You’re Not Lazy. You’re Overwhelmed. Here’s What’s Actually Going On.

We Are Living in Chaos. And Some of Us Are Addicted to It.

I asked in my Facebook community how many women feel like they’ve got adulting locked down. Thirty-three percent said yes — fully confident, no notes. And the rest of us? We’re inconsistent, overwhelmed, or happily burying our heads in the sand.

When I asked Melody whether we’re all walking around in a state of chaos right now, she didn’t hesitate.

“I think only someone blind and dead would say differently.”

But here’s the part worth sitting with: Melody says the reason some of us feel so consumed by the chaos — and others seem completely checked out — often comes back to the same root cause. We grew up in unpredictable environments.

“If you grow up in chaos, you learn how to navigate it. You learn how to survive. But unfortunately, surviving in chaos doesn’t mean you know how to thrive past it.”

So you’re either diving face-first into every news alert, every catastrophe, every scroll — or you’re completely numb to all of it. Either way, Melody says part of you is unhealed. You’re trauma bonding with the unpredictability. The chaos feels familiar. It doesn’t scare you the way it probably should, because somewhere deep down, it feels like home.

That’s a hard thing to sit with honestly.

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How Chaos Shows Up in Your Body and Your Life

The tricky part is that chaos doesn’t always announce itself. It shows up as drinking a little more than usual. Or restricting what you eat. Or the irritability that snaps at people you love. The isolating. The shutting down. The sex life that’s shifted. The anger that seems to come out of nowhere.

“Whatever it is you do when you’re stressed is your coping mechanism,” Melody says. “The goal is to make sure you have healthy coping mechanisms and not the unhealthy ones that will make your life even worse.”

The question worth asking yourself — honestly, without judgment — is what your version of coping looks like right now. Most of us have a go-to, and most of us haven’t looked at it clearly in a while.

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Your Phone Is Not Keeping You Informed. It’s Keeping You Hooked.

I’ll own it — I’ve used “I need to stay informed” as a reason to scroll at 11pm more times than I can count. And a lot of us are doing the same thing while telling ourselves it’s responsible citizenship.

Melody’s take is that your phone has become a knee-jerk response to stress, and you might not even realize it’s happening.

“When you’ve grabbed your phone to scroll, think about what you were thinking about right before you grabbed your phone.”

She’s right that you’ll probably have to try this exercise multiple times before it sticks, because reaching for the phone has become so automatic it barely registers as a choice. Your mind and body are trying to regulate — they’re trying to take care of you — and the phone is what’s right there.

The real test is how you feel when you put it down. Do you feel informed? Energized? Or do you feel depleted, angry, and somehow worse than before you picked it up?

“If you feel those negative things, that means it’s not helping you. You’re maybe just reaching out to it not because it helps — but because it’s become a habit.”

And here’s what Melody said about not keeping up with the news that I genuinely needed to hear: she stopped watching mainstream news in 2001, after 9/11 overwhelmed her. People have questioned her judgment ever since. But she knew about the pandemic. She knew about wars. She knows what’s happening in the world.

“You dialing in absolutely means that you care. But you not dialing in doesn’t mean that you don’t care. It just means that you’ve got a boundary on how information affects you, and you’re protecting your peace.”

Protecting your peace is now a form of rebellion. It’s worth thinking about that.

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You Were Taught to Dismiss Yourself. Here’s How Early It Started.

This is the part of our conversation I keep returning to.

Melody talked about how we are groomed — from childhood — to override our own instincts. The little kid who says she doesn’t feel well and gets sent to school anyway. The child at a family holiday who doesn’t want to hug a relative and gets pushed to do it anyway. In both cases, the message is the same: what you feel doesn’t matter as much as what everyone else needs right now.

“We are taught very early on to dismiss ourselves and to ignore our intuition.”

That child grows up. She becomes the woman who says no and gets called difficult. Who is told she’s too sensitive, too emotional, too much. Who spends her twenties and thirties and forties performing a version of herself that never quite fit, until one day — maybe postmenopausal, maybe after a divorce or an empty nest or a health scare — she wakes up and thinks: what did I even agree to?

Melody’s clients — high-functioning, high-performing adults — often come to her after exactly this kind of reckoning. Many of them carry childhood trauma they don’t recognize as trauma, because there was no broken bone, no visible evidence. Their harm was quieter. Subtler. A thousand things that individually seemed small.

“We’ve been told to dismiss our emotional neglect when that is what is most detrimental to how we see ourselves and see ourselves in the world.”

And when it comes to the word “trauma” itself — Melody is clear. Trauma is relative. What damages one person may not land the same way on someone else, and neither experience is less valid. If anyone has ever told you that your pain doesn’t count because it wasn’t dramatic enough, that says far more about them than it does about you.

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Why Shame Has Never Actually Worked (And What’s Replacing It)

I suspect I’m not alone in having believed, at some point, that if I just felt bad enough about the things I wasn’t doing, I would eventually do them. The will and trust. The workout routine. The decluttered closet.

When I asked Melody whether shame actually works as a motivator, she surprised me.

“It has worked. It worked for millennia.”

But here’s why it doesn’t work anymore: people are waking up. We’re beginning to see that the systems that used shame as a tool were never designed to make us better. They were designed to keep us in line — to keep us small enough not to push back, and distracted enough not to question any of it.

Once you see that, you can’t unsee it.

And here’s where Melody’s perspective becomes genuinely freeing: you get to decide what things mean. You get to decide what it says about you that you haven’t cleaned out the closet, or that you skipped the gym, or that you’re still not where you think you “should” be. Society has a very specific story about what that means. But that story was written by people who benefited from you believing it.

