Ep. 196 - What Your Brain Needs When the World Feels Heavy

When the world feels heavy, your brain can start carrying more than it was designed to hold. This episode explores how ongoing stress, constant information, and uncertainty affect your nervous system, focus, and energy. You’ll learn why feeling foggy or exhausted isn’t a personal failure, how your brain responds to prolonged stress, and simple ways to help your nervous system slow down and reset. 

Show Notes:

Episode 141 – Giving Your Brain a Break
(the cost of being “on” too much) https://youtu.be/3Y0yYg_9zFM 

Episode 164 – The Vagus Nerve
(How the parasympathetic nervous system helps reset stress and restore balance) https://youtu.be/FGEXNc2uQ3M?si=rWXP0rUdZ6ANfMSZ

Transcript

There are times when the world feels especially heavy.

Not because of a single event, but because of the accumulation. The headlines. The uncertainty. The waiting. The sense that a lot of other people are feeling much the same. 

And when that world weariness stacks on top of our regular lives, it can really affect our brains, our bodies, our nervous systems, and our ability to focus just in the day to day.

The Bottom Line on Top of this episode is that it’s okay to not always feel okay.

Oftentimes, our nervous system is just doing its job too well. It stays on alert for too long, without enough signals from us that it’s ok to stand down to step back.

Our nervous systems are designed to protect us. When there’s any sense of uncertainty or threat, it’s going to activate our sympathetic nervous system (the fight, flight, or freeze response) and when that happens it releases stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline to help us respond but also it just stays with us.

That system is incredibly useful in short bursts. But when stress is prolonged and unresolved, it just becomes exhausting.

Over time, the brain shifts its resources away from our prefrontal cortex, which is the part that does our planning, decision-making, and it can get stuck in a spin cycle within our amygdala, which is our emotional center and is also always scanning for a threat.

And when that happens, things start to feel foggy. Motivation can be gone and everything just feels harder than it should be.

This is part of the cognitive cost of being “on” all the time. When our brains are constantly scanning for problems to solve or threats to monitor, we burn a lot more mental energy than we even realize.

And one of the biggest accelerants of this right now is endless information loops. A September 2025 National Geographic article explained that repeated exposure to alarming news keeps our brain’s threat system engaged and it keeps those stress hormones circulating. A lot of us remember this from the early days of Covid. 

Your brain doesn’t know the difference between “I’m staying informed” and “There might be a real threat that I need to do something about.” We need to help define the difference.

This doesn’t mean ignoring reality. It means understanding that constant consumption keeps the nervous system in a state of readiness, and that takes a direct toll on our energy, our emotional resilience, and our sleep .

Here’s another important part: you can’t think your way out of a nervous system overload.

Stress hormones actually need to be metabolized, not stored. They need to physically move through the body.

This is why things like massage, stretching, yoga, walking, or even just deep breathing can feel surprisingly relieving. It’s that movement that starts to increase the blood flow to the brain and helps shift the body back toward the parasympathetic nervous system–that’s the part we call the rest and digest.

And this is where the vagus nerve comes in, and we talked a lot more about this in Episode 164 so I have a link in the show notes. But in short the vagus nerve is the main communication pathway that runs from the base of our brainstem down through the throat, heart, lungs, and into the belly. It also sends signals back to the brain about when it feels safe and calm and regulated.

When you slow your breathing, stretch your neck and chest, or get outside and move a little bit, you start to activate that pathway. The body starts to get the message that says: we’re okay for right now.

Even those small practices help build up what’s called the vagal tone, your nervous system’s ability to recover from stress.

When there’s times of prolonged blah, there’s also an effect on our lymphatic system. Unlike our circulatory system, our lymphatic system doesn’t have a built-in pump. It needs movement, muscle contraction, breath, and pressure to help it circulate.

When we’re stressed it’s more common to be sedentary, then we’re holding onto tension, and then those lymph nodes start to slow down. That can contribute to that heavy, stuck, sluggish feeling.

In these cases, nature can be really helpful. Natural environments offer what researchers call “soft fascination” - gentle stimuli that allow the nervous system to start to relax and take in other senses.

And there’s one more distinction that matters here: There’s a difference between commiseration and camaraderie.

Commiseration keeps us looping in the heaviness. Camaraderie acknowledges it, helps us feel less alone and it creates gentle movement in our brain forward. So if you want some connectedness in the heaviness, talk to real people in real time vs. online only. 

If the world feels heavy, start small.
Move your body. Go outside. Pick a very small task. 

You don’t need to force positivity or override reality. Just help your system remember that there are things within your part of the world that are within reach and within control. 

Helping your nervous system slow down, even briefly, is important. Clarity will come after we’ve had a chance to do that. 

However you can, take time to take good care of you, first.