Chaos in your head
Keynote: What causes all that chaos in your head?
On overstimulation, disconnection and the art of recovery
Forgetting what you set out to do, losing your focus, the feeling that ten things are fighting for your attention at once. That’s not a sign that something is wrong with you. It’s what happens to a brain that multitasks and gets overstimulated all day. In this keynote Elke Van Hoof explains where that mental chaos comes from, what it does to your ability to think clearly, and why the solution has less to do with the amount of stress than with how long it lasts.
What that chaos calls for is learning to disconnect. But disconnecting is far more than putting your phone on silent or switching off your notifications for a moment — that’s the outside at best. Real disconnection goes deeper: it’s letting go of the constant overload of your mind, so your brain gets back the recovery time it needs to think clearly. This keynote goes a step beyond the screen: not by doing less, but by deliberately making room for recovery.
“Doing nothing is anything but nothing”
Agenda
Upon request
Session Content
You answer an email while a message comes in, someone asks you something and in your head the next meeting has already begun. We do it all at once and call it normal. But your brain can’t actually multitask. It keeps jumping back and forth between tasks, and it’s precisely that constant switching that wears it out. The chaos you feel isn’t a character flaw but an overloaded system.
Elke Van Hoof makes this clear using two zones in your brain. There’s the stress brain, which fires off alarm signals, and the prefrontal cortex, the cockpit that puts things in perspective, nuances, plans and keeps your emotions in check. As long as stress persists, those two work together less and less well. You gradually lose the ability to think sharply and manage your emotions. The chaos in your head is in fact that cockpit going offline.
The crucial insight is that it’s not the intensity but the duration of stress that determines the damage. A short, acute stress reaction is healthy and normal. Chronic stress, by contrast, depletes your brain’s recovery substances until the balance is completely disrupted. Think of holding a glass of water: a minute is nothing, an hour becomes heavy, and a whole day paralyses your arm. It’s not the weight, it’s how long you hold it.
The hopeful part is that this isn’t irreversible. The key doesn’t lie in always doing less, but in guarding the duration of your stress: actively building in moments of rest so the recovery substances can replenish, and giving the cockpit room to do its work again. Consciously doing one thing at a time and taking real breaks often change more than a new calendar.
You’ll understand why your head feels so full and leave with a doable way to bring back rest and clarity.
What this keynote brings
- Insight into why multitasking and overstimulation structurally overload your brain.
- How the stress brain and the prefrontal cortex work together, and what goes wrong under sustained stress.
- Why it’s not the intensity but the duration of stress that determines the damage.
- The glass-of-water metaphor as a simple test for your own stress.
- Concrete ways to guard the duration of your stress and win back clarity.
Practical Information
Format: Keynote (45 to 90 minutes)
Participants: From 20 participants
Languages: French, Dutch
Price: Upon request
Our agenda
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