When You’ve Lost Your Spark: Why You’re So Tired, Foggy, and Anxious

Vicki Johnson Author

How Early Childhood Shapes Health and Resilience Throughout Life

We've all been there. That moment when you're running on empty, stretched impossibly thin, trying to hold it all together for your family while something invisible unravels inside you. You carry too much for too long, and nobody sees the weight of those invisible wounds.

If you're a caregiver feeling like you're drowning, desperately needing a soft place to land, you're not alone. More importantly, what you're experiencing isn't a personal failure....it's your body sending you signals.

The Truth About Stress vs. Trauma

Most of us understand stress. It's that burst of energy when you slam on the brakes to avoid a crash or power through a deadline. In healthy doses, stress can actually build resilience. The key difference? After stress, your body should return to balance, heart rate normalizes, muscles relax, nervous system resets.

Trauma is different. Trauma is a whole-body experience, an energy problem that always involves the freeze response. It's deeply connected to your vagus nerve, which wanders from your brainstem down into your pelvis, affecting many vital organs.

Think of trauma as any experience that overwhelms your ability to cope. It can happen two ways:

• Too much, too fast: sudden accidents, losses, overwhelming responsibilities
• Too little, for too long: lack of safety, connection, and support over extended periods

When this goes on for days, months, or years, it gets imprinted into your nervous system, keeping you stuck cycling from survival mode to the freeze response because your body never returns to balance.

Your Nervous System: Wired from Birth

Here's something most people don't realize: from the moment you were born, your nervous system was learning one crucial question: "Is the world safe? Am I safe?"

Your brain and body are literally wired based on how stress, comfort, and connection were handled around you in your earliest moments. We now know attachment begins forming much earlier than previously believed—not just between ages 1-3, but well before those milestones.

If nobody helped you feel safe when you were carrying hard things or too much, your body can get wired to stay in a high-alert, hyper-vigilant state. This leaves lasting impacts on your emotional regulation, relationships, immune function, and physical health.

The Ripple Effect: From Childhood to Chronic Illness

Having insecure attachment from childhood is the strongest predictor of encountering trauma later in life. When we have trauma, it begets more trauma, setting up vulnerability for future experiences. It's not because you're flawed—your nervous system is doing exactly what it had to do to help you survive.

The statistics are sobering: More than 50 million Americans currently live with autoimmune conditions, and 75% are women. Decades of over-functioning, holding it all together, and pushing through can eventually lead to burnout....and the ripple effect impacts every area of life.

Think of your nervous system as a smoke detector. When you're in that hyper-vigilant state, it's like an alarm that keeps going off even when there's no fire. The result? Anxiety, exhaustion, reactivity, and disconnection.

The Power of Co-Regulation

But here's the beautiful truth: human connection actually regulates your biology, and healthy regulation is contagious.

Picture this scenario: It's been a long day. Your child has had big feelings, maybe a full meltdown, and you've had stress too. But instead of more tension, you notice your child crawling into your lap, not because you said the right thing or had the perfect parenting strategy, but because in that moment, you are their safe place. Your steady breath, your calm presence, that's co-regulation in action.

Small Shifts, Big Impact

You don't need long rituals to shift your nervous system. You can give your body a break in 30 seconds:

Try this right now:

• Notice 3 things you can see
• Touch 2 things around you
• Identify 1 thing you can smell

Just that quickly, you bring your body back into the present moment.

These micro-resets meet you where you're actually living. Imagine doing a full exhale while changing a diaper. Swaying gently to music while cooking. Humming while going about daily tasks.

The Freedom Framework: Seven Essentials for Resilience

True resilience isn't just emotional or mental - it's biological, shaped at the cellular level. The path to resilience involves addressing seven essential areas:

1. Felt sense of safety (the foundation for everything else)
2. Resilience- Building genuine support systems
3. Energy- Adding small, meaningful moments of rest, energy, and connection
4. Environment- Internal & external transformation
5. Diet- Nourishing your body properly
6. Optimal sleelp-Prioritizing restorative sleep
7. Movement- Gentle movement and rhythm

Thanks to neuroplasticity, even patterns shaped in early life can be rewired with the right support. Our brains literally adapt to their environment. If we can shift our inner state, we can change the environment we and our children live in.

Breaking the Cycle

The old approaches often fall short because they target the conscious, thinking brain, but when you're highly stressed, that part actually goes offline. You can't find words, can't access language, memory gets affected.

Any approach that skips the emotional component, when emotions live in the body, misses the mark. As trauma expert Dr. Bessel van der Kolk wrote in "The Body Keeps the Score": "When the alarm bell of the emotional brain keeps signaling that you are in danger, no amount of insight will silence it."

This is why willpower isn't enough.

Hope for Resilience

Resilience isn't fixed—it's built. Even when early development includes gaps, stress, or injuries, your nervous system can learn new patterns and begin repairing itself with the right support.

The journey starts with awareness. When you understand these connections, you can respond with compassion instead of judgment, both for yourself and those you love. You can create environments that feel truly safe and develop support that's sustainable for your whole body, not just your mind.

Your Next Step

If you're recognizing yourself in these patterns, if you're realizing that your mental and emotional well-being deeply affects your child's sense of safety, connection, and confidence....there's a path forward.

The work is meaningful and powerful, but it's not a quick fix. It requires time, patience, and willingness to gently examine patterns that may no longer serve you. But even committing just 10 minutes a day to developing new responses can create profound shifts.

Picture this: after learning these approaches, when storms come, you and your child stay connected. Not because the day was easy, but because you repaired and stayed together through the hard moments. When you tuck them into bed, they feel safe, seen, and loved—not because of any particular thing you did, but because of who you're becoming.

Ready to break the cycle and start building sustainable resilience for you and your family?

Enroll in When You've Lost Your Spark: Why You're So Tired, Foggy, and Anxious.

Because everyone deserves to rise up, regulate for internal safety, and see the world as a safe place to explore.

Remember: Strong bonds don't mean being stuck to your child 24/7. Secure attachment develops when they can rest into your relationship and feel your presence even when you're not physically together. Love is resilient, not fragile.

Enjoy this free Resilience Guide and start finding calm in your day......today!

If you haven't see the Live Webinar:  When You’ve Lost Your Spark: Why You’re So Tired, Foggy, and Anxious....Watch it here for a limited time!

Shoutout to Grant Durr for the image

Categories: : Attachment, Bonding, Resilience, Stress, Trauma