For People In Their 30s Feeling Overwhelmed And Overstimulated By Modern Life

So, I’m 33. And I’m recovering from yet another burnout.

I had one at age 26 that took 2-3 years to recover from. Then I had the most “successful” 3-4 years of my life to date from age 29-32.

Yet, here I am again.

I’m not sure if you have experienced burnout or a nervous system overwhelm. Maybe you’re teetering on the edge of one now.

Well, I feel for you. All I can say is that it’s a scary situation. It’s as if your mind and body kind of… cave in on themselves. You feel powerless.

It’s a physical and mental health nightmare, to be honest.

What I’d like to share today, though, are lessons I’m learning from the most recent burnout and how I hope to recover more durably this time.

If it helps you take steps to avoid or break free from this overstimulated and stressed yet exhausted state, I’ll consider it a job well done.

Healing Is Often Counterintuitive

When we get sick or feel anxious and depressed, our first reaction is something like this:

“Uh-oh, I don’t like this feeling. What can I do to make it go away fast?”

We explore all the quick fixes. Take a painkiller pill, eat sugary snacks, drink caffeine or alcohol.

We seek to add something to help us feel better. People who experience a chronically ill state after burnout (as I have) may try to fix themselves with lots of different treatments — both from the traditional medicine and alternative medicine worlds.

Sometimes these treatments work, at least for a while. But most of the time, they don’t offer a long-term cure.

The same happens when we feel edgy and restless or numb and dissociated. We resist our mind-body experience and want to escape it. So we reach for:

• Video games

• Porn

• TV series

• Substances

• Junk food

And so on. These life “additions” can indeed make us feel better. So in a sense, they make sense to continue, right?

Hmm, think again. I’ve found they delay or even amplify how sh*t you feel hours, days, or weeks later.

This has led me to surmise that recovery from overwhelm and burnout is more of a subtraction process in the earlier stages, rather than being about adding something new.

It can, of course, be beneficial to try a new hobby, get a new job, or meet a new person.

Nonetheless, I notice that people (myself included) try to skip ahead and don’t embrace the subtraction phase or “detox” phase first.

As I say, it’s a counterintuitive process in a modern society that rejects or shames periods of slowness and rest. But it’s such a key part of recovery to accept.

Different Labels For Similar Root-Cause Issues?

My lived experience and developing knowledge in this area tells me that a huge number of people worldwide are suffering from varying severity of the same affliction:

Autonomic nervous system dysregulation.

This core body system connects the brain to the rest of the body such as the key organs, gut, and spine.

Let’s take a minute to reflect on all of these medical labels that provide a “diagnosis” but little in the way of cures, only partial solutions, at best.

Burnout

An increasingly widespread problem. Forbes reported on a four-country study that found 43% of workers felt exhausted always or often, 35% were overwhelmed, and 23% were depressed.

Chronic fatigue syndrome / ME

Estimated at 17-24 million worldwide, and 1.3% of the adult population in the US.

Long COVID

65 million people, at a global economic cost of about $1 trillion a year. It is a hot topic whether long COVID is broadly the same nervous system disorder as chronic fatigue syndrome (ME).

Fibromyalgia

This affects an estimated 160 million or 2% of the world's population.

Anxiety

Thought to be 301 million people worldwide — about 4% of the global population.

I’ve been diagnosed with long COVID, anxiety, and chronic Lyme disease at different stages. I swear I’ve experienced more or less every symptom under the Sun!

This time around, it’s made me reflect on how I could be so unlucky to have all these different diagnoses. It doesn’t make sense. Is there a root cause?

And the more I’ve connected the dots, the more I can see that each time my health crumbled was preceded by multiple months of higher stimulation and stress.

Often, this was a combination of cognitive, emotional, and physical stressors.

Although I wasn’t conscious of how stressed I truly felt at the time, my “inner child” felt unsafe. My nervous system became overwhelmed by too much energetic demand — triggering frequent states of “fight or flight” instead of “rest and digest” states.

As the months have gone by, it’s become clearer to me how many subtle addictive behaviours I had.

I unconsciously used these behaviours as coping mechanisms to avoid or distract from stressful feelings — and they worked! In the short-term, anyway.

But, over the long term, they contributed to my health declining.

These behaviours included:

All excellent distractions from boredom and difficult emotions, yet terrible for my health and well-being.

We all know the analogy of the stress bucket. Well, mine continued to fill up until it reached a point where it was overflowing with stress.

