I was driving to buy groceries when, slowly but surely, I became aware of a tension building inside me.
I was going to the same local store I’d been to many times. Nothing was unfamiliar, nothing was wrong, and I had no reason to expect anything would go wrong.
But as I moved from the drive, to the parking lot, to the shop entrance, I could feel the anxiety growing in my chest. It was familiar enough that I didn’t register it as problematic.wr
My mind was already inside the shop. Mapping the route. The fastest way past the aisles, the checklist of essential items to be bought, the best possible order of execution. Observing people, their location, numbers and behaviours as potential hurdles.
It was a basic grocery run, and I was planning it like a high-stakes operation. I was treating a familiar environment as if it were foreign, potentially even hazardous.
I was being hypervigilant in an otherwise unremarkable situation. Caught between two states, deep thought and situational awareness, not entirely present in either.
If you’d asked me at that moment, I’d have told you I was fine. This was what entering most situations and environments felt like.
I misdiagnosed my problem as my personality
For most of my life, I had one explanation for that feeling: this is just who I am.
Anxious. Highly strung. Wound a little tighter than most. I believed some version of that since before I was a teenager, and I had enough evidence to support it.
I was the boy who wanted to please everyone so I wouldn’t be rejected, and I was seen (mostly) as someone who could also do no wrong.
The teenager who was too nervous to catch a rugby ball cleanly in a game, but who still managed to play for the first team.
The adult who overthought and over-prepared for every meeting, but who was praised for being prepared and having the answers.
These challenges culminated in a coping mechanism that mostly served its purpose, saving me from even the smallest momentary embarrassment or social discomfort. But as the pressure of life got real, the noise became overwhelming and this way of living finally became unsustainable.
When something follows you consistently, for that long, it feels less like a state that can be influenced through action, and more like a fixed character trait that would be more difficult to change.
This becomes a sort of unnoticed trap. A feeling you’ve never spent a day without doesn’t register as an emotion. It registers as your identity.
I couldn’t solve a problem I’d misidentified
It took over a decade to fully appreciate what was actually happening. When I finally saw it, it wasn’t complicated.
My mind wasn’t broken. My innate capacity wasn’t insufficient. It was unnecessarily overloaded. And those are very different problems.
Here’s the plain truth. Your attention is a finite resource. There is only so much of it, and everything you carry takes a share — every task, notification, worry, distraction. Every person you’re keeping track of, every situation you’re monitoring in the background.
Each input in isolation can seem like a clear signal.
Signal becomes noise when you allow everything in with no scrutiny or intent. Unfiltered, unprioritized, unguarded.
Some noise is loud and apparent — a demanding job, a difficult season, a phone that’s never quiet. The resulting consequence of persistent and compounded noise exists more quietly. Low-grade monitoring, planning, anticipating. A sustained state of ‘fight-or-flight’. The kind you stop noticing because it never switches off.
The problem is noise will never clear on its own. Attention that gets used needs a window of space and quiet to recover — something that modern life often doesn’t offer freely. New inputs arrive before the last inputs have been processed.
So the weight of the load doesn’t just persist. It builds. Day after day, the occupied share of your attention grows and the free share shrinks.
Eventually, running on empty starts feeling less like a temporary state that can be controlled, and more like a deficiency within your person.
That’s why overwhelm builds up and small, otherwise manageable, issues accumulate into a life that starts feeling unmanageable. The problem isn’t a catastrophic event. It’s many smaller issues, compounded and experienced simultaneously, with no window to put any of it down. Loops that never close.
This is also why wellness itself can feel impossible from inside that state. A new routine, a new practice, a new habit — each one is another demand on attention that’s already spoken for. You’re not incapable. You’re overstimulated.
I accepted maximal output as the norm
I wasn’t purely an anxious person. I had a mind that had been running at maximal output for a long time, with no setting for rest.
One of those unteachable lessons my mother warned me about — and one I couldn’t fully appreciate until I’d lived it. I was always taking on too much. More specifically, I was allowing too much noise in without any filter or control. Even my recreational activities added to the noise instead of creating the space for my mental capacity to recover. I was living hard, unrelenting.
The simplest comparison I have is a car engine held at high revs indefinitely, never dropping to idle. It might not seize, but it runs hot all the time, and it wears faster than an engine handled with greater care — especially when extra care was needed to offset the extraordinary demand.
For me, a big contributor was work.
Without getting too specific: I spent several years in a role where problems didn’t resolve, they recurred. They were inherited, I was at the centre of them, and despite my best efforts, I couldn’t resolve them through individual or team efforts.
At the risk of sounding dramatic, it felt as though the wolves were both at the door and inside the house. I was managing external pressures, while fighting internal fires, with nowhere in the day that felt safe to put the weight down.
To be fair, some things worked really well, but the noise outweighed the rest by enough that I can’t remember many moments where friction didn’t dominate flow, and noise wasn’t louder than signal.
