What do you do when you feel overwhelmed? Have you thought about it?
How does your body feel? What’s going on in your mind? How’s your productivity?
I’ve been thinking about these things a lot lately, and paying attention to my own (not great) habits. After noticing my tendency to just not do anything worthwhile when I’m overwhelmed, I started wondering why. Then I started wondering how to fix it and move on.
The biggest problem here is that I’m pretty overwhelmed right now, which — true to form — is making me totally unproductive.
I have had to force myself to sit down each day and tackle the things that are making me feel like I’m under water. Including writing this blog post.
When you’re trying to build a business for yourself that is reliant on writing and showcasing yourself as an expert in a particular field through your writing, it’s pretty important to keep… writing.
But building a business is overwhelming (and frustrating as heck, but that’s a different topic altogether). Learning how to use social media to market myself has been a lot. Researching and cold-emailing prospective clients is waaaaay out of my comfort zone.
As usual, I decided to use my current struggles to frame a blog post that I hope will help other people while simultaneously helping myself. Bonus!
Overwhelm vs. Burnout
I want to start by drawing a distinction between overwhelm and burnout. Burnout, especially in these pandemic and post-pandemic times, has become a big buzzword. Rightfully so — it’s been super prevalent. Burnout is not synonymous with overwhelm. I’ll briefly dive into the subtle difference.
Through my research, I discovered that overwhelm is actually a symptom of burnout — if you feel overwhelmed, chances are you’re on the road to burnout. Whereas burnout is something that’s characterized by a long buildup of stress over time, overwhelm can be something we feel in an instant or something that builds up over time.
Additionally, burnout can’t really be thought of as positive. Overwhelm, however, is not always a negative feeling. This should have been obvious to me, I guess! But until I started digging into the topic, I hadn’t really thought about the fact that we can be overwhelmed with positive emotions as well.
What Causes Us to Feel Overwhelmed?
You can probably list these just as well as I can, but to save you time, I’ll do it. 😉
Money issues — inflation and the holiday season can really ramp this up.
Family — even if there’s nothing “wrong,” we can become overwhelmed by the incredible number of responsibilities that go along with caring for loved ones.
Politics — it seems as though we need to actively avoid political news these days, and reading or hearing too much can leave us feeling disempowered by our circumstances, which leads to serious overwhelm. We (the larger, societal “we”) have problems, but we (individuals) have almost no capacity to deal with them!
Work — whether it’s a lack of work or too much work, if we’re not in that sweet “just right” spot, we can easily feel overwhelmed.
The combination of two or more of these things can really be detrimental to our mental health. One of these alone can be overwhelming, but stack them on top of each other? Yikes.
What’s Happening in Our Brains During Overwhelming Times?
Experiencing overwhelm sends our brains into fight, flight, or freeze mode. According to this article from Lesley University, having too much on our plates at once is linked to increased cortisol (stress hormone) and adrenaline. When we’re taking in an excessive amount of information and making a million little decisions all day, our brains go into overload mode and we feel stressed and go into fight/flight/freeze.
In an article from Scientific American, Dr. Ellen Hendriksen elaborates, “You[r] brain doesn’t just see a to-do list; it sees a threat. It sees the threat of scarcity: not enough time, not enough energy, not enough magical ability to fit everything into twenty-four hours. Or it sees the threat of failing, the threat of disappointing others, the threat of feeling incapable.”
So these feelings we have are legitimate! Our brains are trying to save our lives… they think. Sometimes it seems like our brains aren’t all that smart.
Coping Strategies
When this post was just a glimmer in my eye, I asked my community of friends and family to tell me how they usually cope with feeling overwhelmed. I was pleasantly surprised with their openness on the subject. You can see the list (including my own) below:
Some of these are generally accepted as positive strategies and some aren’t. We’re probably all seeing ourselves in both types! No matter how much we know about healthy coping mechanisms, when things get really rough it’s totally normal to fall back on the comforting ones.
With that in mind, I created a simple infographic with practical ideas for managing feelings of overwhelm when they crop up. Some of them are well-known, but I often forget about the obvious stuff when I’m in the thick of it. The reminder is good. I hope you find it helpful!
If you have other thoughts about coping with overwhelm, please do leave them in the comments!