“You can choose to beat yourself up — or you could use some critical thinking and discernment and go, ‘What feels right to me?'”

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The Book Worth Your Time

Melody mentioned a book that belongs on every grown woman’s reading list: The Myth of Normal by Dr. Gabor Maté.

Maté is a physician whose work draws a direct line between childhood trauma and physical illness — and he backs it up with data. Your phone was designed to be addictive. Women are diagnosed with autoimmune diseases at dramatically higher rates than men. Women experience depression more than men do.

The reason, Maté argues, is suppression. We have spent our lives being told to push down our reality — our feelings, our anger, our limits — in service of the people and systems around us. And the body eventually presents the bill.

“In that suppression, we’ve gotten cancer. We’ve gotten sicker. Because we’re not expressing all of ourselves — because we’re pleasing the people around us.”

Melody’s prescription: stop. Rebel against it.

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What You Can Actually Do

Here’s what Melody recommends — practical, accessible, and not a single manicure in sight.

Pay attention to your nervous system. When your shoulders are up around your ears, when there’s a low hum of stress you can’t quite name — don’t ignore it. Is it high blood pressure? Anxiety? Something else entirely? Get it checked out. Your body is the first signal, and most of us have been taught to override it.

Redefine what self-care actually means. It is not a spa day (though again, those are nice). Self-care is: I know that party makes me miserable every single time, so I’m not going to that party. It’s buying the cupcakes instead of staying up until midnight making them. It’s being the plates-and-napkins person without apologizing for it. Delegating is self-care. Removing things from your calendar is self-care. A walk without your phone is self-care. These are not dramatic changes. They are small acts of choosing yourself.

Put self-care on the calendar like it’s an actual appointment. Melody’s practical tip: print a blank calendar and schedule your restorative activities on it — a walk in nature, dinner with a friend where you talk about something other than the news, time with your pet, a movie you want to see. And then protect it. Don’t cancel it, don’t reschedule it for someone else’s convenience. You need it.

Understand the difference between processing and ruminating. Ruminating is thinking something to death and arriving at the same place every single time. Processing is different — it moves. It asks: how did this make me feel? How do I want to feel? What perspective on this situation would actually serve me better? That shift — from circling to moving forward — is what changes things.

Learn to trust what your body is already telling you. When someone asks you to do something and your face falls and your stomach drops and your whole body sort of deflates — that is a no. It was built into you for a reason. The more you practice listening to it, the louder and clearer it gets.

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The Quiet Rebellion

The word that kept coming up in this conversation was rebellion — not the dramatic kind, but the daily, unglamorous kind. The kind that says: I’m going to protect my peace. I’m going to stop carrying goals that were never mine to carry. I’m going to trust myself enough to say no, and I’m going to mean it.

You have been hauling around a to-do list — and possibly a whole identity — that may have belonged to someone else. A younger version of you. A parent. A culture that had very specific ideas about what a woman your age should want and do and look like. And somewhere in this season of life, it’s worth sitting down with a journal, or a therapist, or an honest friend, and asking: is this actually mine?

What Melody nearly dying twice in four weeks taught her — and what she came back to share with us — is that dismissing yourself has a cost. It has always had a cost. It just takes a while to show up.

You already know what you need. Melody is certain of it, and after this conversation, so am I. The work is learning to trust that you do.

If this conversation resonated, join me for a free live workshop: **Handle Your Sht** — April 18th. We’re going to get honest about what’s hanging over your head, figure out what’s actually yours to carry, and make a real plan for the rest. Grab your spot HERE.

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About Melody

Melody Murray is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist and Child Mental Health Specialist in private practice, counseling individuals and families aged 14–75. She has expertise in childhood emotional neglect and its effects on adult behavior, trauma responses, family dynamics, and suicidal ideation. Prior to private practice, Melody spent years in hospital settings as a Mental Health Evaluator in an Emergency Department and as a DBT group facilitator.

Melody is a public speaker and author. Her debut nonfiction book, Mourning the Living: When the Loved One You’ve Lost is Still Here, is available now. Her second project, the workbook My Bounce Back Plan: Designing Your Own Healing Formula, releases later this year.

Melody has appeared on The Today Show, The Doctors, the Facebook Watch series Peace of Mind with Taraji, HBO’s PAUSE with Sam Jay, and the E! special E! True Hollywood Story: Is Fame an Addiction? Her work has been featured in the New York Times, Washington Post, Business Insider, Newsweek, and AARP, and she has guest-appeared on podcasts worldwide.

Full Transcript

You know that feeling when you’re lying in bed going through your mental to-do list—maybe the bill you haven’t paid, or the will & trust you haven’t done, the call you keep putting off, or the life admin thing that’s been following you around for months? And you tell yourself you’re going to handle it, and then life happens, and suddenly another week goes by.

Here’s the good news. There’s a strong chance you’re not actually lazy or irresponsible. You’re overwhelmed. And there’s a very specific reason for that.

Today you’ll hear from Melody Murray—reality show producer turned licensed marriage and family therapist. She’s the author of Mourning the Living: When the Loved One You’ve Lost is Still Here, and she’s appeared on The Today Show, The Doctors, among many others, and has been featured in the New York Times, Washington Post, Business Insider, Newsweek, and AARP.

Melody has been on the podcast multiple times before and always provides us amazing insight and practical tools. Today we talk about why we might feel stuck, how our bodies are taking the hit, and most importantly, what we can actually do about it.

I’m Jackie MacDougall. This is The Grown-Ass Woman’s Guide.