944(95)90001-2](https://doi.org/10.1016/0272-4944%2895%2990001-2?ref=withlovesm.com) - **\[8\]** Albulescu, P., Macsinga, I., Rusu, A., Sulea, C., Bodnaru, A., & Tulbure, B. T. (2022). *"Give me a break!" A systematic review and meta-analysis on the efficacy of micro-breaks for increasing well-being and performance.* PLOS ONE, 17(8). [https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0272460](https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0272460?ref=withlovesm.com) - **\[9\]** Pencavel, J. (2014). *The productivity of working hours.* IZA Discussion Paper No. 8129. [https://docs.iza.org/dp8129.pdf](https://docs.iza.org/dp8129.pdf?ref=withlovesm.com) - **\[10\]** Borkovec, T. D., Wilkinson, L., Folensbee, R., & Lerman, C. (1983). *Stimulus control applications to the treatment of worry.* Behaviour Research and Therapy, 21(3), 247–251. [https://doi.org/10.1016/0005-7967(83)90206-1](https://doi.org/10.1016/0005-7967%2883%2990206-1?ref=withlovesm.com)