Before you call yourself lazy, try reducing input first. 🧠🧡 #satisfying #relaxing #painting

[0:00]You're not lazy, you're overstimulated. When there's too much going on and you're overwhelmed, the part of your brain that helps you start and organize tasks says goodbye. This is your brain naturally shifting out of productivity mode and into protection mode. What's happening is that your brain is shifting resources away from the prefrontal cortex. You're probably familiar with this, but as a reminder, that's the area responsible for planning, task initiation, decision making, and of course, emotional regulation. So the brain takes all its power from here and puts it into survival regions, such as the amygdala. When your brain senses stress, anything from too much noise to social pressure, unfinished tasks and even too many tabs open, yes, that's a real thing. It says to itself, yikes, this is uncomfortable, I must prioritize survival. So all your brain power is reallocated to threat monitoring and not a lot of new work is going to happen. All your cognitive resources are literally busy somewhere else. Overstimulation and procrastination are very similar but different fonts, which is why it's so easy to get them confused. Biologically, overstimulation does things like raises your cortisol, reduces your working memory capacity, and decreases your cognitive flexibility. aka your ability to do pretty much anything productive. When stimulation exceeds your nervous system's capacity, your brain seeks relief and this relief looks like scrolling, avoiding, cleaning instead of working, Lizzy, starting small unrelated tasks, Lizzy. This avoidance isn't because you don't care, it's because your system is overloaded. Okay, relatable. So what can I do with this information? Sometimes it feels counterintuitive, but the first thing you need to do is lower your stimulation. Slowing down for a sec restores your executive function faster than any self-criticism ever will. Take a look at our piece and how once we moved away from that big up and down unregulated squiggle, things got a little simpler. It just takes an awareness to shift. If it seems like overstimulation is your constant state, that's not something you have to solve alone. Support and awareness help you build more capacity. Therapy can help you unpack why your nervous system stays on high alert. For gentle support like this, get started with Rula.