Stuck in Overdrive: When Anxiety Takes Over

You’re finishing up laundry or scrolling through your phone when it hits—tight chest, shallow breath, racing thoughts. Nothing’s happened, really. But your body feels like it’s bracing for something.

Anxiety has a way of creeping in, even when nothing seems obviously wrong. It can feel like a heaviness in the chest, a knot in the stomach, or a mind that won’t stop spinning. Sometimes it’s tied to stress or conflict. Other times, it shows up out of the blue.

I remember a scene from a novel where a character quietly unravels while making toast. She’s not sobbing or yelling. Just standing there, frozen, while the toast burns. It’s such a simple moment, but it captures something familiar: the way anxiety doesn’t always look dramatic. Sometimes, it just stops everything. It’s not always easy to recognize. Some people describe it as a vague unease or a sense that they’ve forgotten something important. Others feel on edge for days without a clear reason. Even small decisions can start to feel overwhelming.

In clinical work, when anxiety takes over it is often described as the body’s alarm system going off, even when there’s no immediate threat. It’s a survival response, designed to keep people alert and safe. The challenge is that the system doesn’t always know when to power down.

Daily life can make it worse: pressure to be productive, constant notifications, comparison, burnout. Add to that personal history, perfectionism, or past trauma, and the volume gets turned up even higher. It’s common to hear people say things like, “I should be fine,” or “Other people have it worse,” but minimizing it rarely makes it go away. The truth is, anxiety is hard. It can make even basic things—like replying to a message or falling asleep—feel like uphill tasks.

One of the hardest parts of anxiety is how isolating it can feel. It’s easy to think you’re the only one struggling while everyone else is coasting through life. But anxiety is extremely common, even if most people don’t talk about it openly.

There’s value in learning to notice it earlier, in recognizing how it shows up—not to push it away, but to understand it better. Awareness doesn’t solve everything, but it’s often the beginning of a shift.