What Glitching Feels Like

Photo by Guilman

This article wasn’t scheduled — but today began with a glitch moment, and sometimes the freshest writing comes directly from the inside of an experience. Think of this as a companion piece to my earlier, more structured Glitch Mapping article.

I write my Substack from two places at once:
from lived experience, and from a deeply grounded psychological framework.

Both matter.
Both are real.

And sometimes the most honest thing I can do is let you into the inside of the thing I’m trying to describe — not the theory, but the phenomenology, the felt texture, the actual inner mechanics.

This morning, I was glitching.
And being able to spot my own glitch gave me fresh insights into what glitching probably looks and feels like for other people, just like you.

So here is a simple, practical primer on what glitching is, what it feels like, and what to do in the moment it hits.

A glitch is a temporary collapse in your internal organising processes — the mechanisms that normally hold your internal, relational, and temporal realities together in a coherent hierarchy.

Glitches are not emotional phenomena.
They are organisational phenomena that produce a state before they create a feeling.
And that’s why glitches aren’t resolved by emotional regulation — because their origin isn’t emotional.

But emotions can appear during a glitch.

They are secondary reactions to the disorientation — not the cause of it.
Fear, frustration, sadness, shame: these arise because coherence has collapsed, not because the emotion is driving the collapse.

(For any therapists reading: glitching is phenomenologically similar to the activation phase of a schema mode — the moment integrity collapses before a full emotional–cognitive state emerges. See, for example, Edwards 2022.)

When those organising processes falter, the usually coherent hierarchy collapses and so everything feels equally weighted, equally noisy, equally plausible, equally impossible.

And the mind loses its ability to know:

• what matters more than what

• who “I” am in the decision

• which direction is actually coherent

• which emotion belongs to which reality

This collapse is temporary.
It is not a breakdown.
It is a momentary rupture in coherence.

And when you name it, coherence returns.
Not perfectly — but enough to breathe, think, and reorient.

I had a glitch this morning. I don’t know why it occurred — and actually, it doesn’t much matter why it occurred (more on this point later).

Here’s what I noticed in real time — the texture of the experience, the signs that glitching was occurring:

“I can’t decide whether to walk, work, paint, meditate, go out, stay home…”
Everything carried the same emotional weight.

“I don’t know if I should go to that ABBA party — maybe I will, maybe I won’t…”
No internal voice felt trustworthy.

“Today’s admin list feels enormous… insurmountable.”
Ordinary tasks felt unmanageable — because my internal structure had collapsed, not because the tasks had changed.

“Meh” one minute.
Resolute the next.
Anxious two minutes later.
The signals stopped mapping onto anything stable.

Which “me” is deciding?
Which “me” is resisting?
Which “me” is evaluating?

The sense of self wasn’t stable enough to know which self was in charge.

Fidgety.
Unsettled.
Hard to inhabit the body.

“Maybe I’ll walk… no meditate… no paint… no maybe I should cancel…”

My mind tried to logic its way out — but executive function cannot mend a rupture in internal coherence.

Only naming can.

Photo by Sebastian Rück on Unsplash

I don’t know what caused it and you won’t always know why you glitched either.

And you don’t need to.

Glitches don’t usually come from one clean cause; they come from overlapping internal pressures, micro-stressors, relational misattunements, or simple executive fatigue.

Trying to analyse the cause in the moment actually makes the glitch worse because the system cannot do meaning-making while coherence is collapsed.

Naming the glitch restores coherence; understanding (if needed at all) can only happen afterwards, and often there is actually nothing deeper to understand.

Glitches aren’t caused so much as precipitated by a temporary overload of organising demands.

Your system doesn’t need you to understand why it glitched.
It needs you to recognise that it glitched, stop analysing and restore coherence —end of.

This is a great question, I’m glad you asked.

Glitching and overwhelm can feel superficially similar, but they arise from completely different mechanisms, require different interventions, and signal different internal processes.

Overwhelm is an emotional overload.
Glitching is an organisational collapse.

Mechanism:
Too much emotional input, too quickly, without enough regulatory capacity.

Produces:

• flooding

• big affect

• clear emotional tone: fear, shame, sadness, anger

• sympathetic activation

• urge to escape or soothe

• difficulty thinking because the emotion is too loud

Intervention:

• grounding

• The Soothing Pathway

• emotional naming

• compassion focus

• co-regulation

Overwhelm = emotion → dysregulation → cognitive disruption.

Mechanism:

A sudden drop in internal organising processes — a rupture in coherence across internal/relational/temporal reality layers .

