Signs Your Are Reacting to Emotional Baggage
Sep 25, 2026TL;DR: When your reaction feels much bigger than the moment that triggered it, something else may be coming along for the ride. Nicole Hollar, behavior change keynote speaker and integrative life coach, looks at how emotional baggage can reveal itself through disproportionate reactions and sweeping language like “nothing ever goes my way”—and why noticing that gap before treating the reaction as fact is where emotional reshaping begins.
The Steak Isn't the Problem
Here's a diagnostic I give clients, and it has nothing to do with therapy language or a worksheet: if from one thousand feet the emotion is bigger than the event, the event isn't what you're reacting to.
A steak comes out well-done instead of medium rare. That's a legitimate, mild annoyance. You mention it to the server, maybe you don't finish it, you might even send it back — but you move on with your evening. That's proportionate.
But if a slightly overcooked steak turns into a ruined night — you're short with the person across the table, you're still irritated an hour later, or if the whole evening now has a bad taste to it that has nothing to do with the meat — that reaction didn't come from the kitchen. It came from somewhere else, and the steak just happened to puncture a hole in the emotion bubble.
That gap, between the size of the situation and the size of the reaction, is one of the most reliable signals you have. It's not proof of anything specific. It's just information. And most people never stop long enough to notice it's there.
Listen to Your Own Language
This is the part people skip, because it requires paying attention to what comes out of your mouth in the moment, not after you've calmed down and rewritten the story.
“Nothing ever goes my way” is not a statement about a steak. It's a statement about a worldview, and it just got attached to a steak because the steak was available. Same with “everyone always does this to me,” “of course this would happen,” or “why do I even bother.” These phrases are bigger than the moment that produced them. That mismatch is the tell.
You don't need a therapist in the room to catch this. You need to listen to yourself the way you'd listen to a friend, and ask: does that sentence match what just happened, or does it sound like it's been waiting for an excuse?
Baggage Doesn't Have to Be Permanent to Be Real
People assume baggage means something deep, chronic, capital-T trauma. Sometimes it is. Often, it's smaller and more temporary than that: a rough week, a bad meeting earlier that day, an unresolved conversation with someone else entirely that had nowhere to go and landed on the nearest available target. In this case, dinner.
Temporary baggage still counts. The steak didn't create the frustration. It just gave it an exit. If you only look for the big, obvious, long-standing stuff, you'll miss the everyday version of this, which is honestly the one most worth catching, because it's the one you can do something about right now.
Awareness Before You Internalize It
The goal isn't to suppress the reaction or talk yourself out of being annoyed. It's to notice it before you fold it into a story about who you are or how the world works.
There's a difference between “I'm frustrated right now” and “nothing ever goes my way.” The first is a feeling passing through. The second is a conclusion. The first is honest. The second is baggage wearing the feeling as a costume.
This is the first principle in Hollar's Potter's Wheel™: Awareness. I see it. Not “I understand it” or “I've fixed it,” just “I see it happening.” That's the whole ask in the moment. You're not required to solve the origin of the overreaction at the dinner table. You're just required to notice that it's an overreaction before you accept it as an accurate account of your life.
What to Do When You Catch Yourself
The next time your reaction feels disproportionate, try this instead of either suppressing it or running with it:
- Name the gap. “This reaction is bigger than this moment.” That's it. You don't need to know why yet.
- Check the language. Did you just make a sweeping statement about yourself, other people, or “how things always go”? That sentence is the clue, not the truth.
- Separate the trigger from the source. The steak triggered it. The steak is probably not the source. You can deal with the trigger politely and still leave the source for a postponed reflection.
- Don't demand an immediate explanation. Awareness doesn't require you to solve it on the spot. It just requires you to stop treating the reaction as correct.
None of this makes the frustration disappear, and it's not supposed to. It just keeps you from handing your whole evening — or your whole self-narrative — over to a steak.
Questions for Reflection
- Think of the last time your reaction was bigger than the moment deserved. What story did you tell yourself about it afterward, and was that story actually about what just happened?
- What phrases do you catch yourself using when you're upset (“this always happens,” “nobody ever,” “I can't do anything right”)? What do those phrases suggest you already believe, independent of whatever set them off this time?
- When you overreact, do you tend to blame the situation, blame yourself, or blame someone else? What would it look like to get curious about the reaction instead of immediately assigning it somewhere?
Frequently Asked Questions
What is emotional baggage, exactly?
Emotional baggage is an unresolved emotional response from an event, pattern, or stretch of stress that resurfaces in situations that don't fully explain the size of the reaction. It doesn't have to come from a major event. A rough week or an unrelated unresolved conversation can produce the same effect as something more longstanding.
How do I know if I'm overreacting or if my reaction is justified?
Compare the size of your response to the size of the event, not to how it felt in the moment. A proportionate reaction generally fades once you address the actual issue. If the feeling lingers, escalates, or attaches itself to a bigger claim about yourself or your life, that's usually a sign there's more underneath it than the immediate trigger.
Does having emotional baggage mean something is wrong with me?
No. Nearly everyone carries some version of it: unresolved stress, old patterns, unfinished conversations that never got closure. Having baggage isn't a diagnosis. It's a normal byproduct of being a person who has lived through things. The relevant question isn't whether you have it; it's whether you're aware of it before it starts making decisions for you.