You feel foggy, forgetful, and unable to focus. And no, you’re not losing your mind; you’re not crazy. This one hits really hard. You used to be sharp; you could think on your feet. Now, you reread the same line five times and still can’t remember what it said. You walk into a room and forget why. You blank out in the middle of conversations. This isn’t you getting older or losing your mind. It may not be ADHD; it’s not stupidity; it’s trauma. Here is what is happening: when your body is constantly flooded with stress hormones like cortisol, it begins to shrink the parts of your brain responsible for memory and focus. What am I talking about? The hippocampus and prefrontal cortex. At the same time, your amygdala, the fear center, gets overactivated. That means your brain is prioritizing survival over thinking. You are scanning for danger, not solving problems. People call it brain fog, but really it is neuroinflammation. Your brain is inflamed from constant emotional stress, and what does that do to you? You feel disoriented, confused, and mentally exhausted. As I said, you’re not crazy; you’re just operating from a brain that was trying to keep you alive in an emotionally and maybe physically unsafe environment.
Sign 3: Sensory Overload
You get easily overwhelmed by noise, lights, touch, even smells. You walk into a crowded room and your body tenses. A loud sound makes you flinch. The smell of someone’s cologne turns your stomach. It is called sensory overload. What is happening here is that your nervous system has lost its ability to filter out sensory input. Your thalamus, the part of your brain that sorts what is important and what is background noise, starts glitching. And since your body has been in high alert mode for so long, it treats everything as a potential threat. Every bit of information feels overwhelming to process why? Because your brain has had to process too much, too fast. I want you to know that you’re not being dramatic for needing silence or space. You’re not being too sensitive. Your system is overwhelmed because it never got the chance to come down from alert. This is what happens when you have spent too much time around someone whose emotional unpredictability kept your body locked in fight, flight, or freeze. Every part of you became tuned to react, even your senses. Certain textures, smells, sights, and sounds can hurt like hell, like it used to hurt me in my early stages of recovery. It feels like your nerves are on fire 24/7.
Sign 4: Persistent Flu-like Symptoms
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