Learning to Feel Without Flooding
For the longest time, mostly during my teenage years and into my early twenties, I thought that feeling meant drowning . The smallest sadness would quickly roll into a heavy fog of despair, a quiet anxiety would suddenly swing into a full-body alarm…I struggled to simply feel whatever came over me and instead I became these emotions. What I didn’t realise then was that this behaviour wasn’t a personality flaw and it didn’t mean that there was something inherently ‘wrong’ with me. It was a nervous system pattern. In psychological terms, this is often described as emotional flooding which is when the brain’s threat system becomes so activated that it overrides the parts of us that think , reflect , and regulate . The amygdala (essentially the brain’s alarm centre) fires rapidly, while the prefrontal cortex (the part that helps us make sense of what we feel) goes offline. When this happens, the body reacts as if it’s in danger, even when nothing outwardly threatening is...