The lack of control I had, contrasted against the effort and commitment I gave, was out of balance. This eventually led to a level of noise that all but burnt me out.
Long-term exposure to this can retrain a mind.
After enough time running near empty, my attention and focus treated all signals as something to track and control. A grocery run on a Saturday produced a very similar internal pitch as a truly high-pressure situation. The habit of analysis, risk aversion and optimization became more of an instinct than a skill.
That’s what I’d been calling my personality, but it wasn’t a trait, or at least it didn’t have to be. It was a mind that hadn’t had a quiet moment in so long it had forgotten quiet was possible.
Simply reducing the noise did not equal quiet
Eventually I made a decision that, from the outside, could appear drastic. I removed myself from the noisy situation entirely.
I want to be clear: the solution wasn’t simply to quit, to walk away and feel the relief. Few people have that luxury, and it isn’t what happened for me either.
The decision to resign from a job where the noise became too much was carefully weighed, not impulsive. The cost, risks, opportunities and benefits were all meticulously compared, and the best long-term solution was chosen.
The initial relief was real but brief — it came from setting a boundary and choosing what I believed to be a better path. Choosing to eliminate the noise, rather than letting it continue.
That relief lasted about as long as a deep breath. I wanted to leave things in the best order I could manage, I wanted to ensure the negative implications on others were buffered as best I could. So I spent time tying off loose ends and supporting them in a reduced capacity. This means the noise didn’t drop when I handed in my notice. It peaked.
The real relief, when it finally came, came slowly, more gradually, in smaller increments.
It took about two weeks before I could start to decompress, and I felt tired and depleted through most of it. But as I worked under less strenuous conditions with a renewed goal and purpose, I started to bounce back.
It’s worth saying: I didn’t take a career break, I didn’t go on vacation. I jumped straight into studying my personal training certification, building our business, and continued to work out my reduced capacity commitment. I did it all at once. The amount of signal I was taking in wasn’t significantly reduced, but it was certainly more focused.
Over the weeks that followed, things gradually changed. I rearranged my priorities and re-established my control. In that space, I started rebuilding the basics.
Better sleep. More movement. More quiet in the day. More quality time in companionship. More intent and care behind what I consumed.
Rather than a drastic pivot in direction and behaviour, I focused on small, incremental changes. I set myself up for success with goals I could achieve consistently — and that, more than the act of leaving, is what brought the noise level down.
One honest disclaimer: lowering the noise was necessary, but it doesn’t automatically translate into recovery.
My attention was more reasonably occupied than it had been in years — and it still wouldn’t switch off. It kept scanning, planning, monitoring, out of pure habit.
I had to build on the momentum of the first choice and compound its benefits by consciously auditing the signal I allowed into my mind and better reducing the noise stemming from sources I could control.
I had reduced the input. I had not yet felt the quiet. I didn’t actually know what I was aiming for, because I had no memory of it.
My body unintentionally led me to the clarity I was looking for
Credit goes to my wife, who introduced the catalyst that took me from effort to results.
She arranged a day trip to a spa about an hour from where we live — hot mineral springs cascading down a hillside into several pools, each one a different temperature. We’d talked about going for a while. We chose a day when we were both worn thin and had no urgent issues to attend to.
It was the first month of winter, but the day was clear and still, which is rare in Cape Town. We’d both been trying, deliberately, to find better ways to manage stress than the ones we’d leaned on before.
The hottest pool (measuring in excess of 40°C) sits at the top. The water was extreme enough that most people didn’t last long in it, which meant we mostly had it to ourselves.
You could only stay in for a few minutes at a time. The heat stung if you moved. Climbing out left you light-headed while your body adjusted to the cold air again.
We moved from there to a cold plunge pool (aptly titled the Frigidarium and measuring somewhere around 10°C) and a steam room. In and out, hot to cold, several times over.
It was intense the whole way through. Nothing about it felt like relaxation while it was happening. We choose these types of experiences by design. Being as tightly wound as we are, subtle doesn’t do the trick.
No notable shift happened throughout our time at the spa. We first felt the change once we got in the car, ready to head back home.
We both felt it at the same time — suddenly, completely, not gradually. My nervous system had switched off.
I don’t know how else to say it. For the first time in over a decade, the noise was truly gone.
The closest comparison I have is the tiredness after a psychedelic experience, minus the hangover — wrung out and clear all at once. Physically exhausted in the way you feel after hard exercise, tired but somehow rewarded.
And the part that mattered most: the gnawing was gone. Worry, stress, logistics, planning. That low, constant sense of needing something — coffee, social media, alcohol, any distraction to take that edge off. It was just absent.
Like an itch finally scratched. Like a sneeze finally sneezed. Every channel that was usually occupied had gone still at once.
