When life feels impossible: A note from me to you.
When life feels impossible — when everything is hard AND you can’t see a way forward — that feeling is real, and it deserves to be met with care instead of dismissal or self-judgment. Nervous system flooding (when stress activates your survival brain so intensely that your rational mind goes offline) is a real physiological experience, especially if you carry childhood relational trauma that lowers your overwhelm threshold. This is a direct, warm note for anyone in that place right now.
- TABLE OF CONTENTS
- When life feels impossible…
- When life feels impossible you may cry five times before 8am.
- When life feels impossible you may wonder how on earth your life got so terribly off track.
- When life feels impossible, you may look at other people.
- When life feels impossible, people can say to you, “I get it. I’ve been there. Things get better. Things will get better for you.”
- Frequently Asked Questions
When life feels impossible…
When life feels impossible you may want to give up.
SUMMARY
When life feels impossible — when everything is hard and you can’t see a way forward — that feeling is real, and it deserves to be met with care rather than dismissal. This post is a direct, warm note for anyone in that place, acknowledging how hard things are and offering some honest grounding about what can help when you’re in the thick of it.
Overwhelm and Nervous System Flooding
Nervous system flooding — sometimes called emotional flooding or overwhelm — occurs when the autonomic nervous system becomes so activated that the rational brain (prefrontal cortex) is effectively offline. In this state, problem-solving is impossible and everything feels insurmountable. For those with childhood relational trauma, the threshold for flooding is often lower due to chronic dysregulation.
Related reading: What does it mean to be an ambitious, upwardly mobile woman from a relational trauma background?, Attachment Trauma: How Early Relationships Shape Your Adult Connections, Trauma and Relationships: When Your Professional Strengths Become Your Relationship Blindspots
On your job, your kid, your partner, your life. You may want to run away to a corner of the world where no one will find you, where you can start over, where you can be free of the crushing weight of responsibilities you hold.
Mongolia sounds nice – who would find you in Mongolia? Or becoming a waitress in a diner with a rented apartment and no one and nothing to take care of… For more on this topic, see the American Psychological Association.
When life feels impossible you may regret – deeply regret – big choices you’ve made that are now irrevocable (or seem that way).
You may grieve the choices you’ve made and all the paths that seem unavailable to you now. That person, that career, that down payment, that would-have-been child…
When life feels impossible you may wake up at 3am, content in sleep and then when your mind gains a shred of consciousness, your brain grabs hold of thoughts like a needle on a record player and starts whirling and remembering… zooming you out of the peace you felt while asleep and unconscious and spiraling you into anxiety for the rest of the sleepless morning…
When life feels impossible you may cry five times before 8am.
Relational trauma refers to psychological injury that occurs within the context of important relationships, particularly those with primary caregivers during childhood. Unlike single-incident trauma, relational trauma involves repeated experiences of emotional neglect, inconsistency, manipulation, or abuse within bonds where safety and trust should have been foundational.
And apply multiple coats of undereye concealer to hide the puffiness before heading into work. And you wonder how on earth you’re going to get through the work day.
You rival the talents of Meryl Streep in acting OK just to get through the day. You watch the clock and think it will never reach 5pm…
When life feels impossible, you think your body – your stomach, your chest, your throat – can’t possibly hold any more of the hot heat of emotion you are feeling.
You may wonder how you thought things were hard before when they feel so much more vividly difficult and high stakes now…
When life feels impossible you may wonder how on earth your life got so terribly off track.
You may think to yourself, “It wasn’t supposed to be this way for me!”
You may think back on all the choice points you could have taken that might have led you to more stable finances, a happier marriage, a healthier body.
You look at your old college classmates on Instagram and regret that you didn’t go into finance, you didn’t stay with that guy from your dorm, that you didn’t join that then-little-known startup that became Facebook…
When life feels impossible you may find yourself watching The Handmaid’s Tale or Game of Thrones to reassure yourself that your life, while hard as hell right now, could hypothetically be worse…
When life feels impossible, you may look at other people.
In your office, in their cars next to yours on the commute – and wonder if they have it easier. No, you KNOW they have it easier. And you feel jealous and sad and angry about your own situation and having it so much harder…
When life feels impossible, people may say to you, “You’ll get through it. You’ll figure it out.”
