Do you ever go into stress overdrive mode?

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When I say stress overdrive mode, I am referring to a state of mind that I personally experience. I define it as a state induced by a period of very heavy stress be it social, financial, domestic, academic, and so on. The stress is often from multiple sources and is extremely overwhelming. As a result of this stress, I completely collapse mentally and go into something of an extended meltdown. All of a sudden my mind is racing all the time, I feel incredibly intense anxiety, my need for sameness and routine goes from a strong preference to almost life or death, I get incredibly hyperactive, agitated, and impulsive. I start having a hard time managing and I start having fantasies of acutely withdrawing from all social interaction and holing myself in a room for me to engage in a special interest for the rest of my life. Depending on the intensity of the stress I sometimes let go of my responsibilities and actually pursue and start living out said isolation until I actually can't anymore due to circumstance and I return to a normal state until my life's stress gets that bad again to restart the cycle.

Can anybody relate? I feel myself going into this place again and I really need help and advice. Thank you.

Once, high pressure got me into savant mode, but multitasking does not work for me. To avoid burnout I have to scale back my responsibilities. You are probably getting some symptoms of simple sleep deprivation - the smarter, newer sections of your brain shut down before the survival areas, but they can't do the work.

I'm going through it now.

I've been in that stage since 2002. It's pretty much a non-stop high alert panic mode, on top of CPTSD. I don't have advice how to get out of that hole, unfortunately, but you have my empathy.

Hugs

I rarely feel stress. I was a little overwhelmed on 3 June 2009. That was the days that the tornadoes hit. I have 30 acres of land with many large trees. It is like a park with a small creek running down below. Many of my trees are a hundred years old. Very quiet and very peaceful. On that date, I came home around noon after running some errands. But I couldn't get home because the road was blocked off. So I stopped the car and walked a half a mile up to my house. My yard looked like a war zone. It is quite hard to describe the destruction. I lost over a hundred trees that were one to two feet in diameter. Many were 50 feet tall. They were either broken in half like trigs or pulled over by the roots. This is what my front driveway looked like.



I had to climb over many downed trees to make it up to the house. When I arrived up to the house and walked around it, the house had sustained very little damage. The electrical power was out. I stood on my deck and I was overwhelmed. I stared out at the desolation and destruction and I was blank inside. Then I reached out and captured a single thought. It was to answer the question, How do I get back to Normal? My wife was at work. She would return in less than 4 hours. Somehow I reasoned that if I could clear the driveway of the 4 large trees and allow her to drive up to the house, then my life would start to return back to normal. Once I captured that thought, without considering all the other parts to follow, I immediately put it into action. I went down and took my chainsaw and began cutting. A few minutes later one of my neighbor's boys came by and asked if he could help. He had brought his chainsaw with him. Between the two of us, we managed to cut a path in 2 hours time and my wife came home and drove up the driveway to the house.

I didn't understand this at the time, but that is how one can get out of being totally overwhelmed. Put you hand up in the air and pluck out an idea. A small bit of a solution and then immediately put that into concrete action. You do not need to solve the entire problem all at once. Just one little bit to get you moving in the right direction.

keep on plucking............. personally , find it very hard to get to the plucking part often but lately have been attempting to isolate individual things and try to muddle through each one.. then remember to move on to next item, and requirements to get to that next item. And so on and so.. But as the originator of thread wrote. Have had days must shut down.. but getting to turn off even in those circumstances can be very hard .. Some stress meds have help circumvent that process sometimes . Dealing with those racing thoughts can be a real task . almost like a sense of desperation comes up.
. But still know better than to challenge the world again.. Just spend time recovering,,
Occassionally am able to keep those items to accomplish going and do get some stuff, would never have expected , to have accomplished .... Done and finished with .Every so often , just can even think, i can give myself kind of a Pat of the back . After having gotten through it ,, but got to remember pat on your own back , is as important as each step.. (for just have gotten through it .)