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.
Number 3: Sensory Overload
You get easily overwhelmed by noise, lights, touch, and 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’s 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.
You may also want to read this:
7 Signs That A Narcissist Is Done With You
What Happens To Narcissists When They Get Older?
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