And you think to yourself, what the hell does that mean? And yeah, I’ll figure it out because I have no choice but to figure it out and yet you still don’t know what that will look like…
When life feels impossible all you may want in the world is to crawl under your blankets and dissociate through escapist TV, reading, or sleep.
Being awake, being in touch with the reality of your life feels too hard…
When life feels impossible, you may feel like things will never get better.
You’re convinced things will always be this hard and painful and that you may have blown up your life with a choice you made, something you said, or something you didn’t do or say. You may feel like this is now your new normal. A permanent state…
When life feels impossible, people can say to you, “I get it. I’ve been there. Things get better. Things will get better for you.”
But you don’t really believe them. Or you want a timeline and a tactical plan for HOW and WHEN so you can have some hope…
When life feels impossible, you long to reach out to friends, to people who will understand, but maybe you don’t have these people. Or you can’t bring up what you want to talk about. Or it’s not emotionally safe to talk about it with people in your life.
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When life feels impossible, everything can feel like too much. Like this human experience is just crushingly hard. Like this isn’t what you signed up for. Like you don’t know how you’re going to get through this….
And I want to tell you something…
If you’re feeling this way right now, you’re not alone. I know what this feels like for myself, and I see it with my friends, with my little family, with my clients and with my colleagues.
To feel this way is such a human experience. It’s pure, raw, unadulterated, broken, fractured humanness.
Reading these words likely won’t make you feel any better, and that’s not necessarily my intent, anyways.
“You do not have to be good. / You do not have to walk on your knees / for a hundred miles through the desert repenting. / You only have to let the soft animal of your body / love what it loves.”Mary Oliver
I want you to feel comforted and I want to tell you that things will get better and you can handle it. But I don’t have a crystal ball and I don’t honestly know if that will be true.
I don’t know if things will, in fact, get harder for you. Or harder before they get better. And I don’t know how things will resolve for you, if they will resolve, and what the timeline and how of that resolution might be.
I want so badly to be able to say to you, it will be okay. And perhaps it will be. But it also probably hurts like hell right now and I want to let you know it’s okay to feel this way.
It’s okay to regret your life choices. It’s okay to want to quit your life, your kids, your marriage, your responsibilities. It’s okay to compare yourself to others you see walking past you, or on your Instagram feed.
It’s okay to hate your life circumstances right now. It’s okay to cry more than you smile today. It’s okay to feel like you’re just barely surviving and not thriving like you thought you would/should be when you got [fill in the blank].
It’s okay that you’re going through this and it also sucks and hurts like hell at the same time.
Both things can be true.
In times like these, we have no choice but to dig deep, to turn towards any support we can.
And sometimes those supports look like therapy and yoga and meditation.
And sometimes they look like Zoloft, Netflix binges, and popcorn for dinner every night of the week.
Sometimes emotional support looks like turning towards your best friends and booking an extra session with your therapist.
And sometimes it looks like Googling all night and finding blog posts and forum threads from strangers who have gone through something similar. Leaving you less alone.
Sometimes it just looks like going to sleep. Letting yourself have ten solid hours of sleep where you can get a break from reality.
Sometimes it looks like Marco Poloing your best girlfriends twice. Three times. Four times in one day. Just to hear their voices. Just to see their faces and to feel okay.
Whatever your version of digging deep is, let that be okay.
Take care of yourself in any way you need to to get through a particularly tough time.
Try and remember the tough times you’ve survived before and how, in the middle of them, they felt endless and also impossible and they, too, passed.
Try to remember you have a history of surviving tough times and let this be a sliver of consolation about the current tough time you find yourself in.
When life feels impossible, the last thing you want to do is beat yourself up for not coping with it better.
Do what you need to right now, honey.
There’s not one single prescription for self-care. Let whatever comforts you right now be okay and keep putting one foot in front of the other until your tough time is a ghost of a memory.
When life feels impossible, bookmark this post, come back to it when you need a digital proverbial permission slip to take care of yourself, and then keep taking things five minutes at a time.
Seek out the helpers that resonate with you, take the pieces of advice that work and leave the rest, trust the process and imagine that this will pass.
