August Feeling Overwhelming? It May Be Back-to-School Scaries

"The bright Crayola bins. The towering stacks of composition notebooks. The "Let's Do This, Parents!" signs cheerfully cheering me on. And I got mad. Not sentimental. Not overwhelmed. Not wistful. Mad. Mad that the season of loosely structured days and fewer transitions was ending. Mad that my nervous system was about to be hit with the full weight of school-year demands again-the tight schedules, the multitasking, the constant need to manage competing priorities."

"What are the Sunday Scaries? The Sunday Scaries are that well-known wave of dread that rolls in around 4 p.m. on Sunday, when the weekend's freedom starts slipping away and the Monday morning rush creeps back in. It's the anticipation of structure, performance, and unpredictability that makes us want to hit pause, even if we love our jobs or have a perfectly functional adult routine."

"Now multiply that by a hundred. Stretch it across school supply lists, open house emails, bus schedules, new teachers, and the creeping suspicion that everyone else is excited while you're quietly panicking. That's the Back-to-School Scaries. And if you're a post- traumatic parent, it doesn't just feel heavy. It feels dangerous. In my book Post-Traumatic Parenting, I describe the trauma app as a metaphor for how trauma lives in our brains. It's not just a memory, it's a full behavioral algorithm."

Back-to-School Scaries multiply the Sunday Scaries across an entire school year, transforming fleeting dread into sustained anticipatory stress. Bright school displays and supply lists can trigger anger and panic as routines compress and demands rise. Trauma-shaped brains interpret rapid transitions, multitasking, and unpredictable demands as danger, activating a nervous system brace response. Anticipation of structure, performance, and unpredictability fuels the fear even when roles and routines are otherwise functional. Normalizing the reaction, expecting heightened stress, and implementing small rituals and predictable rhythms can help settle overwhelm and reduce the nervous system's perceived threat level.

Read at Psychology Today