202. Stressed! Why You Can’t Think Straight Right Now

Have you been forgetting simple things, rereading the same message, or struggling to make decisions that would normally feel straightforward? After betrayal, it can feel as though your brain has stopped working properly, but that does not mean you are broken, incapable, or failing.

Infidelity recovery creates an enormous invisible mental load. Grief, hypervigilance, intrusive thoughts, uncertainty and relationship decisions can quietly consume your emotional capacity before the day has even begun. When normal life continues to demand your attention, even small tasks can become overwhelming.

In this episode, I explore cognitive load, emotional overwhelm and why self-criticism makes recovery harder, while offering a kinder, more accurate way to understand why you cannot always think clearly after betrayal.

Key Takeaways:

• Recognise that difficulty concentrating may be a sign of emotional overload, not personal failure.

• Stop judging yourself by the size of the task and consider everything else you are already carrying.

• Understand how betrayal recovery uses mental capacity through grief, hypervigilance and intrusive thoughts.

• Avoid making major relationship decisions when you are at your most depleted or overwhelmed.

• Replace “What is wrong with me?” with the more compassionate question: “What am I carrying that nobody else can see?”

Why You Can't Think Straight After Betrayal

After infidelity, many people worry that something is wrong with them. They forget appointments, lose track of conversations, struggle to make decisions or read the same message repeatedly. This can feel frightening, especially if you were organised, focused and confident. However, understanding why you can't think straight begins with recognising the invisible workload your mind is carrying.

Betrayal activates grief, uncertainty and hypervigilance. Part of your brain may be replaying the past, searching for missed signs or trying to work out what was real. Another part may be scanning the present for danger, while another tries to predict the future. These processes consume mental energy, even when you appear calm. Everyday tasks have not become harder; you have less capacity available to complete them.

The shift is to stop treating overwhelm as evidence of weakness. Instead of asking, “What is wrong with me?”, ask, “What am I carrying that nobody else can see?” That question creates understanding rather than shame.

Creating Space for Clearer Thinking

Knowing why you can't think straight does not instantly remove the pressure, but it can help you respond compassionately. Start by reducing unnecessary decisions, writing down important information and postponing anything that does not need an immediate answer. Focus on one manageable task rather than demanding that you solve your relationship or future at once.

Try listing everything you are carrying, including the invisible parts: grief, anger, parenting pressure, financial concerns, fear and the need for relationship clarity. Seeing the full load can help you stop blaming yourself for struggling beneath it.

You are not failing. Your emotional capacity may be full. Recovery begins not by forcing yourself to cope better, but by creating enough space to think, feel and choose your next step with care.

💬 Reflection Question:

What invisible emotional weight are you carrying right now, and how might your experience change if you stopped judging yourself for struggling with it?

People Also Ask

What happens to the brain after betrayal?

After betrayal, the brain may enter a stress response, increasing hypervigilance, intrusive thoughts, poor concentration and memory difficulties. This is a protective reaction to emotional threat, not a sign that you are broken.

How to stop overthinking after betrayal?

Overthinking after betrayal eases when you stop chasing certainty. Name the thought, return to what you can control, limit rumination time and calm your body. Healing comes through repetition, support and self-trust.

Why is it so hard to recover from betrayal?

Betrayal damages trust, safety and your sense of reality. Recovery is hard because you are grieving both what happened and what you believed was true, while rebuilding confidence in yourself and others.

How to calm your nervous system after betrayal?

Calm your nervous system with slow breathing, gentle movement, grounding exercises, regular sleep and supportive connection. Focus on safety in the present rather than forcing yourself to feel better immediately.

Connect with Luke:

• Website: www.lifecoachluke.com 

• Instagram: @mylifecoachluke

• Email: luke@lifecoachluke.com

Join the After the Affair community at www.facebook.com/groups/aftertheaffaircommunity

Episode Transcript:

The After The Affair podcast with me Luke Shillings is here to help you process, decide and move forward on purpose following infidelity. Together we'll explore what's required to rebuild trust not only in yourself but also with others. Whether you stay or leave I can help and no matter what your story there will be something here for you.

Let's go. Hello and welcome back to the After The Affair podcast. I'm your host Luke Shillings and today you're listening to episode number 202.

I'm going to talk about something a little bit different today. I want to start with a confession. This week I've been overwhelmed.

In fact it's been more than just this week but this week in and of itself it seems to have peaked. Now I'm not saying this is like an overly dramatic, everything's falling apart kind of way. There's nothing significant, significantly catastrophic that's happened and no one's been pushed to hospital.

There hasn't been some huge emergency crisis as such. It's just that life has decided to throw several completely normal things at me just all at the same time. I'm currently in the middle of moving house.

Not the exciting bit where you unpack the boxes and decide where everything goes. Think of it more like the messy bit. The decorating, the chasing suppliers, the coordinating trades, organising removals, the endless boring admin.

