Everyone needs to stop talking for five minutes (a clinical explanation)
"I need five minutes!" I announced to no one in particular, with the calm and grace of a smoke detector at 3am.
It was a Tuesday evening. Or a Wednesday. Honestly the days have started to blur together in a way I am choosing not to examine too closely.
I had worked all day in clothes that were professional and therefore uncomfortable, in the particular way that professional clothes are always slightly lying about who you are. I had existed on coffee, adrenaline, and a fistful of pretzels I inhaled approximately four minutes before a Zoom call because someone had the audacity to schedule a 4pm meeting and my body had started sending distress signals around 3:45. I had sat with clients all day — really sat with them, the way this work requires — and also answered emails and also thought about seventeen things I hadn't done yet and also forgot to go to the bathroom until it became urgent, which it always does, because I get so absorbed in what I'm doing that basic biological functions start to feel like interruptions.
At some point, the workday ended. In theory.
In practice, the transition from work-Maya to home-Maya felt like an aggressive costume change in a crowded backstage — people rushing you from every direction, someone telling you this isn't fast enough, the old costume half-off, the new one not quite on, and everyone needing you to be fully dressed and present and ready right now. The 97 browser tabs I'd had open all day were still running in the back of my mind. Last night's bad sleep had started drilling into my temples. Somewhere in the other room, my daughter was playing with a plastic toy drill — the sound of which, I want to note, is specifically engineered to penetrate human consciousness at a cellular level — and dinner had already been negotiated with the kind of intensity usually reserved for mob deals. (She won. I don't want to talk about it.)
And then she came in and asked me something.
I couldn't even tell you what it was. Something reasonable. Something a child is completely allowed to ask. But I was still mentally mid-costume-change, still trying to close the tabs, and the question landed on a nervous system that had nothing left to receive it with. I felt a wave move through me that started in my shoulders and ended somewhere around my jaw. Not anger, exactly. Not sadness. Something more like — every single input I had absorbed all day had just reached its limit at exactly the same moment, and my body was filing a formal complaint.
I said I needed a second. I went and stood somewhere quiet. I breathed. I came back.
Later — because I am a therapist, which means I am professionally required to examine my own reactions until they confess something — I turned the whole thing over and landed on a word for it.
Overstim.
And I think a lot of mothers are having this experience every single day without a name for it.
So. Here's the name.
What Overstim Actually Is
Overstimulation — sometimes called sensory overload, though that phrase tends to make people think of children with sensory processing challenges, which is not who I'm talking to right now — is what happens when your nervous system takes in more input than it can process at once. Sound, touch, movement, the particular way someone says your name when you have already heard your name forty times today. It stacks. And when it stacks past your ceiling, your body tips into discomfort and sounds the alarm.
The alarm does not mean you are broken. The mechanism is straightforward: too much coming in, not enough bandwidth to process it, system overload. Your nervous system is functioning correctly. The conditions are just a lot.
And motherhood — especially the working mother's particular version of it, where you spend all day being maximally competent and then walk through a door and are immediately needed in a completely different way — is genuinely, physically a lot. The closeness. The demands. The costume change no one warned you would feel this violent. It is also, I mean this completely, one of the most extraordinary things a human being gets to do. Both are true at the same time. The inconvenience does not cancel the love. But the love also does not cancel the inconvenience, and pretending otherwise doesn't help anyone.
What it Feels Like in Your Body
You probably already know this list. But it helps to see it written down, because on paper it looks less like a character flaw and more like a nervous system doing exactly what nervous systems do.
Skin that crawls, prickles, or buzzes — like your nerve endings are sitting too close to the surface
The urge to physically remove yourself from sound or touch, especially after a day of being needed with your whole self
Rage that arrives fast and feels bigger than whatever just triggered it
The sense that you might cry, or scream, or simply stop functioning
An inability to think clearly while noise is happening — like the signal is being jammed
Clenched jaw. Held breath. Shoulders somewhere near your ears.
The specific, guilty wish that everyone would stop needing you for five minutes
The clearest sign that what you're experiencing is overstim: when the input drops, so does the feeling. Quiet room, a few minutes where no one needs anything, the toy drill finally put down — and almost immediately, the buzzing starts to ease. That speed is information. It's telling you what you're dealing with.
"You're the boss, not the feeling. Naming it is how you get back in the driver's seat."
