Understanding Your Teen's Emotional Spiral

DEAR COACH

Q: "Why do I feel fine one minute, and then suddenly overwhelmed... like I shut down or overreact, and then I can't stop thinking about it? Is something wrong with me?"

A: First, take a breath. Because the fact that you're asking this question at all means you're already paying attention to yourself in a way that matters.

And to answer it directly: no. Nothing is wrong with you.

What you're describing is something a lot of girls your age are going through quietly, without ever quite having a name for it. The swinging between fine and overwhelmed, the shutting down, the going over it afterward. That's not you being too sensitive or too much. That's a pattern. And once you start to understand what's underneath it, it stops feeling so out of nowhere.

Here's what's actually going on. Your brain is trying to take care of you. It's watching for judgment, for the moment something might go wrong. And when it picks up on something—a tone, a look, a silence that feels a beat too long—your nervous system triggers a stress response before you've even had time to think. That's why it hits so fast. You were okay a minute ago and now you're not. That's not a flaw in you. That's just your brain doing its job, only doing it a little too hard.

The shutting down, the irritability, the going quiet. Those aren't weakness. They're what happens when a feeling gets too big and your system goes into self-protection mode. This is a classic nervous system hijack, and it's a lot more common than you'd think.

And then comes the part that's usually the hardest. The replay. Long after the moment has passed, your mind is still in it. Still going over it, still looking for what you did wrong, still bracing for what comes next. That part is really tiring. And it makes everything feel so much heavier than it is.

So what can you do with all of this?

The first thing, and it sounds simple but it genuinely helps, is just to notice it while it's happening. Not fix it, not stop it, just recognize it. Something like: this is that thing again. In coaching, we call this meta-cognition—the advanced skill of observing your own thoughts , and that small moment of awareness, just naming it to yourself, creates a little room between you and the reaction. And that room is where you get to make a choice. You can't do much with a feeling you don't even know you're having.

From there, your body is usually the fastest way back to feeling steady. Before you respond or pull back, give yourself one small physical moment. Feel your feet on the floor. Take one slow breath. It brings you back inside your emotional baseline, that calmer place where you can actually think instead of just react. It sounds almost too easy, but it does something real.

The thoughts themselves are worth looking at too, but gently. When your mind tells you they think I'm weird or I said something wrong, it feels completely true in that moment. But those are cognitive distortions—your fear doing the talking, not reality. You don't have to argue with them. Just get a little curious. Do I actually know this for sure? Is there another way to read this? That's reframing, and sometimes that one question is enough to loosen something that felt certain a second ago.

And after a hard moment, instead of going straight into why did I do that, see if you can try something a little kinder. That was hard. I got through it. You don't need to be perfect at any of this. You just need to be a little easier on yourself than you were the last time.

That's really how this changes. Slowly, and more than you'd expect.

With warmth,

Estie Ashlag, AAPC 

 Certified Life Coach, Refuah Institute

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