Ever wonder why everything feels so heavy sometimes? It’s not you falling apart; it’s your brain rationing your energy, and there are practical ways to stop it from costing you more than it should. Episode 351 of LTAMH will show you how. So, Let’s Talk About Mental Health!

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Episode Overview:

Why does everything feel so heavy sometimes, even on days when nothing’s technically gone wrong? 

In this episode of the Let’s Talk About Mental Health podcast, I dig into what’s actually happening when that weighed-down feeling takes over: how your brain starts rationing your physical, mental, and emotional energy the moment it hits something it can’t control, and why that rationing quietly shrinks parts of your life that had nothing to do with the original problem in the first place. This isn’t about making the hard thing disappear (because you probably can’t, or you’d have done it already); it’s about catching the exact moment “I can’t fix this” turns into “so I might as well stop trying at everything,” and taking that power back before it costs you more than it should.

Whether what’s weighing on you is the news, your health, your relationships, or something you couldn’t even name out loud yet, the pattern underneath is the same… and so is the way out of that pattern. And if you want to go deeper on the control piece specifically, my episode on focusing on what you can control (Episode 291) is a great one to pair with this. 

👉 Ready to stop letting heaviness and overwhelm shrink your life? Then let’s talk!

💡 TL;DR: Feeling heavy and overwhelmed doesn’t just make things tough, it quietly rations your energy and shrinks your whole life; this episode is about how to catch it happening and take your power back. 🙂

New here? Hi! Let’s Talk About Mental Health is your weekly dose of practical mental health advice for real life. I’m Jeremy Godwin (hello! 👋) and I keep things simple, honest, and doable so you can feel more in control of your life and your mental wellbeing. If you’re not already a free subscriber, sign up below to have episodes and transcripts land in your inbox every Sunday:

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Episode Transcript:

Why does everything feel so heavy sometimes?

Why does everything feel so draining sometimes?

You might be able to pinpoint exactly why, or you might not… but either way, it can feel like you’re constantly dragging something around that never gets any lighter. And just figuring out what’s actually weighing on you is only the first step.

In this episode, we’re going to dig into how to work it out and what to do next.

So let’s talk about… why everything feels so heavy sometimes.

Hello and welcome! I’m Jeremy Godwin and this is the Let’s Talk About Mental Health podcast, where every week I help you understand and improve your mental wellbeing.

So… do you ever have one of those days or weeks where it feels like the entire weight of the world is on your shoulders? This is one of those episodes that applies whether you’re dealing with something huge or something quiet that’s just been building for a while, and it isn’t really about whatever’s specifically weighing on you right now… because this kind of mental and emotional heaviness follows pretty much the same pattern no matter what’s causing it, and once you can see that pattern clearly it changes what you actually do about it.

And just to be clear, the problem is not the feeling itself… it’s what happens next. Your brain goes into this kind of knee-jerk reaction to feeling overwhelmed by the feeling, and that can be completely exhausting and draining… so much so that it can be hard to find the physical energy or the emotional energy that you need to take the next step. But that’s actually a very clear signal that you have to come at things from a different angle. And we’re going to dig into that a lot deeper shortly.

First though, let’s make sure we’re on the same page here and let’s talk about…

What ‘feeling heavy’ actually means

Alright, so before we go any further: I’m a little bit croaky today, I feel like I’m coming down with something, so you’ll have to bear with me!

Alright, so let’s actually define this properly because it’s an idea that gets thrown around a lot but I think it rarely gets sort of unpacked.

So… when something feels heavy, what’s actually happening is that your mind and body are reacting to a gap; it’s the gap between how much you want something to be different and how little say you actually have in whether or not it changes.

That’s genuinely all it is. That stuck, ‘weighed down’ feeling is what it’s like when you run into something you can’t do anything about. It’s not a character flaw, not a sign that you’re fragile or delicate, or proof that you can’t handle things. It’s just a sign that you’ve recognised something is out of your control and it feels like crap: consciously, subconsciously, or both. Even if it is something that is directly within your control, it’s possible that you just don’t have the emotional energy or bandwidth to deal with it right this second so… that makes the ‘control’ thing really hard.