But Here’s Where it Gets Complicated
Overstim doesn't travel alone. It tends to show up alongside anxiety or burnout, and because all three feel vaguely terrible in the body, they get lumped together and treated like the same thing. They aren't. And treating them like the same thing is exactly why "just take a bath" fixes nothing.
OVERSTIM
Right now, in this room
Spikes fast, can ease fast
The body sounds the alarm
Lifts when the input drops
Ask yourself: If the noise stopped right now, would this lift?
ANXIETY
About what might happen
Runs on thought loops
Present even in total quiet
The room going calm doesn't help
Ask yourself: Is the worry still running in a quiet room?
BURNOUT
Built over weeks or months
Chronic, not a spike
Flat, empty, distant from yourself
A nap doesn't touch it
Ask yourself: Has this heaviness been building for a while?
Anxiety is future-tense and internal. You can be sitting in total silence and be completely, profoundly anxious — because the trigger isn't the noise, it's the thoughts underneath the noise. What you haven't done. What might go wrong. The Zoom you have tomorrow at 8am that you keep thinking about even though it's 9pm and there is nothing you can do about it right now. Removing the sensory input doesn't touch it, because the input was never the problem.
Burnout is the slow one. Research on parental burnout treats it as its own distinct experience — not a hard week, not the Tuesday evening from hell, but a specific chronic depletion that builds when you give more than you have resources for, over a long stretch of time, with nowhere to refill. The flatness. The loss of things that used to feel like yours. The sense of being emptied out.
And here's the part that connects everything: burnout lowers your overstim threshold. When you're already running on not enough, it takes so much less input to push your system over its edge. Last night's bad sleep. The pretzels. The 97 tabs. The clothes that fit wrong all day. None of those things break you on their own. But they add up, and then your daughter asks you a perfectly reasonable question, and your body files a formal complaint — not because the question was too much, but because everything before it already was.
That's not you falling apart. That's math.
About Not Enjoying Every Moment
I want to say something I've been thinking about for a while, which is that the pressure to love motherhood while you're inside it — to feel grateful, to recognize the gift, to be present — is its own kind of exhausting. Especially when you are also trying to be a professional and a person and someone who occasionally remembers to eat a real meal before 9pm.
I don't think you have to love every moment. I think some things about motherhood can only be understood from the other side, when you have enough distance to see the shape of it. When you're in the middle of it, you're just in the middle of it. The costume change is violent. The tabs are open. The drill is going.
Hard and meaningful are not opposites. Being in it — showing up for it even on the Tuesday evenings — is proof you have what it takes. And the fact that you're reading an article trying to understand your own experience? Also proof.
What Actually Helps
For overstim in the moment: reduce the input, as fast as you can. Leave the room for two minutes — actually leave, don't just think about leaving. Noise-cancelling headphones, which I have heard described as life-changing by more clients than I can count, and I believe every single one of them. Dim the lights. Ask someone to not touch you for a few minutes. Name it out loud if you can: I'm overstimulated, I need ten minutes. Naming it is what makes you the one responding to the situation instead of just drowning in it.
For anxiety: quieting the room won't be enough, because the noise is inside. The work is with the thoughts — the loops, what your nervous system is protecting you from, why the 8am Zoom has so much grip at 9pm. That usually needs more than a strategy. It usually needs support.
For burnout: the answer is slower and harder than anyone wants it to be. It requires actually restoring what's been taken — not a weekend, not a bath, but a real look at the math of your life and where it isn't adding up. That is almost never something you can do alone.
When to Reach for Something More
If this is happening often. If it's affecting how you feel about yourself, or how you're showing up. If you can't tell which of the three you're in — that last one, by the way, is much more common than you'd think, and is itself a perfectly good reason to talk to someone.
You don't have to wait until things feel impossible. Wanting to understand what's happening inside you is a completely sufficient reason to ask for help.
The woman behind the mother deserves to feel like herself again. Understanding what's happening in your nervous system is one real step toward that.
Overture Therapy supports the woman behind the mother. If you're navigating overstimulation, anxiety, or burnout in motherhood, reaching out is a place to start.
Maya Kruger, MA, LCAT, LPC, RDT, PMH-C, CTT3
Licensed psychotherapist · Founder, Overture Therapy · Maternal mental health specialist