When the network is congested, my most intuitive feeling is: transactions are not "sent and done," but are queued in the mempool waiting to be picked up. After you sign and broadcast, the nodes hold onto it first, and miners/validators prefer to package the ones with higher fees and more profit, so your transaction might get stuck, replaced (by resubmitting with higher fees), or simply expire. Anyway, don’t treat "submitted" as "completed"; the waiting period in between can be quite frustrating.

Recently, everyone has been talking about the pressure from staking unlocks and token unlock calendars, but I think congestion makes emotions easier to amplify: watching pending orders not fill, transfers not go through, and starting to imagine "is it going to crash." I personally trust data more, at least being able to see the pending count and fee distribution, to know whether the network is congested or I just bid too low out of carelessness; intuitively, in a bear market, this stuff is too easy to deceive me.