Coping With Overwhelm

Overwhelm is not a personal weakness. Much of it is designed, some of it is inherited, and a good deal of it is emotional debt collecting interest.

People tell me they are overwhelmed apologetically. As though everybody else is managing fine and they alone have failed to keep up, and there is something wrong with them.

Overwhelm is not a character flaw. We live in a world built to exhaust your ability to choose, a mind that has had to take its hands off the steering wheel, and a stack of unprocessed emotions.

Here are some of my insights for what they are worth.

The paradox of choice

Go and stand in front of the Bolognese sauces in a supermarket.

There are twenty or thirty brands. Each brand often has many varieties. And every few months they move it to a random part of the store or juggle the order of the brands, so whatever you learned last time is no longer useful. This isn’t disorganisation. Its purpose is to deplete your capacity to choose, and to overwhelm it. It has a name, and that name is merchandising psychology.

By the time you reach the till, you’re running on empty. And of course, that is where the chocolate is.

You can see it happening to other people. They wander up and down the aisles like zombies, staring vacantly at the products or sometimes in obvious distress. Trolley rage is a very real thing.

I wrote software for retail, and in the process I learned many of these dark arts. They are being used on all of us most of the time.

And it doesn’t stop at the supermarket. Search for meditation on YouTube, and you are offered hundreds of millions of them, literally. The purpose is to confuse you, so that you stop consciously choosing and react.

That is the first kind of overwhelm. It is manufactured and aimed at you personally. Knowing that does not make it stop, but it does stop you from blaming yourself for it.

Autopilot

The second kind of overwhelm is more subtle.

Your brain’s job is to take anything that is not critical and hand it to a background process that runs without needing your attention. Without this autopilot process, you could not drive, or walk and hold a conversation. It is the result of many millions of years of selective evolution.

You know about autopilot. You arrive somewhere and can’t remember the journey. You open the fridge and stand there with no idea why you opened it. You go from one room to the other and can’t remember why you went there.

When you are overwhelmed, you hand even more over to the autopilot because deciding is expensive and you have nothing left to spend. Autopilot doesn’t just take over the driving. It takes your reactions, your conversations, your choices about what to eat, what to look at, how to live your life.

Stress, and the hamster wheels

Stress itself is your body’s natural response to challenge. It is preparing you to take action. Our ancestors needed it. When you encounter a predator in nature, your body prepares to run; you run, your thinking stops, and you react. It is a survival trait.

The modern problem is that our threats do not resolve quickly. You cannot outrun a mortgage, and you can’t fight a difficult coworker. So the stress response switches on and stays on.

Driving the stress cycle in our lives are the hamster wheels of work, home, finances, family, career, and the rest. Each one spins constantly, with no opportunity to take a break.

Personal admin has become a full-time job. Deliveries, subscriptions, passwords, PINs, emails that never stop. The hamster wheel does not have a brake.

Emotional overwhelm

The third kind is the one nobody talks about, which does some real damage.

Our culture admires people who hide their feelings. Being stoic is a compliment. When something painful happens, we are told to keep ourselves busy; this all creates the illusion of coping.

Personally, I did this for years, and I see others doing it all around me. I used to say I had an emotional dustbin. I thought I could stuff anything difficult into it and carry on, which I did for many decades, but for most of us, eventually, it will overflow.

Ignoring emotions doesn’t make them go away. If the body doesn’t process a difficult feeling, it stays there and stacks up. Unprocessed feelings accumulate, and the more you carry, the more easily you are triggered by small things. That sensitivity to little things is called emotional leakage by psychologists. Left alone for long enough, it becomes emotional overwhelm, which is where your choices are made by your emotions.

I have watched where that ends. People withdraw. They become hermits, avoiding others because they are so easily triggered or offended. Their world gets smaller and smaller.

One way I describe managing emotional connection to my students is that it is like a tap.

We can crack open the tap, notice the feeling a little bit, and then close the tap again.

These sorts of meditations are key practices, and I really think it is difficult, if not impossible, for someone to make progress in coping with trauma without this slow, managed emotional connection process.

This is called habituation, and it is one of the most useful things you get from meditating.

What to do

None of this needs thirty minutes on a cushion at dawn.

Learn to connect to your breath, especially when things become difficult. Learn to focus on the breath. In the car park before the supermarket, in the aisles, at the checkout, and afterwards.

Release the four key stress areas. Eyes, jaw, shoulders, hands. One on each out-breath. That is where stress lives in the body, and letting go of it there tells the rest of the system that you can relax.

Name the pattern, not the content. When the same worry comes round again, learn to label it and let it go.

Open the tap a little. Once a day, let yourself notice how you actually feel, just for a moment as part of your formal meditation practice. You’re not fixing anything. You’re stopping more from piling up.

You can’t go back through your emotional baggage and unpack it all from a standing start. What you can do is stop more of it accumulating. That is what coping with overwhelm looks like. Not a life with less in it, but a mind that is on your side and an awareness that allows you to make your own choices rather than being led by others or by a system that only ever wants to sell you something.