I care about you.
Here’s to healing relational trauma and creating thriving lives on solid foundations.
Warmly,
Annie
What do you do when survival itself feels like too much?
When you tell your therapist that life feels impossible and you fantasize about disappearing to Mongolia, they don’t minimize or rush to solutions. They understand that sometimes feeling absolutely overwhelmed requires both witnessing and practical crisis management—holding the paradox that this is unbearably hard AND you will survive it.
Your therapist helps create what they call a “crisis protocol”—identifying what’s actually within your control versus what feels urgent but isn’t actionable. Maybe you can’t fix your marriage today, but you can shower. You can’t undo major life decisions, but you can eat something. These micro-actions aren’t dismissive of your pain but recognition that survival happens in tiny increments.
They validate that crying five times before 8am isn’t weakness but your nervous system desperately trying to discharge unbearable tension. Together, you explore how escape fantasies serve as pressure valves—your psyche imagining relief when reality offers none. Mongolia represents not just geography but the dream of being unknown, unburdened, free from the crushing weight of being needed.
Your therapist helps you understand that impossibility often comes from trying to solve everything simultaneously while your system is flooded. They teach you to “titrate” your experience—feeling waves of grief without drowning, taking action without bypassing emotion. Sometimes therapy during impossible times is just having someone hold hope for you when you cannot hold it yourself, reminding you of every previous impossible situation you’ve already survived.
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This feeling is often due to ‘nervous system flooding,’ a physiological response where intense stress activates your survival instincts. Your rational mind temporarily goes offline, making it hard to think clearly or solve problems. It’s your body’s way of trying to protect you, even if it feels debilitating.
Relational trauma refers to emotional injuries from past painful or neglectful experiences in close relationships, often from early life. These experiences can lower your threshold for overwhelm, making you more susceptible to nervous system flooding when faced with current stressors. It shapes how you connect with others and manage difficult emotions today.
Healing begins by acknowledging these intense feelings with care and precision, rather than dismissing them. It involves recognizing that survival itself can feel like a monumental effort. Allowing yourself the grace to seek support without judgment, and understanding that you don’t have to cope alone, is a crucial first step.
When your nervous system is flooded, focus on gentle self-regulation techniques to bring your rational mind back online. This might include slow, deep breathing, grounding exercises like noticing five things you can see, hear, and feel, or simply allowing yourself a moment of quiet to process without judgment. The goal is to create a sense of safety within your body.
High-achievers often carry significant responsibilities and internal pressure, which can make feelings of impossibility particularly jarring. A legacy of early relational trauma can also contribute, as it may have taught you to push through pain rather than seek support. Recognizing this pattern is key to understanding why you might feel this disconnect and finding healthier coping mechanisms.
Annie Wright
LMFT · Relational Trauma Specialist · W.W. Norton AuthorHelping ambitious women finally feel as good as their résumé looks.
As a licensed psychotherapist, trauma-informed executive coach, and relational trauma specialist with over 15,000 clinical hours, she guides ambitious women — including Silicon Valley leaders, physicians, and entrepreneurs — in repairing the psychological foundations beneath their impressive lives. Annie is the founder and former CEO of Evergreen Counseling, a multimillion-dollar trauma-informed therapy center she built, scaled, and successfully exited. A regular contributor to Psychology Today, her expert commentary has appeared in Forbes, Business Insider, Inc., NBC, and The Information. She is currently writing her first book with W.W. Norton.
Work With AnnieWhat does the research say?
The following statistics provide important context for understanding this topic:
- More than 1 in 5 U.S. adults has a mental health condition, and people with insomnia are 10 times more likely to have depression and 17 times more likely to have anxiety — the nervous system experience of “impossible” is physiologically real. (Stanford Medicine / NIMH, 2025)
- Childhood trauma is associated with dysregulation of the HPA axis — elevated cortisol at baseline and slower decline after stress exposure — meaning the physiological experience of overwhelm is more intense and longer-lasting for survivors. (Clinical Psychology APA Division, 2017)
- 63.9% of U.S. adults carry at least one adverse childhood experience — these early wounds shape the nervous system’s threshold for what feels “impossible” in adult life. (CDC BRFSS Survey, 2023)