So what happens next, usually completely on autopilot, is this: your brain quietly treats the thought of, “I can’t fix this” as a reason to start feeling crap about pretty much everything else; maybe even including the parts of your life that were never broken in the first place. You can’t control it, so your brain shrinks everything around it.

The good news is that that’s fixable, properly fixable, not just ‘manage it a bit better’ fixable, and we’re going to come back to exactly how in a little bit.

But the thing is that this ‘feeling heavy’ state can show up everywhere, and show up in wildly different shapes and forms. So it may be a health result that you’re waiting on, and you can’t speed it up. It might be watching someone you love make choices that you can’t undo for them, and that you then feel helpless. It might be money, or your job, or the state of the world, or something as unglamorous as your own body not cooperating the way that it used to; I don’t know about you but my knees started filing formal complaints every time I get down somewhere around the age of 40, and no matter what I do negotiations are still very much ongoing… and I think I’m losing that one! The specifics often change completely from person to person, from week to week, but the shape underneath is identical every single time: something matters to you, and you can’t make it behave the way you want it to. And so that’s why everything feels so heavy sometimes.

But here’s the thing: the feeling on its own doesn’t actually cost you very much. It’s uncomfortable, sure, and it’s annoying, and tiring, and it’s not fun to sit with. But feeling heavy by itself is just emotional weather, right? And weather passes.

Where the cost comes in is with what your mind does with the heaviness that turns it into something that eats away at you and potentially affects your whole life. Because what tends to happen next, completely underneath your awareness, is this: as soon as your brain recognises that something’s overwhelming and potentially outside of your control, your brain does not just accept that gracefully and move forward. Oh no! Instead, your system starts generalising that one specific “I have no control here” piece into a much broader and much less accurate perspective of your entire life. It starts thinking, “Oh, well, I probably shouldn’t bother trying anywhere then because it’s just a total waste of effort.”

You stop wanting to do things for yourself. You say no to things that you’d normally say yes to. You stop making plans that you’d normally make. And you find yourself feeling crappy about things that have nothing to do with whatever made you feel heavy and crappy in the first place. I’ve had that, especially on days where I’ve read something in the news that’s made my brain go, “What kind of dumpster fire nonsense has this world become?” And then it’s like I’ve just gone into a complete shutdown cocoon mode. Right? None of that is a conscious decision. It’s your brain getting overwhelmed and going into self-protection mode.

We often tend to assume that the specific heavy feelings are what’s wrecking our mood, or our week, or, you know, our ability to function like a regular human being, when really it’s very often what your brain does off the back of the initial feeling. So the heavy thing stays exactly the same size the whole time; your life is what shrinks around it… and it can be easy to let those “What’s the point?” thoughts take over and run the show, leaving you on the couch, scrolling on your phone for ages while moss grows on you.

And look, that reaction makes sense in a way… even if it maybe doesn’t feel like it in the moment. Your brain isn’t trying to sabotage you here. It’s simply doing what it thinks it has to in order to protect you, trying to hold onto whatever energy you’ve got left.

The catch, however, is that it’s not just your physical energy that it’s rationing. It’s controlling your mental and emotional fuel too. And those two don’t always run out the same way or at the same time. Some days you’re wiped out in your body, but your head’s fine. Other days it’s the opposite: you’re going through all the motions physically and getting through the day, but there’s just nothing left upstairs. Either way, it’s the same underlying story: your system has decided that you can’t handle something right now, and so it’s quietly rationing you to cope… whether you asked it to or not.

So that’s what’s going on when you feel heavy. But now let’s get into…

Why feeling heavy affects your mental health

Alright… so let’s discuss why this actually costs you more than you might think, not to mention what it’s doing to you if it sticks around and isn’t addressed. Because the thing about running on rationed energy is this: it doesn’t just stay neatly in its own little lane or its own little box. Physically and emotionally you feel tired, flat, foggy, reaching for coffee instead of the things that you’d normally do. That part’s obvious enough, and most of us at least recognise it when it happens.