To top it off, my work involved lots of open tabs, lots of context changing between tasks, dings from Slack messages that disrupted my focus, and working at a quick speed. This was rewarded with promotions and praise, so the behaviour was reinforced financially and socially, but the body could not sustain it.

You Can’t Process The Emotional Stress If The Cognitive Stress Is Too High

What I hope to do is help you make life changes sooner so that your health — physical, mental, or both — does not reach a breaking point like mine did.

By slowly reducing my cognitive and physical stressors, there has been more space to see the underlying emotional stressors in a clearer view. This is a work in progress for me.

Emotional stressors are often the root cause of our suffering and can lead to physical symptoms, such as chronic pain or fatigue. When we can acknowledge the true extent of the emotional stressors, there is more opportunity to process and release them, lowering the energetic demand on the nervous system.

In truth, this is a painful, journey. It’s not linear either, as you’ll hit plateaus and setbacks along the way. But it may be the most rewarding journey to embark on if you’re interested in healing and self-discovery.

When your cognitive and physical inputs are high due to overworking, overexercising, eating tons of sugar, or being addicted to short-form social media, the core emotions remain repressed and hidden from the conscious mind.

It’s like trying to put a plaster over a wound that is still bleeding and needs to be examined and responded to more thoroughly.

From experience, I can tell you that healing from overstimulation and overwhelm is a messy process. When you begin to try to lessen or cut out addictive habits fuelled by stress, you increasingly have nowhere left to run from your emotions.

You have to spend more time being with yourself. At this stage, you’ll start to notice tensions and discomforts in your body that you never knew existed. You’ll also have to sit with racing thoughts — often anxious or self-loathing in nature.

These will be presented to you in layers, like a snake shedding its old skin. In this case, you are shedding stress from the body.

On the other side?

Well, there’s your reward. Over time, you will feel less anxious and self-loathing because you’re freeing yourself from habits that left you feeling trapped and powerless before.

In addition, you’ll find you experience states of connection with self, peace, acceptance, and quiet joy. These will be fleeting at first. You’ll have a minute, an hour, or a day where you feel almost serene. And the next day you’ll feel even worse than before.

But the pleasant states can arise more often as you detox from multiple sources of stimulus stress.

You will begin to realise something profound that we are not taught in school:

Your body is your home, and your emotions live in this home. So you must tend to and be present in this home to truly claim it as your own, attempt to embrace its sensitivities, and appreciate how it tries its best to protect you.

Your Plan For The Next 3-6 Months

I understand if all of this is starting to sound abstract and fanciful. 24-year-old me would not have connected with this topic. But, if you do, here’s what I can recommend:

Commit the next 3-6 months to reduce your net amount of external cognitive inputs. When your default state is a feeling of overstimulation and overwhelm, you don’t need to add a new habit. You need less information input on a day-to-day basis.

Then, slowly build up from ground zero (or close to ground zero) with better habits.

I recommend reducing your overall cognitive input by 5% every few weeks. This is a more sustainable shift in behaviour.

Ease off like you would when stopping a medication.

You can try to stop all gaming + short-form content + multi-tasking (and so forth) cold turkey. This works for some. Not many, though.

You need to give yourself time, patience, and grace to go through this process. You will slip up and make mistakes.

I’ve fallen back into bad habits more times than I can remember.

But on a month-to-month timeframe, if you commit 100%, you’ll notice encouraging changes in two key areas:

1) As you reduce hyper-stimulating behaviours, your dopamine system will adapt to give you a sense of reward from less stimulating sources.

For example, you may find yourself a bit more present in conversations when you’re not checking your phone every five minutes.

Or you may feel able to walk somewhere without listening to music or a podcast.

2) As you commit to living a less frantic, fast, and impulsive life, you will develop a greater awareness of your feelings.

You will build your emotional intelligence, which also helps you relate to others and form more meaningful relationships.

Don’t be alarmed if you feel a lot of boredom or numbness, which often cover up deeper feelings such as loneliness, fear, or rage.

These can feel SUPER uncomfortable, but it’s a key part of the process. Don’t think you’re failing when sitting with these feelings adds to the sense of overwhelm for a while. It will lessen over time. However, I recommend working with a therapist if it feels too much to hold space for these feelings on your own.

Remember, we are social creatures who need a degree of support and validation to thrive emotionally.

I’ll also include a link to a free spreadsheet I put together that you may find useful. It’s basic but can help you discover which hyper-stimulating behaviours you engage in the most, and which behaviours you aim to reduce first.

Good luck,

Declan Davey