All of the decisions that just seem to, oh my word, never ever ever ever end. You know, making a little jobs list of all of the different things that I need to do that in and of themselves are tiny, easy, not particularly difficult, at least the majority of them, but stack them all together and it's a mountain and a half. For the longtime listeners here, for those of you who know that my father doesn't live in the UK, he's currently here at the moment for a six-week period over the summer, which is obviously wonderful.

It's always nice to have him here and spend time with him and spend time with the grandkids. But I feel some level of guilt because I can't quite spend the time that I normally would or would like to at least. I don't want to look back and realise that I barely saw him because I was too busy worrying about paint colours or broadband installations.

The kids are off school for the summer, my partner's off work too, which again is obviously a great thing, you know, and in many ways I love that. But I also can't help but catch myself feeling guilty because I'm just not as present as I would like to be. And then of course there's the business.

Buying a house naturally puts a lot of pressure on you financially. I've been renting for several years and you know this is a different step getting back onto the property ladder after, you know, after betrayal. It just does have an impact and suddenly the business that I absolutely love doesn't just need to grow, it needs to perform consistently.

And whilst I absolutely believe in everything that I do and, you know, on the surface there's not really anything to worry about, there's still that awareness that sits quietly in the background of almost every day. And then just to top all of that off, I'm supposed to be going away this weekend only I got the dates wrong, or at least the timings wrong. And again not by any significant margin, just enough that I genuinely got confused about when I was supposed to be leaving.

Now on the surface it's not a big deal, you know, people mix dates up all the time, but for me it was just one of those moments, in fact it was probably about the 15th moment actually, where I truly stopped and thought, Luke what the hell is going on? Because this isn't like me, you know, I pride myself on being organised, I have a structured week, my business is structured, my life is fairly structured and, you know, I have a pretty good memory and I genuinely able to keep lots of moving parts together without too much difficulty. So why did something so simple suddenly become so difficult? And then I noticed something that surprised me probably a little bit more. Underneath all of that overwhelm was shame.

Not overwhelming shame, not crippling shame, just this quiet little voice that was saying, you should be coping better than this Luke. You literally help people navigate difficult seasons of their lives, you teach emotional resilience, you've recorded over 200 podcast episodes talking about this sort of thing, you should know better. And if I'm completely honest, at its worst, I even caught myself feeling like a bit of a hypocrite.

Now I almost didn't tell you that because, well, it's a little bit uncomfortable, but the more I sat with it, the more I realised I suspect many of you experience exactly the same thing. Not because you're a coach, but because you have your own version of that sentence. I should be stronger, I should be over this by now, I should be coping better, I should know what to do, I should have figured this all out.

And when we don't live up to those expectations, we don't just feel overwhelmed, we judge ourselves for being overwhelmed. And they're two completely different things. The first is simply a human experience, the second is something that we then add on top.

And that's really what I want to talk about today. Not moving house, not decorating, I'm not going to bore you with all those details, and not forgetting dates. I want to talk about what happens when life asks for more of your mind than your mind currently has available to give.

Because I think this is probably another one of the many overlooked parts of betrayal recovery. So have you ever walked into a room and then forgotten why you were there? And I'm not talking because you're 95 years old and your memory has naturally started to fade away as it can do with age. You know, I'm talking, you know, you're functioning, you hold down a full-time job, you have a family, you have kids, you have all of the things, and all of a sudden you don't know what it is you're doing.

Or maybe you've picked up your phone to do something and have absolutely no idea what that thing was. Maybe you've read the same email three times before any of it actually went in. Maybe somebody asked you a simple question and your brain just kind of froze.

Or perhaps you've snapped at someone you love over something completely insignificant and then five seconds later you're thinking, where on earth did that come from? Most of us assume it's because we're busy, but I don't actually think that's what's happening. Being busy is having lots to do. In fact I could do a whole episode just on the term busy, but for now I just want to recognise that this is different.

This is feeling like your brain has simply run out of room. It's a bit like, you know, we've had hot weather here in the UK recently, and in lots of other places in the world, and my computer has been struggling. And it's been demonstrating its struggle with its fan whirring like crazy and the little cursor on the screen doing little circles.

And it feels like my brain is just like that. And I think there is an important distinction to make here because if we believe that we're simply busy, our solution tends to be try harder, be more organised, work longer, push through, get up earlier, download another productivity app, colour-code the calendar, as though the problem is somehow just poor organisation. But what if it wasn't? What if the problem isn't your diary, but it's your capacity? Think about your own situation for a moment.