But the deeper mental and emotional side of it is a lot sneakier… and it’s honestly a lot more expensive. It’s the extra half second it takes to answer a simple question. It’s snapping at someone over nothing because you’ve just got no energy left to be available for anything. It’s reading the same paragraph four times over and still not knowing what it said. It’s saying yes to things out of the sheer inability to find the strength for the fight that saying ‘no’ might lead to. Now, look… none of that might seem particularly dramatic from the outside, right? It just looks like you feeling a bit worn thin. Which is exactly why it’s so easy to miss until it’s been going on for months.

There’s a name for a version of what’s happening underneath all this: psychologists call it ‘learned helplessness’. Back in the sixties, researchers found that when someone runs into enough situations where nothing they do changes the outcome they stop trying… and they also even stop trying later in completely different situations where they’d actually have full control. One specific “Nothing I do here matters” eventually turns into a general “Why bother trying anywhere?”

Now, your system isn’t being melodramatic when it does this to you. It’s doing exactly what it’s built to do: spot a pattern, write a rule, and apply that rule everywhere… so that you’re not stuck relearning the same lesson from scratch every single time. And that is a very genuinely useful system. Most of the time! But it completely works against you in this situation, because it creates a spiral of heaviness and maybe even helplessness, which I talked about back in Episode 297.

So here’s the actual cost if this stuff doesn’t get addressed: it’s not that the tough thing stays tough; I mean, look, it might, and there’s not always much to be done about that part, and sometimes we just have to muddle through the tough stuff because there is no easy fix.

But the bigger cost is everything else that quietly goes with it: the friendships that you stop maintaining because you’ve got nothing left to bring to them, the hobbies that you drop without noticing, the plans you stop making, the opportunities that you talk yourself out of before you’ve even properly looked at them. None of that even remotely touches the original problem. It just piles more problems on top of it, ones that you build without meaning to. Right?

I’ve lived this one myself. For a really long stretch of time after my breakdown in 2011, I was carrying something that I had zero say over, zero direct control over, being my severe depression and anxiety, and I watched myself, almost in slow motion, begin to decline invitations and drop the things I actually wanted to do and go quiet with people who had nothing to do with what was actually going on. At the time, it felt like I just simply didn’t have it in me. I just didn’t have the capacity.

So the question I have for you, and that’s really worth sitting with, is the same one regardless of whether what’s weighing on you is your health or the state of the world or your relationships or something that maybe you couldn’t even name out loud yet, and the question is this: where else in your life have you quietly started showing up less, wanting less, trying less? And look, no judgement here. Remember that it’s not a failure or a character flaw; it’s just your system doing what it was built to do… but going completely unchecked about the way it’s doing it.

What we’re really doing here is beginning to put in place some of the checks and balances that have been missing simply by asking those questions. And that’s the one part of any of this that’s actually yours to change. And we’re going to talk about how to do that right after this quick break.

[AD BREAK]

And welcome back! So now let’s get into the ‘how to’ part of this episode, and let’s talk about…

How to stop ‘ feeling heavy’ from shrinking your life

And to be clear: I’m talking about everyday feelings of ‘heaviness’ here, not clinical depression; if that’s what you’re dealing with, Episode 188 goes deeper on that specifically, and I’ll leave it linked in the description.

OK, so earlier on I told you that this was “properly fixable” and not just “manage it better fixable,” but like genuinely, and so here’s what I meant by that. The fix isn’t making whatever’s weighing on you lighter, because half the time you can’t, right? And let’s be real: if you could, you probably would’ve done it already, right?!

The fix is catching the moment that your system quietly hands that thing more power over your whole life than it’s actually earned, and taking back that power. So let’s get into exactly how to do that. First up:

Refill on purpose, not by accident.

Remember earlier how we talked about your system rationing you on several fronts, being the physical, the mental, and the emotional, and how they don’t always drain at the same rate? Well, most of us only ever notice the physical one: we’re tired, so we think we need to rest. Right? And fair enough. But if your head’s the part that’s actually running on empty, a nap will not touch that. You need things that specifically top up your mental and emotional tank: a proper conversation with someone who actually gets it, or 10 minutes doing genuinely nothing with no screen involved, or laughing at something stupid on purpose.

