Introduction
“You’re overreacting.” It may be the most weaponised sentence in modern relationships. Sometimes it is fair. Often it is not. It presumes a shared reality: that both people are seeing the same stimulus and one person’s response is out of proportion to it. Neuroscience quietly disagrees with the premise. Two nervous systems in the same room are not looking at the same stimulus — they are looking at the pattern the stimulus matches in their own history.
Why This Matters
Being told, or telling yourself, that you are overreacting almost always deepens the very state that produced the reaction. Recognising that a reaction is not disproportionate — that it is proportional to something the outside cannot see — is often the intervention that lets it release.
The Science
Amygdala reactivity research (LeDoux, 2000; also see Phelps, 2006) shows that threat learning is durable, generalisable, and often invisible to introspection: a stimulus resembling a previously threatening one triggers the full alarm cascade before the cortex can weigh whether the resemblance was meaningful. What is felt in the body is a real, physiological alarm. It is not “made up” and it is not “too much” for what the alarm was calibrated to.
Barrett’s theory of constructed emotion (2017) provides the perceptual layer: emotions are the brain’s inference about the meaning of internal state, drawing on prior experience. The same interoceptive signal will be constructed as different emotions in different people. “Overreaction” assumes a single correct construction; the biology does not honour that assumption.
Current Research
Contemporary work on interoception (Khalsa et al., 2018) shows that the accuracy and granularity with which a person can read their own bodily state is itself a variable trainable across a lifetime. Poor interoception does not mean a reaction is wrong; it means the person may struggle to name why the reaction is happening. Trauma-informed research (van der Kolk, 2014) has documented, in tens of thousands of clinical cases, how patterns held in the body reappear in the present with full force and no verbal narration — not overreaction, but under-narrated reaction.
Practical Implications
When “overreacting” language arrives, replace it with a different question: “what did that just remind me of?” Sometimes the answer is nothing — the reaction was disproportionate. Often the answer is something specific and useful: a tone, a phrase, an old scene. Meeting the answer with curiosity, not judgement, is the beginning of change.
Common Misconceptions
**“If I’m the only one reacting, I must be wrong.”** You may be the only one whose history matches the pattern in the room. That does not make the reaction wrong; it makes it specific.
**“Recognising that I’m not overreacting means I don’t have to change.”** It means the change starts in the right place — with the pattern, not with the shame.
Key Takeaways
- Reactions are calibrated to remembered patterns, not only to present stimuli.
- Threat learning is durable and generalises across resembling cues.
- Interoception granularity varies — and predicts how well we can name our own reactions.
- Curiosity, not shame, is how the pattern loosens.