How To Get Out of Overwhelm

When life throws us challenges that exceed our capacity to cope, we become overwhelmed. The etymology of the word speaks accurately to the experience: the mid-14th century Middle English overwhelmen, means “to turn upside down, overthrow, or knock over” or “to submerge completely.” Usually, when life is going okay-enough, we can brace ourselves, summon our strengths and ‘surf’ the waves of difficulties. But when life throws us too much at once, our knees buckle, the waves submerge us completely, our life gets turned upside down—our best efforts overthrown.

Symptoms of overwhelm

Overwhelm can show up as racing thoughts, anxiety, physical symptoms (sweating, restlessness, heart palpitations), but overwhelm can also show up as feeling flat, empty and numb. Though these symptoms of overwhelm are very unpleasant, this response is completely natural. When life becomes too much to bear, our nervous systems involuntarily go into a coping and protective state.

Neuroscience of overwhelm

When we’re in overwhelm, a primitive part of our brain called the amygdala starts sending stress hormones through our bodies. This spreads the message that lets us know we are in danger, something is wrong, thus mobilizing our various protective strategies. Our bodies start doing strange things (fight, flight or freeze responses) and our logical minds desperately try to catch up with the body’s intelligence, conjuring up stories in order to understand what’s happening, and generating ideas about how to “fix” the problem. As a therapist, so many clients I see come in to my office with very clever and complex hypothesis of “what to do” and “how to fix” their overwhelm. They often bring in ornate, highly intellectual understandings about what is the ‘cause’ of overwhelm in their lives. But one of the most effective coping tools for overwhelm is astoundingly simple. It cuts through the overwhelm tsunami and the concoctions of the intellect and gets to the core of that matter, and it works.

How to get out of overwhelm

The phrase “Name it to Tame it” was coined by neuroscientist Daniel Siegel. The idea is if we can name and witness our experience, we can tame it. Naming and labelling our experience literally causes changes in our brain: it causes the amygdala to become less active, and our stress response decreases, bringing overwhelm down.

When we name it to tame it, we inherently slow down and start to notice our experience. This is mindfulness. We might say to ourselves, ah… I’m feeling afraid. Or, ah, I realize I’m sad and also scared, and ashamed to be both sad and scared.” This gives us a bit of distance from our state so that we are not “submerged completely” in it.

Rumpelstiltskin

In old German folklore, there is a fairytale about Rumpelstiltskin, a merciless monster who kidnaps the King and Queen’s first born daughter. When the Queen confronts the monster, and calls him by his true name, his power is taken away, and the daughter is returned to safety. Name it to tame it works similarly. When we can name the monsters inside us, we take away their power.

The role of Self-Compassion

This is not always as easy as it seems. Sometimes turning into our inexperience to see what’s there feels scary. Sometimes it’s scary to name and acknowledge what’s really there. This is more common than not in those who have experienced trauma, hardship and marginalization. Through clinical practice and personal experience, we have found that adding the warmth of self-compassion to the experience of mindfulness helps us foster an atmosphere of inner safety that’s required to turn within and name what’s there.

The quickest and most cost-effective way to learn the skill of Self-Compassion, and other skills to manage overwhelm, is our 8-week Mindful Self-Compassion Training. In this course, you will learn “name it to tame it” and dozens of other mindfulness and self- compassion tools to help you not only tolerate overwhelm, but surf the waves and regain your strength.