Recognising overwhelm

We can look, but we need to see

Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash

Why does this even warrant a blog post, you might think? Overwhelm seems like a generally easy thing to notice. You have too much to do, you feel stressed. End of story. Or not really? What if it's just a chapter of the story?

Growing up, I’d spent a lot of time in the dark - I was not in touch with my interests much, even less so with my emotions, feelings, and needs. Most of the time, I just thought of myself as a "failed" or, more accurately, an actively failing person. This understandably caused me a lot of pain, which wasn't acknowledged by me until later on. Everybody else was out there living life successfully and fully it seemed, and I was just existing and crying on my pillow at night.

When I was a teen, stress wasn't talked much about, or maybe those conversations went above my head. But moreover, stress is an adult thing, isn't it? It is easy to believe that and to let go of exploring the undefined discomfort further. Aside from the self-inflicted stress of always completing assignments at the last moment possible, and the stress of putting myself out there in front of other humans, it didn't seem like there was much more to be overwhelmed by. That being said, it surely didn't help that most of my family was telling me to "just do it" when it came to going out with friends as everyone else was doing. The "just do it" mindset made it sound like a piece of cake, which reinforced even further the image of my failed self I held.

Why am I sharing all of this? I guess it is a long-winded way of saying that overwhelm is not always as easy to notice as it might seem. Or to define. There are psychological and mental conditions that make it harder for some of us to do certain things like being around people or getting out of bed. And while overwhelm is hardly the root cause of these, I have found working around it to be quite helpful.

Symptoms

The "symptoms" of overwhelm can vary. Stress is not the only sign. In my own experience, those symptoms are all quite related and feed off of each other, often leading to cycles that are hard to get out of. It took me a while to realise that, for me, overwhelm predominantly shows up as stuckness.

Procrastination was quite the buzzword when I stumbled on it about 15 years ago. Today, doom-scrolling might be a more popular concept, but it is only one of the ways in which you can procrastinate. First things first though - for anyone unfamiliar with the term, it means postponing things you should do, oftentimes indefinitely. For example, if you need to do the dishes, which is usually not the most enjoyable activity, you might be spending your time on social media instead. Or if you have to be writing, you might be on social media or doing the dishes, telling yourself you will get to writing any time now, but still finding other things to do or fiddle with.

This wouldn't be the end of the world if guilt wasn't residing in the back of your mind while doing all those other activities. In the end, it feels like nothing you do is enjoyable because you are not doing what you should be doing most. If, by chance, you are finally doing what you most need to do, you are probably tortured by why it took you so long to get started. And if this doesn't seem painful enough, there are times when we don't even know what is the most important thing we should be doing. Fear of not knowing how to do things exactly and doing them badly, coupled with not being in touch with ourselves, tend to lead to that. It's the playing ground of analysis paralysis - trying so hard to optimise what to do, that you end up doing nothing. And overthinking is overwhelming in its own right, making things even worse.

I don't know if anxiety and depression are the root or show up as a symptom, but they can be found in the mix sometimes too. Overwhelm can be a trigger for them, making it that much harder to fight it. However we look at it, the end result is usually an unhappy human being, with low or non-existent self-esteem, trying to do things, failing more often than not and seeing herself as a failure.

Sources

There might be as many triggers to overwhelm as there are people on Earth. Different things can be overwhelming to different people, and what can be too much for one might be completely fine with another. Some of the stimuli are external and some are internal, and very often a few are into play at any given time, making it harder to pinpoint the source of the unrest we might be experiencing.

The environment we find ourselves in seems like an obvious culprit, but it is not always easy to realise that. Light, sound, temperature, and crowds to name some, can be very overwhelming to some of us. Highly sensitive people who take in more stimuli than others often find themselves drained by day-to-day situations and need some downtime to tame all the stimulation. It took me years to realise that some things you don't get used to, you learn they affect you in a certain way, and avoid them whenever possible. Like very busy areas or strong fluorescent lights. And horror movies.

Next up, another very obvious but not so obvious source - physical sensations and needs. I’ve never seen these as a big deal, yet bit by bit it became clear to me that being hungry, sleepy, tired, or cold are very grand triggers, which can sometimes spiral my mood to rock bottom very quickly. Maybe for everyone reading this, it is beyond obvious that you'd be unhappy if you were experiencing those. But for someone like me who tends to put productivity above all else (in a wrong way, as you can tell), it seemed like these were inconveniences which should be ignored until they couldn't be ignored anymore.

Then, emotional sources of overwhelm might be easier to tell. I for one, still found it hard to connect being unable to do things to unsettling emotions. But just like we can't expect top productivity when we are ill (yes, I used to expect it then too), we can't do that when we are sad, for example. The emotions we are experiencing take too much of our headspace, and it is hard to focus on anything else. This is why we feel like we are procrastinating, but in the end, we are just working through what we are feeling. The default would be trying to suppress our feelings and emotions and to try to function as normal. But this only makes things worse, pushing ourselves when we should be resting instead.

And finally, what I've always found easiest to identify was mental overwhelm. It is very, very relevant in the age we live in. Everybody is talking about it and probably this is why it's been more obvious to me. It's the constant buzz of notifications, the infinite amount of content, the neverending comparison to others. Seeing how this affects us is easy, and - you guessed right - there is a lot of content out there centring on this very topic. The hard part of it all is that technology is so ingrained in daily life, that we believe we should be able to deal with and process all these stimuli unfazed. It is true that we are also reaping a ton of benefits thanks to the digital age. Yet the amount of information we are trying to hold in our brains becomes greater and greater, frequently leaving us numbed on the couch for hours on end.

Solutions?

It's all good talking to pass the time and numbering things that may be troubling. But what we are really in for is, most preferably, quick fixes. I know I have been after them for all these years. And I've tried plenty, most with limited long-term success. As the name of this blog suggests, I am aiming to helm the overwhelm and hopefully explore lots of solutions in the process. In the following post, I will be sharing the method that has worked best for me.

But for now, I want to draw our attention to the elephant in the room. Which, in its own right, is a pretty big solution. I know it is much easier to believe we are living through minor inconveniences for which we only need to find quick solutions. Instead of looking inward and realising something might be amiss. Instead of accepting we are, in fact, not perfect. And may require some work to function better.

How does overwhelm usually show up for you? What do you think are the major sources of it?