The REAL Reason You’re Overwhelmed

I had a mom reach out to me named Laura. Laura is a mother who was overwhelmed in her home. She always knew she wanted to be a mother and even dreamed of staying home and homeschooling her children. She had the life she had always wanted. “A nice home, a good husband, healthy children, the privilege of staying home with them” and yet she was constantly struggling.

Today I want to share Laura’s story. It’s a story that may resonate with you. The story of a mom who got everything she thought she always wanted, and still felt like she was barely surviving it.

Laura’s Story

Let me tell you about Laura.

Laura said, “I always knew I wanted to be a mother… I had a pretty idealistic image of what this would be like.”

But when her daughter was born, that image didn’t match reality. “Her whole first year, she cried all the time and never slept and I was pretty miserable…I was always on edge and my husband and I frequently snapped at each other.”

Then life did what life does and threw more at her. A second baby. Two under two. The pressure multiplied. Laura remembers her husband pointing to their child and saying, “You’re always mad at her.” This broke Laura’s heart and she knew it was true but couldn’t stop.

“I got so mad at her when she had accidents… and she was still just a baby.” Laura loved her kids and had the life she always wanted and yet, she “felt like a terrible mother most of the time.”

Then more was thrown at her. A third baby. A third pregnancy which ended in miscarriage. It was devastating. “I was at my absolute worst, constantly snapping at my family and totally out of control emotionally.” Through this season, Laura came to Christ. But coming to Christ didn’t just make the old destructive patters disappear.

“I was feeling constantly overstimulated… snapping all the time… loving my kids but feeling like I’m barely surviving… counting down the hours til bedtime… feeling resentful. I didn’t want to be so tense and angry all the time but I just couldn’t stop. Sometimes it took every ounce of my limited self-control just to not scream at my toddlers. I felt like I was white-knuckling life.”

This is where it all came to a head.

“I was having what could only be described as an adult temper tantrum… I shut myself in my room because I was so overwhelmed.” It was a breaking point that scared her enough to do something about it.

That was when she came across my work and THS and decided to go ALL in.

At this point, if you’re realizing this might be you too, I put together a free workshop that walks you through the exact process we used to get out of survival mode step by step. You can grab it below.

What Was Actually Happening

It’s important to come back to what was actually happening underneath all of Laura’s issues. I look at overwhelm and overstimulation through a very specific lens, and it’s called nervous system dysregulation. It’s not a personality problem. It’s not a discipline problem. It’s a nervous system that had been pushed into survival mode and stayed there in fight or flight. You could see it clearly in Laura’s life:

Constant overstimulation.
Snapping and yelling.
Feeling resentful.
Feeling like she was barely surviving.
White-knuckling her way through the day.

It wasn’t because her life was too much, but because her system couldn’t handle what used to feel normal anymore. That’s the piece that a lot of moms miss. When you think about someone who is overwhelmed, you assume they’re just doing too much. But there’s more to it than that. Your capacity has dropped so far below baseline, that normal life now exceeds it and your ability to handle it went way down.

Your capacity to handle stress, stay regulated, and respond calmly is not fixed. It adapts to your internal environment, your thought patterns, your stress responses, and the state your nervous system lives in day after day all come into play. Your nervous system either becomes more resilient or more reactive based on how you use it.

This process is gradual enough that you usually don’t notice it happening but you sure feel the results later.

Snapping faster.
Feeling constantly overstimulated.
Counting down the hours until bedtime.
Feeling like you’re barely surviving something you once longed for.

Physical ailments abound. And all of a sudden you feel like you don’t even recognize yourself or your life anymore Here’s the part that makes it so misleading. By the time most moms notice, their baseline has dropped so far that normal daily life feels like something, you have to survive instead of enjoy.

Why Doing Less Doesn’t Fix It

What do most moms do when they feel this way? They try to do less. They try to declutter more. They try to simplify everything and get new planners, organization methods and basically just control their environment and their circumstances. But if your problem is a dysregulated nervous system, none of that will fix it and it can actually make it worse.

Doing less can shrink your tolerance for stress and keep reinforcing the idea that you can’t handle your life and teaches your brain that you can only feel okay when life is perfectly controlled and organized. However, when you fix the problem at the root, your capacity increases. Now, the kinds of moments that used to send you over the edge don’t even phase you. You’ll start to walk through days that used to break you feeling actual peace and joy.

Your nervous system doesn’t rebuild capacity through avoidance of stress. It rebuilds capacity through learning how to handle that stress differently. You have to give it a reason to become stronger again. This is so counterintuitive and nobody does it, but it works every time. Doing the hard thing, sitting with the stress but interrupting your old destructive patterns is the thing that actually changes everything. This is what will help you become someone who no longer has to white-knuckle her way through motherhood.

What Changed for Laura

When Laura came to THS she didn’t change her circumstances at all and she didn’t declutter her whole house. Instead, she learned the Christian Brain Rewiring Formula I teach and put it into practice. I taught her how to retrain her responses in real time. Laura rebuilt her entire mental landscape with simple, but consistent changes that signaled to her brain, “we can handle this.” When she did this, she told me,

“Not only is my life 100% better, but it has improved the feel of our home and my children’s lives. I’m grateful that God showed me a way out of my struggle not only for our current life, but because I can teach my own kids how to calm their nervous systems and pass down positive habits and mentalities rather than my old negative ways; that is an investment in future generations. The course has really helped me grow stronger in my faith.”

“Where it had taken all my will-power not to yell before, it feels so much easier now. I almost never have that overstimulated ‘crawling out of my skin’ feeling anymore. I enjoy motherhood much more. I feel more like the mother I am meant to be. I feel more fulfilled by motherhood in general.”

What Capacity Really Means

That’s what capacity actually is. It’s not having a perfect life or even showing up perfectly within that imperfect life. It’s feeling at peace despite that and feeling true joy and fulfillment regardless of your circumstances. So, how do you know if this is you?

If your life is objectively good, and it still feels like too much, that’s likely a capacity problem. The mom who tries fixing this by controlling her environment instead of addressing the root will stay stuck in the same patterns.

If you’ve lost your capacity, you can rebuild it. You can’t declutter your way there. You have to intentionally retrain it. The peace you want isn’t on the other side of doing less or decluttering more. It’s on the other side of becoming someone who can handle the stress of motherhood without breaking.