OVERWHELM

When you experience emotional OVERWHELM, it can feel all-consuming. OVERWHELM means to be completely submerged by your thoughts and emotions about current problems, to the point where you lack efficacy and feel frozen or paralyzed. When OVERWHELMED, it can be difficult to think and act rationally, and even function in a normal way. Needless to say, the experience of this feeling is uncomfortable.

The reason a person responds so strongly to the negative emotion of OVERWHELM is the release of cortisol through your body, which leaves you overloaded with anxiety. At the same time, our serotonin stores, the chemical that helps our bodies fight off depression and anxiety, start to deplete. This combination causes the intense feeling of despair associated with being OVERWHELMED. Often, OVERWHELM feels as uncomfortable as it feels uncontrollable. It rears its head as anxiety, anger, irritability and worry. 

Moving overseas can trigger the feeling of OVERWHELM. You don’t have a home. Nothing is organized or familiar and your brain is freaking out. Your brain likes consistency and familiarity, because that means we’re safe and we’re going to survive. When you’re moving, it is the opposite of that. Everything is crazy. Everything is in disarray. 

In addition, add children to the moving abroad equation and dealing with their emotional experience and making sure everything is sorted for them and the family.

OVERWHELM pretends to have a purpose, but it has no purpose. It has no usefulness at all. It also pretends to be caused by the amount of things that are going on in our lives. OVERWHELM is never, ever, caused by what is going on in your life. OVERWHELM is always caused by your thinking. There’s the things that are going on, and then there are our thoughts about it.

We are at a place in our evolution where we are genuinely faced with more options and more decisions than we’ve ever been faced with in our lives.

If you think about how the brain evolved, there was basically an option to survive and an option not to survive. There was one thing to eat and it was usually an animal or a plant in the vicinity. We didn’t have the number of options that we have now.

Our brains feel that lack of skill in terms of how to manage. Our brains seize up and go into confusion. It’s almost like our brain, because it hasn’t evolved and developed to be able to take in so much information, just says, “I don’t know. I’m confused,” and we go and hide in the corner or buffer with food or we just go into a complete emotional meltdown.

Your brain likes plans. It likes things to go as they’ve always gone because that means we will stay alive.

I think the increasing number of options is a beautiful thing. Our brains just don’t know how to manage it.

OVERWHELM is a knee jerk reaction to the number of options, to the number of things not going the way we want, and to the number of decisions that we are being asked to make on a daily basis. You can look at this and run in a corner and hide in confusion, tuck yourself into a bed of OVERWHELM, or you can start training your brain to manage a surplus of options, a surplus of challenges, a surplus of issues. Too much of a thing doesn’t cause OVERWHELM. It’s the way that we think about it, those many undisciplined thoughts about our options and our knee jerk reaction to say we don’t know how to figure it out. 

I want to offer that you can always figure out a solution. Your brain is designed to evolve. It’s designed to create new neural pathways, that create new emotions that create new actions, and therefore new things in the world. When you hide from it in OVERWHELM, you are missing that opportunity.

Asking yourself to consistently make decisions is what prevents OVERWHELM. Release yourself from constantly believing that you don’t know what to do and just do something. Because when you start doing something, you will learn whether it was the right or wrong thing for you to do. 

The second thing you need to practice is constraint. Instead of giving yourself all of those options, you have to train your brain to give yourself fewer options.

Your brain will tell you that there’s other things to consider, and that you should read all of them. Do not listen to your brain. Your brain doesn’t know how to constrain. Your brain wants to just go into OVERWHELM. You narrow it down and then pick an option.

Now, the key is you have to support your own decision long enough to be able to execute it. 

In summary, many options are a beautiful thing. We need to develop the mental skills of constraint, decision making, and deliberate discovery versus confusion.

You’ll say, “I’m just too busy. I’m just too tired. I can’t handle it all. There’s too much going on.” When you hear yourself, it will always be laced with a little bit of self-pity. Start by separating out what are the facts of what you have to do versus what are your thoughts about it. When you look at the facts separately from the drama, you will have more peace and freedom. 

OVERWHELM is not something that happens to you. It’s something that you create. Constrain your options on purpose and then make decisions quickly and powerfully and then support your own decisions. Do not indulge in regret. Do not indulge in confusion. Do not indulge in OVERWHELM. Be willing to fail. Be willing to make the “wrong decision” so you can prevent yourself from being OVERWHELMED and then you will know what the right decision is.