Are You Overwhelmed by Overwhelm

Are you keeping your head above water?

I don’t know about you, but some days, I feel completely overwhelmed before the day has properly started.

I might still be in bed when I think about how much I have to do. Or why I don’t have more to do?

And then I remember that I’m in bed. Not much to be overwhelmed by right now.

What is overwhelm?

If you’re like me, on the days you have a lot to do; you don’t know where to start? You feel worn out before you even begin whatever you need to do.

When you feel overwhelmed, you feel pressure, which is hard to deal with. When you feel under pressure, it feels as if everything is weighing you down.

But the only thing weighing you down are your thoughts. Overwhelm is when you’re buried under your habitual thinking.

It’s hard to pinpoint precisely when the feeling of overwhelm starts, isn’t it? You can’t say, “Well, I was fine, and then I suddenly felt overwhelmed”, although sometimes that last email or angry word can feel like the straw that broke the camel’s back.

But your feeling didn’t start with that email; it began before then and built up.

The feeling begins when you start to think about whatever you’re feeling overwhelmed about.

It’s like a mood. You can’t say, “I got into a mood at 10.45 am and then got out of it again and 3.15 pm”.

Just like you can’t say the exact second you wake up, even if you use an alarm, or the second you fall asleep. You know that you must have been asleep because now you’re awake, but it’s impossible to define the exact moment. You were sleeping, and now you’re awake.

And it’s the same with feelings of pressure and overwhelms; when you’re thinking about whatever appears to be overwhelming, you change, and your feeling changes.

When you’re trying to control your thinking, you’re not seeing that your thinking is out of control.

Ironically, the more you have on your mind, the less you get done. It is a type of paralysis; you think you should be doing so much that you don’t know where to start and your thinking shoots off in different directions. The more frantic your thinking, the more frantic you feel.

It’s like trying to open too many windows on your computer and getting the spinning ball of doom. The computer gets overloaded and might shut down, or it will definitely slow down. But there isn’t anything wrong with the computer when it resets it starts to work properly. It stops being overloaded.

Recognizing that you’re feeling your thinking helps you to reset the machine.

You can’t function properly when you’re overloaded. When you live responding and reacting to your environment, you’re knocking the body out of balance, and then that imbalance becomes the new balance, and overwhelm becomes ‘normal’.

But it isn’t something you have to experience.

If you keep running the same chemicals through your body, you’re innocently keeping yourself in the same state, you keep having the same thoughts and feelings, and you believe that this is ‘how you are and that you can’t change.

But neuroplasticity says that you’re changed by every thought you think.

Amazing eh?

When do you get overwhelmed?

What are you doing at the moment you feel overwhelmed?

Even today, I started to get those feelings. I started thinking, I have too much to do, how will I get blah blah finished, is this new project going to work …….. and on and on.

I started to feel anxiety and panic build up until I stopped and laughed at myself. I had to ask myself, “what am I doing right now? Right this minute?” and at that minute, I was drying my hair.

Was I overwhelmed by drying my hair? No, of course not. I was overwhelmed by my thoughts of the things I felt that I had to get done during the day.

And not only did things did I have to get done that day, but I was also time-traveling into the future and imagining the consequences of not getting things done tomorrow and how tired I would be trying to get all of the items on my list done.

You never get overwhelmed by the things you’re doing now — only by thinking about what you should be doing in the future or what you should have done in the past. In this very second, you are just getting on with things.

Your brain is made up of around 100 billion nerve cells called neurons. These neurons are their own biocomputer and can process hundreds of thousands of functions per second.

And when you have a new thought, you change. You change chemically, genetically, and neurologically.

So when you’re having the same thoughts and have the same feelings of overwhelm every day, your brain is firing its neurons and activating the neural pathways in the same way. This becomes automatic thinking and feeling.

You’re probably not even aware that you’re doing it? These neural pathways have become hardwired and ‘natural’. This is when you tell yourself that it’s just the way I am.

There is a saying in the scientific world that, ‘nerves that fire together, wire together (also known as Hebb’s Law), so if you stay in the same thinking, you’ll stay in the same feeling, the same feeling of overwhelm.

Most people are using the same hardwired programs they used the day before, seeing the same people, and maybe even having the same conversations, so they are stuck in the same feelings. They blame these feelings on the environment that they live and work in, rather than seeing the experience is generated by their thoughts and not from anything on the outside.

Suppose you travel to work in your car and listen to the same radio program as the day before playing the same music and adverts, or get on the same train and see the same people as the day before, as you do the same things. In that case, you might be thinking the same thoughts about a meeting that you’ve got to go to and how boring it will be or wondering how many emails have come in since you last checked and how can you possibly get through them all when you have a mountain of work to do.

How do you stop doing this?

The only way is to notice the feeling that you’re in. When you’re feeling overwhelmed, everything is an effort. If you’re sitting on your sofa thinking about everything you need to do at home and work, you might feel overwhelmed.

Even the thought of washing up the dishes is too much.

But you’re not doing all of these things, are you? You’re just thinking about them, so notice the feeling you’re in, which will cause a shift. Bring yourself back to the moment. What are you doing right now?

You can either get up and wash the dishes or tell yourself that you’ll do them tomorrow and let the thought go.

Be present at the moment. To right now. This very second.

And say goodbye to overwhelm.