I Wouldn’t Be a Bitch If My Mind Wasn’t in Overload

What chronic mental overload actually does to a woman's brain.

You’re in the middle of a sentence, and the word just isn’t there. You know the word. You’ve used it a thousand times. It’s gone.

You make the joke about early Alzheimer’s, and you laugh, and nobody notices that part of you isn’t joking.

And then you snap. Not at something big. At something completely ordinary. The missing scissors. The milk left on the counter by someone who clearly saw it there.

Then comes the shame. Then the confusion. Because that’s not you. Or at least it didn’t used to be.

It’s still not you.

The job nobody put in a job description.

Somewhere in your thirties, you became the default. Not by choice but more by accumulation. You were the one who remembered to schedule the pediatrician appointment. And the one who knew which kid needed what form for which field trip. And the one tracking the car insurance renewal, your mother’s medication refills, and what your husband couldn’t eat without getting reflux.

You became, without anyone naming it or asking your permission, the person who holds the information.

All of it. All the time.

Researchers call this mental load. The invisible cognitive work of managing a household. Not the doing of tasks but the remembering, the planning, the anticipating, the tracking. The constant low hum of everything that needs to happen next.

It doesn’t show up on any list. It lives in your head, and it never stops.

I call it “The Hijacked Brain.” It’s what occurs when a brain has been running at that capacity for so long that the system itself starts to give. From the simple, cumulative weight of too much, for too long, with no one to hand it to.

I know this one from the inside.

I was a therapist holding space for people in crisis all day. Then I came home and became the person who tracked everything else. The appointments. The grocery list. The emotional temperature of everyone in the house. The things that needed doing that no one else was tracking because no one else knew they existed.

One night, my daughter left her backpack at school. I cried for ten minutes. My daughter thought I'd lost my mind. I hadn't. I'd just finally run out of room to hold it together.

If you had asked me to explain it, I couldn’t have. I just knew I was done. Not dramatically. Just quietly, completely done. My brain had hit a wall, and the backpack was the last thing it could absorb.

That’s the hijacked brain. And it doesn’t announce itself with something important. It announces itself with whatever shows up last.

Nobody made this a motivational poster.

Multitasking is not doing two things at once. It’s switching between them. Fast. Over and over. And every single switch has a neurological price. Attention residue, researchers call it.

Part of your brain stays on the previous task even after you’ve moved to the next one. You’re never fully anywhere. You’re in the meeting but also tracking what’s for dinner. You’re in a conversation but also running the background calculation of what you forgot to do.

Over time, this fractures concentration. Not because you’re distracted, but because your brain has learned that nothing is ever fully done, so it keeps part of itself on everything, all the time.

You can’t just relax.

People will tell you to relax and take a break.

But the challenge is that relaxation requires your brain to believe, at the level of your nervous system, that nothing urgent is waiting. That it’s actually safe to stop monitoring.

Your brain doesn’t believe that for a minute and knows this is bullshit.

There is a network in your brain called the default mode network. It’s what activates when you’re not focused on a specific task. It’s where your mind is supposed to wander and restore cognitive function.

But when a brain has been managing everything for twenty years, the wandering doesn’t come. The list does. The tracking. The planning. Your brain is technically at rest from the task in front of it, but it is not resting. It has just switched to a different kind of work.

This is why you can sit on a beach and not feel relaxed. Why the vacation doesn’t fix it. You’ve just changed locations while still running the same program.

Your brain has been keeping score.

Your prefrontal cortex is responsible for planning, organizing, and working memory. It is also the part of your brain most sensitive to chronic overload. When it runs at capacity for years without real rest, it becomes less efficient. Retrieval slows. Processing takes longer. The word you’ve used a thousand times stops coming when you call it.

We think it’s aging, but it’s not. It’s depletion.

Chronic stress keeps cortisol elevated. And elevated cortisol, over time, impairs the hippocampus. That’s where memories get consolidated. Where information moves from short-term to long-term storage. When it’s been under stress for years, that transfer stops working properly.

The forgetting isn’t random. It’s the direct result of a system that has been running without a genuine break for two decades.

And then the bill arrives.

A 2022 study published in Current Biology found that hours of demanding mental work cause a buildup of a chemical signal in the prefrontal cortex that makes subsequent thinking feel harder and changes how you make choices.

By the time evening arrives, that residue has been accumulating since 6 am. You still have three more things on the list. And your brain is working twice as hard as it was this morning to do half as much.

Then perimenopause arrives. The cognitive changes that come with hormonal shifts hit a brain that is already operating on fumes. Estrogen helps the exact parts of your brain that are already running on empty. When it fluctuates, the system that was barely managing starts to struggle.

That’s when women start making the Alzheimer’s joke. And meaning it.

She thought she was losing her mind.

She sat across from me at 52. She ran a department of twenty people at work. At home, she held the family calendar, both kids’ medical histories, her mother’s prescription schedule, her husband’s travel, the dog’s vet appointments, and what everyone in the house would and wouldn’t eat.

She had started writing herself notes. Then, losing the notes.

“I genuinely thought something was neurologically wrong with me,” she said.

Nothing was neurologically wrong. She was running four full-time jobs inside her head. Her brain wasn’t failing. It was full. And it had been full for so long that she had forgotten what empty felt like and started calling the fullness a symptom.

That’s the Hijacked Brain. It’s not a character flaw. It is what happens to a brain that has been carrying everything for everyone with no end in sight.

This is not who you are. This is what you were handed.

Remember what I called the Great Unfuckening?

That point in midlife when your capacity to pretend, perform, and please others starts shorting out like an electrical system that’s finally had enough.

Nobody handed you this job either. Nobody sat you down and said, “You will be the person who holds all of this.” It accumulated. It was handed to you in small pieces, each one reasonable on its own, until you were carrying everything, and it had become so normal that questioning it felt unreasonable.

You called it competence and caring.

You’re not difficult. You’re depleted.

The word “bitch” gets applied to women at the exact moment their brain stops having the capacity to manage everyone else’s comfort on top of their own overload.

The moment you stop having the room to soften your edges, absorb the friction, smooth things over, and make sure everyone around you feels fine, that’s the moment you become difficult.

You were never difficult. You were fully occupied with tasks nobody else was doing. And one day, the capacity to hide that fact ran out.

Your brain was not breaking down. It was finally telling the truth about what it had been carrying.

This won’t fix everything. Do it anyway.

Pick one thing living in your head and move it somewhere outside of it. A calendar someone else maintains. A task someone else owns without being reminded twice.

Not because it fixes twenty years of this. It doesn’t.

Because your brain deserves one moment where it isn’t responsible for everything.

You’ve earned that. Even if no one ever said so.

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