Your Brain Crashes Under Stress (Here’s How to Reboot It)
We’ve all been there. Everything feels like it’s falling apart, and suddenly even the simplest decisions seem impossible. Your usually clear-thinking mind turns into a jumble of competing priorities and mounting panic.
But here’s the thing: this isn’t a flaw, and it isn’t weakness. It’s your brain doing exactly what it was designed to do — just not in a way that helps when you’re facing modern challenges like deadlines, money worries, or supporting your child’s learning.
When Stress Takes the Wheel
As soon as stress kicks in, rational decision-making seems to vanish. You feel flustered, unable to see the logical next step. It doesn’t matter whether the problem is genuinely complex or has a simple solution — when stress is in charge, clarity takes a back seat.
Yet the moment calm returns, everything changes. Suddenly you can work through the steps methodically and find solutions with ease. This dramatic shift isn’t about ability or intelligence. It’s your brain’s built-in emergency system doing its job, just not in the way you’d like it to do!
The Brain’s Emergency Protocol
When stress strikes, your brain switches to survival mode. The parts responsible for reasoning and problem-solving are overridden by the stress response system, which has one simple mission: make this problem disappear now.
This ancient mechanism kept our ancestors alive when facing immediate threats, but it doesn’t translate well to modern challenges. A reactive brain might help you dodge danger, but it’s less useful when dealing with school meetings, bills, or workplace pressures.
In this state, your brain isn’t looking for the best solution — only the fastest. That’s why stressed decision-making can feel scattered and why, afterwards, we wonder how we missed such obvious answers.
The Power of the Mental Queue
Here’s where a simple software concept can shift how you think about stress: the queue system.
Imagine a website under heavy traffic, with users clicking frantically when a page won’t load. Without proper management, the system crashes. With a queue, however, requests get organised and processed when resources become available.
Your brain needs the same approach. When demands pile up — whether it’s ten thousand responsibilities or just a busy school morning — trying to tackle them all at once will only crash the system.
The key is learning to delay reactions and “queue” problems until your brain has the capacity to process them properly. Stepping back, taking a pause, or consciously postponing a response gives your logical brain time to catch up.
Timing Is Everything
Stressful periods usually come in bursts. If you can resist reacting in the middle of a stress burst, you’ll be in a much better position to handle the problem appropriately once it passes.
Sometimes this looks like saying, “I hear you, and your concern is in my queue,” and then following up later when you can give it proper attention. The follow-through matters just as much as the pause — without it, trust breaks down and stress increases.
This approach is especially important with children. They simply don’t yet have the capacity to manage rapid-fire requests or multiple instructions at once. When too much comes at them too quickly, they easily slip into panic mode, becoming defensive or shutting down. Supporting them to focus on one task at a time helps them build confidence and calm.
The Trauma Factor
For people who have experienced trauma, the brain’s natural queuing system often doesn’t develop in the same way. Stress responses can be more intense, with the brain throwing “error messages” much sooner.
What might look like an overreaction often makes perfect sense when viewed through this lens. Understanding this can help us meet both ourselves and others with greater compassion when stress responses seem overwhelming or out of proportion.
Tools That Help Calm the Brain and Body
At Dyslexia Unpuzzled, one of the very first tools we use is designed to calm both the mind and the body — putting them in the right place for learning. It’s an incredibly powerful process. The moment of realisation that it’s safe to relax and be calm can be life-changing.
One client, after completing this exercise, told me he felt “the weight of the world lift off his shoulders.” Once clients are in that calm space, they can learn so much more effectively because they’re working with their brains and bodies in unison, not against them.
A simple technique I often teach in my sessions is box breathing. It’s a powerful way for both parents and children to step into calm before starting something like homework time. Just a few minutes of breathing with focus can help shift the brain out of stress mode and into a state where learning feels safer and easier.
It’s equally important for parents to practise to calm themselves before working with their children. When you feel steady, your child is more likely to follow your lead. If you’d like to try this, I’ve created a short video that demonstrates box breathing — you can watch it here: [insert YouTube link].
Practical Strategies for Better Mental Queuing
Single-Task Focus: Prioritise completing one task at a time — for yourself and for children. Avoid multiple instructions or overload.
Strategic Delays: Build in pause time between noticing a problem and responding to it. Even a few minutes can change the outcome.
Follow-Through Systems: If you tell someone their concern is “in the queue,” make sure you have a reliable way of addressing it later. Broken promises add to stress.
Burst Awareness: Learn to recognise when you’re in a stress burst and remind yourself it will pass.
Workload Management: Find strategies that work with your brain’s natural rhythms instead of pushing against them.
The Transformation
When you learn to work with your brain’s natural patterns instead of against them, everything changes. The problems don’t necessarily shrink, but your capacity to handle them grows.
The next time you feel that familiar flood of overwhelm, remember the queue. Step back. Breathe. Organise your thoughts. Trust that when the stress burst passes, your problem-solving brain will be ready to take its turn.
And if you’re supporting a child with learning challenges, this is especially important. They need calm, steady guidance while they develop their own queuing systems — one task, one step at a time.
With the right strategies, both you and your child can move from panic mode to problem-solving mode. One step at a time really is enough.