Work out which tank it is that’s actually low before you decide what ‘rest’ even potentially means for you today… because focusing on the wrong thing just leaves you exhausted, and it leaves you still running on mental and emotional fumes. Next…

Draw the actual line.

And this one matters a lot more than it probably sounds like it should. Be specific about exactly what you have no say over, whether you do that out loud or on paper. Now, it’s not saying, “everything about this situation,” right? It’s: “What is the actual precise issue of it?”

So if it’s a health result that you’re waiting on, the thing you can’t control is how long it takes or the result itself, right? That’s what you’re focused on. It’s not about how you spend this evening. If it’s someone else’s choices, then maybe the thing you can’t control is their choice… not whether or not you choose to let their choice stop you from living your life. Your brain loves to round things up, right? And so it turns the idea of, “I have no say over this one thing” into, “I have no say generally speaking!” Right?! That’s what I mean by ’rounding up’. It just puts everything into the same category, the same bucket, and so that ’rounding up’ is exactly what quietly runs the show.

So, try finishing this sentence out loud: “The only thing I can’t control here is…” and then name it. And notice how much shorter that list of things that you can’t control really is, rather than the vague feeling of dread that it usually looks and… and appears like. Next…

Run the ‘spread check’.

And this goes back to a promise I made earlier in the episode, and it’s important that you don’t skip this part: go through the parts of your life that have felt like a struggle lately; so… things that you’ve stopped doing, plans that you’ve quietly let drop, people you’ve stopped reaching out to, et cetera, et cetera, and just ask yourself honestly, for each one, did that actually happen because of whatever’s weighing on you? Or because the heavy feelings spread there uninvited? You’re probably going to find out that it’s the second one more often than you’d expect. So, a quick test: would this specific thing that you dropped have gone the same way, even if none of this had happened at all? If the honest answer is no, then it’s the heaviness doing the talking… not reality. Next…

Collect counter-evidence on purpose.

Once you’ve found somewhere that the heaviness has crept in, don’t just try to make yourself feel differently about it, right? Because that almost never works. Instead: pick one thing in that area and act like you still have a say there, deliberately.And then actually notice what happens, right? So, message the friend that you’ve gone quiet with. Make a plan. Pick the thing back up. Right? Whatever it is, write down what actually happened, even just mentally or in a note on your phone if you want it there for later on. Most of the time, nothing bad happens when you take some sort of simple action… and that’s the whole point.

You’re not just hoping that the heavy feeling is wrong, you’re building an actual record that it is. Do this over the coming weeks, tackling one area at a time. Slow and deliberate proof-gathering beats one big dramatic gesture every single time. Next…

Answer it later, not now.

When that flat, “Ugh, what’s the point?” thought turns up, don’t argue with it in the moment… because you’ll lose. It’s very convincing at 11 at night when you’ve got no emotional energy or bandwidth left since about lunchtime, right?! Just note it down and come back to it later, with your actual evidence in hand from the step before; nine times out of 10, that thought will not survive contact with your own evidence in the harsh light of day. It only ever wins by default, so usually when you’re feeling vulnerable… and it rarely ever wins when you properly cross examine it. Next…

Decide your limits before you need to.

Because you get to decide what you will and won’t accept, and what your limits are. Set the boundary while your head’s clear, not in the heat of the moment when the feeling is shouting at you… since that’s the exact moment that you are least equipped to set a boundary, let alone to stick to one. Decide for yourself ahead of time: “Today, this thing doesn’t get to decide whether I see my friend, whether I go for a walk, whether I laugh at something stupid.” Pick two or three non-negotiables the night before, or first thing in the morning, whatever works for you.

If you notice it trying to overrule one of those anyway, catch it as it happens rather than only realising afterwards that you folded. Just notice it. Don’t punish yourself for it, but just be aware of it; look, set a reminder on your phone if you need to… even if that means that it has to flash up at you every hour on the hour. You’re not pretending that the feeling doesn’t exist here. You’re just refusing it the ability to chair every single meeting, or to drive the bus. It’s not in control. You are. Next…

Practice living two truths at once.