Produces:

• dissonance

• confusion

• internal mismatch

• identity wobble

• collapse of prioritisation

• task distortion

• overthinking without affect

• loss of “which emotion belongs to which reality”

Glitching = coherence collapse → disoriented state → secondary emotion (ie. an emotional reaction secondary to the experience of being disoriented).

Intervention:

The Glitch Mapping Pathway, with or without preliminary soothing.

Glitching is pre-emotional in origin, which is why emotional regulation tools don’t land — not until coherence is first restored.

My glitch this morning was an internal glitch — a conflict within the self where my internal organising processes temporarily stopped lining up.

But glitches don’t always look like this.
They tend to fall into one of three broad categories:

Something in the “between us” stops matching.
You feel mis-seen, misread, or momentarily out of sync with others.
Communication distorts.
You can’t tell which part of the interaction went sideways.

And suddenly, you’re untethered, unanchored, confused, disoriented.

You lose the thread between yesterday’s intentions and today’s decisions.
Motivation evaporates.
Identity feels unanchored in time.
You can’t access the memory or emotional meaning of a previous intention.

The same texture appears: untethered, unanchored, confused, disoriented.

Your identities, priorities, or internal drivers pull against each other.
Hierarchy collapses.
Your sense of “who is deciding?” becomes unstable.
This was exactly what happened to me this morning.

Untethered, unanchored, confused, disoriented.

If you recognise yourself in the description I shared above — the prioritisation collapse, identity wobble, second-guessing, and internal mismatch — you’ve probably experienced internal glitching too.

These ruptures arise at the level of coherence, not emotion.
This is why emotional regulation doesn’t land until the glitch is named.

I didn’t do what I’m about to outline for you in a neat, numbered order — nobody does in the middle of a coherence collapse.

But these were the steps I moved through, instinctively and imperfectly.
Now, looking back with a clearer mind, I’ve distilled them into something simple and usable — something that may help you recognise and navigate your own glitch moments.

These steps are the movements that helped my system steady itself enough to enter — and complete — the Glitch Mapping Pathway.

This is the “felt-sense” version of glitch first-aid.
The bridge back to yourself.

What I noticed:
Every option felt both right and wrong.
Every task felt both tiny and impossible.
And I felt abruptly untethered.

How this might translate for you:
You may recognise a glitch when the hierarchy of your internal world suddenly flattens — when everything feels equally weighted and nothing feels navigable.

A gentle internal note —
“This might be a glitch” — is enough.

What I did:
I quietly said to myself:

“This is a glitch. My coherence is temporarily down.”

It eased the scramble.

How this might translate for you:
Naming it — softly, without judgement — may interrupt the impulse to over-think your way out.

If emotions appear (fear, frustration, sadness),
you might notice they arise in reaction to the collapse, not as its cause.

What I did:
Two slow breaths.
Feet on the floor.
Shoulders down.

This is not emotional regulation — it’s giving the organising system a stable anchor so it can stop spinning.

How this might translate for you:
Before your mind can find clarity, your body may need 5–10 seconds of grounding.

A glitch cannot be mapped while the body is in free-fall.

Photo by Caleb Jones on Unsplash

What I did:
Once I felt even 5% steadier, I followed the same sequence I teach in the “What Help Do I Need?” Decision Aid

How this might translate for you:

• If you are emotionally hijacked — scared, panicky, ashamed, angry, overwhelmed —
  you may find it helpful to move to the Soothing Pathway first.
  Not to fix the glitch, but to quiet emotional noise, so you can follow through with accessing the Glitch Mapping Pathway

• If you are not emotionally hijacked, but you feel internally collapsed,
  move straight into the Glitch Mapping Pathway.
  Glitch Mapping is what actually rebuilds coherence.

Soothing settles emotion.
Mapping restores organisation.
You may need both — but not at the same moment.

What I did:
When the mapping landed and things made sense again,
I anchored that coherence with one simple action.

In my case, I drank a glass of water —
but it could equally have been opening a window, changing rooms, or stretching.

How this might translate for you:
When your system begins to feel coherent again,
one low-stakes, deliberate action can consolidate that stability.

The action itself doesn’t matter.
The directionality does.

One small step communicates:

“We are back in one coherent reality now and I can move with deliberation within it.”

This single act re-establishes the restored hierarchy and prevents the rupture from reopening.

Photo by Lara from Pixabay

Glitching is part of being human — especially human with an ADHD nervous system.
It’s not failure.
It’s not regression.

And it doesn’t mean your CBT tools or coping strategies have stopped working — only that, for a moment, they’re not accessible.

A glitch isn’t a verdict or a story about who you are.

It’s just a moment when your internal organising system needs a breath.
Mine needed one this morning.
Maybe sometimes yours does too.

With mettā (loving-kindness), always.

Anita