Why does that day matter to the whole story? It wasn’t the cure. It didn’t last, and I didn’t expect it to.
What it did was illuminate the target for me. For one afternoon, my attention was completely free — a state my mind and body had no memory of — and it happened seemingly incidentally. For the first time since I can remember, I knew what quiet actually felt like.
This meant for the first time I knew what I was trying to achieve.
You can’t direct your actions toward a goal you don’t know exists. That day, the goal became much clearer.
Changing the incidental to the intentional
This brings my story full circle, back to the parking lot.
It was weeks after the hot springs. Same shop, same kind of errand, same tension rising in my chest as I walked toward the doors. Nothing about the moment was different.
What was different was everything that led up to the moment. The months of lowering the noise. The slow rebuilding of ordinary habits. And the spa — the one day my body showed my mind, directly, what quiet actually felt like.
This time, as the tension climbed, I noticed something I’d never had the room to notice before. There was just enough free mental capacity left to step outside the feeling and to observe it from a new perspective.
And from that small distance, I could say something true to myself. This is coming from overload.
There is nothing here to fight or to flee. There’s no threat. The alarm is sounding out of habit.
For the first time in more than a decade, I was able to turn the volume down. I could set the feeling down beside me, and control it instead of being controlled by it.
I won’t pretend that was small. It felt enormous. It felt like a line drawn across my life, a clear before and after. That breakthrough moment was the visible ‘tip of the iceberg’, carried by months of quiet work.
This was not one magic moment where everything clicked effortlessly. It was a long, unremarkable build-up, and then a single moment where I could finally feel that it had added up to something. My choices and consistency started paying off.
I was both the product and the architect
It would be easy to end the work-related part of this by leaving myself out of it. To make the noise entirely a thing that was done to me.
That wouldn’t be true.
I have a hard time leaving things broken. Not in a way I’m proud of — in a way that means I tend to pick up responsibility for problems that aren’t mine to hold, because I can’t stand watching them go unfixed.
I took ownership of more than my share, and then resented the weight of it. I wasn’t firm enough in pushing back on what I was being handed. Even more than this, I voluntarily inserted myself in many of these situations.
My choices were (mostly) logical, in that I, or people and outcomes I was responsible for, were directly and negatively impacted by these unresolved issues.
This doesn’t change the fact that my capacity isn’t infinite, and I ignored my limitations.
It takes two to tango. I was genuinely caught in a difficult situation — and I also contributed to how loud it became.
I call this out because a meaningful reframe of the problem doesn’t exist without it.
If the lesson is “if the kitchen gets too hot, find a cooler room”, then this leaves no space for accountability and growth. It relies solely on circumstances working in your favour, and doesn’t equip you to deal with any difficulty in your life.
If this is the way the world works, I wouldn’t be writing this article in the first place. And you wouldn’t be reading it.
Some of the noise was my fault. I was letting it in, and I was generating my share of it. Which means some of the power to reduce it was mine too. That’s not a comfortable realization, but it also leaves me with something I can actually control.
Still in the grey
I’m not writing this from the finish line of my journey. I want to be clear about that, because too much of this kind of writing pretends at an arrival the writer hasn’t reached. I have zero intent on creating romanticised, unrealistic expectations.
This isn’t a story about how I reached a state of “Zen”.
I’m not entirely calm and grounded, nor am I flustered and off-balance.
I’m somewhere in the grey, between the noise I knew and the quiet I’ve now felt once or twice, and which I’m learning to find on purpose.
What I have now that I didn’t have before is capacity and perspective. A share of my attention that the noise used to swallow whole, recovered and free. A new view on how my choices directly impact my nervous system. A greater appreciation for sustainability.
The capacity preceded the clarity, which preceded the control.
With a little free capacity, I could finally see that the noise was a state I was in, not the person I am. With that perspective, I could start choosing my response instead of being ruled by it. Even more valuably, I could start priming my response proactively, better equipping myself for whatever comes.
Capacity, then clarity, then control. In that order.
For a long time I’ve felt like a passenger in my own life, carried along by whatever I was feeling. I’m not fully in the driver’s seat yet. But for the first time, my hands are truly on the wheel.
If you recognise yourself in any of this, then the first move isn’t a new routine or a technique. These elements need to be built on a strong foundation.
This foundation is built on honest, potentially uncomfortable reflection. Sit with three questions, and answer them bluntly rather than kindly.
What’s currently creating the noise?
Which habits, environments, or inputs are draining your attention?
And what would actually help you feel calmer, clearer, and more connected?
You don’t need the answers today. An honest reading of where you actually are — not where you think you should be — is the ground everything else gets built on.
If this spoke to something real for you, you’re in the right place.
If you want to read the other side of the same root — the version where the overload came not from feeling too much, but from knowing too much and not being able to act on it — my wife has written that one. It’s a companion to this, not a footnote: [link to Knowledge Seeker foundational].
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