A lot of us default to wanting to deal with the hard thing fully, and then maybe someday we’ll be able to get back to living. But life doesn’t work that way, and plenty of the tough things that we have to deal with in life don’t come with a nice and neat finish that you can actually wait for. So the real skill that’s really worth building properly is learning how to hold space for both the heaviness and the living without needing the heavy feelings to resolve themselves first. This is not denial. It’s not forcing positivity over something real. It’s just about refusing to let one thing cancel out another thing.

So here’s a small way to practice that: next time you catch yourself enjoying something, even briefly, while something else is genuinely still weighing on you, just resist the urge to shut it down or feel guilty about it… and just let both be there. Because each time you do that, it builds… and over time, it grows into the ability to allow these two competing realities to coexist. Life is not clear cut and defined, right?

Now, like I said though, it’s not easy, and I’ll be very honest here and say that I still catch myself doing the opposite sometimes, right, waiting for something tough to fully resolve before I feel like I can let myself properly enjoy something good that’s sitting right in front of me. That’s human nature. And so taking this different approach doesn’t just automatically fix things, and it also doesn’t just happen automatically… even once you know about it; it takes work, constant work. But noticing it when it’s happening is most of the battle, because that’s the moment that you actually get to choose differently instead of just letting the old pattern run on autopilot and dictate your life for you, especially when it comes to the stuff that’s out of your control.

And if you do want to go deeper on that control piece specifically, check out Episode 291 about focusing on what you can control; it’s a great one to sit alongside this one. It’s linked in the description, or head to ltamh.com/episodes where you’ll also find the full transcript for this episode so you can go back and refer to it if you want to work through this stuff or as you work through this stuff.

And just something important to note about all of the how-to suggestions I’ve shared today: none of them are about making whatever’s weighing on you smaller. They’re about making sure that it only gets to take up the space that it’s actually earned, instead of quietly gobbling up everything around it like Pac-Man on an eating binge. That’s the whole shift to focus on making here, the thing that’s going to help you keep on living your life when things feel heavy.

Conclusion

So here’s what I want you to take away from this episode. Feeling worn down by something that you can’t control is your system doing exactly what it’s built to do. The real cost to your mental wellbeing isn’t the thing itself… it’s letting that thing quietly dictate how much of the rest of your life you’re still allowed to show up for and enjoy.

So, what’s actually weighing on you? And how can you navigate it in a way that lets you keep on living your life?

Because when you boil it all down, whatever’s making you feel heavy only ever gets to take up as much room as you let it.

Each week I like to finish up by sharing a quote about the topic, and I encourage you to take a few moments to really reflect on it and consider what it means to you. This week’s quote is by an unknown author, and it is:

The sun never quits shining. Sometimes, clouds just get in the way.

Unknown

Let me repeat that.

The sun never quits shining. Sometimes clouds just get in the way.

Alright, that’s it for this week. If this episode was helpful, please leave a rating or review on your favourite platform to help more people discover the show and the advice I share. And join me on Patreon to support my work and get ad-free access to episodes a week early. It’s linked in the description.

Thank you very much for joining me today. Look after yourself and make a conscious effort to share positivity and kindness out into the world… because you get back what you put out. Take care and talk to you next time!

Join me next week so we can talk about how to live in the present more. And check out my episode on protecting your peace in chaotic times next. It’s linked in the description. I release new content every Sunday, so follow or subscribe to never miss an episode.

Let’s Talk About Mental Health is an independent program. Discover more at ltamh.com.

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ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

Find more content at www.ltamh.com

Let’s Talk About Mental Health.
Making Mental Health Simple.

Let’s Talk About Mental Health. © 2026 Jeremy Godwin.

The information provided in this episode is for general awareness on the topic and does not constitute advice. You should consult a doctor and/or mental health professional if you’re struggling with your mental health and wellbeing. You’ll find additional information on the Resources page of this website.