If you're listening to this podcast, there's a good chance that you're already carrying betrayal, which means that you're carrying grief, you're carrying uncertainty, you're carrying hyper-vigilance, you're carrying intrusive thoughts, you're trying to decide whether somebody's telling the truth, you're questioning your own judgement, you're trying to rebuild trust, sometimes you're trying to hold a family together at the same time. None of that appears on your calendar. No one looks at you and says, wow, you spent four days today regulating your nervous system, because it doesn't look like that.

It simply happens, silently, quietly in the background. Life just keeps asking things of you while you're already carrying something incredibly heavy that nobody else can see. And that's before normal life gets involved.

Work, children, finances, parents, school holidays, laundry, shopping, relationships, appointments. Life doesn't pause simply because you've been betrayed. It keeps arriving.

And I think that's where many people become incredibly unfair to themselves, because they compare themselves today to the version of themselves that existed before betrayal. Or they compare themselves to somebody else without considering what each person is carrying. Of course you're struggling more.

You're carrying more. When I realised I'd mixed up the dates for this weekend away, my first thought was, Luke, you've probably just got too much going on. It was, come on, sort yourself out, this isn't difficult.

But can you hear the judgement? I wasn't recognising the context. I was judging the outcome. And I think we all do this.

We judge ourselves based on the size of the task, rather than the size of everything else we're already carrying. If you are working with me as a client, we talk regularly about the emotional cup. It's our capacity.

It's how much space we have left for new challenges and tasks coming along in our day. If our emotional cup is completely full, then it does not matter how small the next thing on the list is, it is going to exceed its capacity and it's going to overflow and pour down. Replying to one email isn't difficult.

Remembering one date isn't difficult. Making one decision isn't difficult. Until it's not just one email, or one date, or one decision.

It's those things plus everything else. That's what changes. Not your intelligence, not your capability, not your character, your available capacity.

And once I'd recognised that, something shifted. Not the workload. The workload stayed exactly the same.

But I stopped trying to make it mean something about me. That's the bit I caught. I caught myself noticing that I'm not the problem.

So instead of asking what's wrong with me, I started asking, what am I asking my mind to carry right now? These are very different questions. One creates shame. I can hold my hand up to that.

The other creates understanding. And I think understanding is always, always more useful. Because once you understand what's happening, you stop trying to solve the wrong problem.

Instead of trying to become a better version of yourself, you start recognising that perhaps you've simply been expecting too much from the version of yourself that's standing here today. There's a concept in psychology called cognitive load. I've spoken about this numerous times before.

Now don't worry, I'm not going to go all deep into psychology, at least not here. The idea is really quite simple. Your brain has a finite amount of processing power available at any one time.

Think of it a bit like the RAM on a computer. The more programmes you have running in the background, the less capacity you have available for what you're trying to do next. Now here's the important part.

Betrayal doesn't just hurt emotionally. It kind of quietly instals a whole series of background programmes. You don't consciously choose them, they just appear.

One programme is consistently scanning for danger. Does that text message seem odd? Why were they five minutes late? Do they really mean what they just said? Another programme is replaying the past. How did I miss it? What else wasn't real? Was any of it genuine? Then there's another programme, probably trying to predict the future.

What if it happens again? What if I stay and regret it? What if I leave and regret that? Then you've got grief, loss, anger, shame, trying to decide whether you're rebuilding your relationship or rebuilding your life without it. None of these things ask for your permission. They're simply running constantly, which means before your day has even started you're already using a significant proportion of your available capacity.

That's why I don't think it's accurate when people say I'm just not coping anymore. I don't think that's what's happening at all. I think you're coping with far more than you're giving yourself credit for, because life doesn't remove the normal demands whilst you're trying to recover.

You've still got to go to work, still pay the bills, collect the kids, answer emails, remember birthdays, book the dentist, buy milk. Life carries on exactly as it always has done. The only difference is that you're no longer carrying just life, you're carrying betrayal as well.

And that's a very, very different load. The problem isn't simply that you become forgetful or distracted or tired. The real cost is what you make those things mean, particularly what you make those things mean about you.

Because once you start believing that you're struggling, say something about your character, you begin attacking yourself. You start thinking I'm useless, I can't even remember simple things, I'm failing, I'm letting everybody down. Can you see what happens? The original problem was capacity, but now you've added self criticism on top, which takes more capacity.

It's like trying to swim whilst somebody keeps handing you another brick, and then another, and another, and eventually you aren't drowning because you can't swim, you're drowning because you're carrying too much. I also think this is one of the reasons that people make decisions they later question. Not because they're incapable of making good decisions, but because depleted people don't think as clearly.

Have you ever noticed how everything feels so much more dramatic late at night? The relationship feels more hopeless, the future feels darker, everything feels heavier, then you wake up in the morning and it doesn't seem quite so catastrophic. Well what changed? Often nothing, except your available mental capacity. The decision didn't change, your ability to process it did.

