You know that feeling when you’re drowning in your to-do list and suddenly your brain decides that absolutely everything needs to happen right now? The email that’s been sitting there for two days becomes a crisis and your stomach tightens. That project due next week feels like it should have been done yesterday and your jaw clenches. And somehow, deciding what to have for lunch becomes another impossible task causing your shoulders to become earrings.
I used to think this was just me being dramatic. Turns out, there’s actual science behind why stress makes our brains go haywire and turns everything into a five-alarm fire.
When Your Brain’s Emergency System Takes Over
I learned that when we’re stressed out to the max our brains treat that stress trigger as a threat to our safety. We have an outdated survival mechanism to thank for that. So, when stress gets triggered, your body is flooded with stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline to prepare you to either fight, fly, freeze or fawn.
In my case, here’s what happens when I’m stressed to the max. My motivation drops. Focus gets foggy. Creativity takes a nosedive. And sleep? Forget about it. (Hello, Freeze Mode.)
Sound familiar? And the thing is, none of us is alone in our levels of stress and how we respond.
According to Gallup polling, about 8 in 10 Americans say they experience stress in their daily lives, with 44% experiencing it frequently.
When stress hormones flood your system, your thinking brain (the prefrontal cortex) essentially goes quiet, while your emotion and survival centers take control.
Another way to think about it: imagine your brain has a thoughtful, rational CEO who usually makes all the decisions. But when stress hits, that CEO gets locked out of the boardroom, and suddenly the office security guard is running the company. The security guard only knows one thing: “DANGER! REACT NOW!”
This is why everything feels urgent when you’re stressed. Your brain’s alarm system doesn’t have an “it can wait until tomorrow” setting. It only has “HANDLE THIS IMMEDIATELY OR WE’RE ALL GOING TO DIE.”
The Feedback Loop from Hell
Here’s where it gets really frustrating: once your brain starts operating in emergency mode, it creates this feedback loop that throws everything off. When you can’t think clearly, tasks take longer. When tasks take longer, you feel more behind. When you feel more behind, your stress levels spike. And when your stress spikes, your thinking gets even fuzzier and your body responds with all sorts of tension in all sorts of places.
It’s like your brain gets stuck in this panic mode where it’s convinced that if you just work harder and faster, you’ll somehow catch up. But working from that frazzled state usually makes you less effective, not more.
The interesting thing is that this stress response is automatic, but it’s not permanent. When you notice that “everything is urgent” feeling creeping in, that’s a cue to pause rather than speed up.
One thing that helps is remembering that your brain is designed to keep you alive, not to help you prioritize your email. When it’s screaming that everything is urgent, it’s just doing its job. But you get to be the one who decides what needs your attention right now.
Here’s a simple experiment to try: Next time you notice that stressed-out, panicky “everything is urgent” feeling, take a breath and try asking yourself: “If I could only do one thing in the next hour, what would actually move the needle?” Usually, there’s one real priority hiding under all that manufactured urgency.
Your brain might protest this approach at first. It’s used to operating in crisis mode and will try to convince you that slowing down is dangerous. But remember that’s just the security guard talking, not the wise decision-making CEO.
Speaking of breaking these stress patterns, I’ve been working with a tool that takes a different approach to stress management. Instead of giving you generic advice, it starts by using your current stress level.
Once you rate your current stress level, it offers specific experiments based on the level of stress you’re experiencing.
After you try the stress-busting experiments, you can check in again with how you’re feeling. If you’re still stressed, it helps you dig deeper into what’s causing it. The tool gives you different strategies depending on whether you’re overwhelmed by work, worried about money, or dealing with relationship stress.
There’s no email signup, no daily notifications blowing up your phone. Just a practical way to interrupt that stress spiral and get back to thinking clearly any time you need it.
Have you noticed this “everything is urgent” phenomenon in your own life? Maybe it’s when you’re facing a deadline, or when you have too many things competing for your attention, or when you’re trying to juggle work and personal stuff.
I’m curious: how does stress impact you?
In the comments be sure to share. Sometimes just naming these patterns helps us see them for what they really are: outdated alarm signals, not actual emergencies.