Even if it doesn't last very long, just noticing the difference between one stage and another. That's why I encourage people to not necessarily make life-changing decisions from their lowest moments. Not because your feelings aren't valid, of course they are, but because overwhelm has a way of shrinking your perspective.

It convinces you that the only thing you can see is the whole picture, yet it rarely is. So what's the answer? Well I don't think it's becoming more productive, and I don't think it's simply trying harder. In fact I think trying harder is often exactly what exhausted people do.

Instead I think we need to ask ourselves a very different question, not what's wrong with me, but what am I carrying that nobody else can see? I love that question because it's so honest and it immediately changes the conversation. We're not trying to prove to other people how busy we are. That doesn't solve anything other than make us feel even more busy, which increases the level of overwhelm and stress and uncertainty and everything else that we're experiencing in the moment.

It doesn't help, but what it does do is it changes the conversation. Instead of judging yourself you become curious about yourself. Maybe you are carrying grief, maybe you are carrying uncertainty, maybe you're carrying responsibility for everybody else, maybe you're carrying guilt because you feel like your children deserve a happier version of you, maybe you're carrying pressure to make the right decision about your relationship, maybe you're carrying all of those things.

When you acknowledge the load your experience suddenly makes so much more sense. That doesn't magically reduce it, but it does stop you adding shame to it and I think that's incredibly important because shame doesn't increase capacity, it drains it. Something else I've noticed is that when people feel overwhelmed their instinct is often to add another solution, another book, another podcast, another morning routine, another journal from Amazon, another habit, another thing to remember.

Now don't get me wrong, those things obviously can all be useful, but if the real problem is capacity, adding another demand isn't always the answer. Sometimes the most productive thing that you can do is to remove something, it's to delay something, it's to say no to something, it's to allow one plate to stop spinning before it falls on its own. I know that's easier said than done, even just as I'm talking now my brain is trying to offer me lots of different things that I need to do by a certain time.

There are things on my list that simply cannot move or at least not easy to move. I do need to decorate the rooms before the carpets go in and I do need to get the carpets in before I can put the beds in. There are some logistical practical things that that I want to happen in a particular order so that things work and it makes sense.

I mean I will say that life hasn't suddenly become less demanding just because I recognised what was happening, that's important, but I have stopped expecting myself to perform as though none of those things exist and strangely that has made me feel a little bit lighter. Not because there's less to do but just because there's less judgement attached to doing it which gives me some space and actually slightly increases my capacity which is great. So if you've listened to this episode and recognised yourself I just want to leave you with one thought.

Maybe you're not failing, maybe you're full and there is a big difference. Maybe the reason that you can't think straight isn't because you're broken, maybe it's because your mind is doing exactly what a healthy human mind does when it's asked to carry more than it comfortably can. If you're recovering from betrayal please don't underestimate how much of your capacity that the recovery itself quietly consumes behind the scenes.

Just because other people can't see it doesn't mean it's not there. Just because it's not on your calendar doesn't mean it isn't work. It is real work, difficult work and often invisible work and perhaps that's why I wanted to share a little bit of my own week with you.

Not because moving house compares to betrayal, it doesn't, I can confirm that, although it is stressful, but because it reminded me of something that I think all of us need reminding of from time to time. Even the people who teach us this stuff. We are still human, I'm human, I still get overwhelmed, I still forget things, I still catch myself judging myself and I still have moments where I think I should be coping better.

The difference isn't that those thoughts disappear, it's recognising them for what they are. Thoughts. Not evidence, not proof, not facts, they're just thoughts.

So the next time you catch yourself forgetting something or snapping at someone you love or reading the same email three or four times or feeling frustrated because your brain simply just doesn't seem to want to cooperate in that moment, before asking what's wrong with me, try asking this instead. What am I carrying that nobody else can see? And I have a feeling the answer to that question will be far kinder and far more accurate. If today's episode has resonated with you I'd really encourage you to spend five minutes this week writing down everything that you're currently carrying.

Not just the obvious things and we're not trying to make the list long on purpose to justify it, let's just be honest and think about some of the invisible things too. Because sometimes seeing the full weight of what you're holding is enough to stop blaming yourself for struggling to hold it. And if part of that invisible load is the aftermath of betrayal and you'd like some help putting some of that weight down, that's exactly what I help people do inside my one-to-one coaching and within the After The Affair Collective.

If you're on socials then come and join me over at Instagram at mylifecoachluke. And if you've been finding this podcast helpful and you'd like a little bit more support between episodes, I'd love you to join my email community. Each week I share additional insights, practical tools and personal reflections that I don't always talk about on the podcast.

It's a chance to go a little deeper and continue your recovery with me there. You can sign up at lifecoachluke.com and I'll make sure that you hear about new episodes, free resources and anything else that I think will genuinely help you move forward. Okay, thank you ever so much as always.

I can't wait to speak to you again next time and remember, go easy on your capacity. Okay, I'll see you.