Overcoming Overwhelm

The world seems to be frozen, holding its breath, poised between fight and flight. In this compulsive hush it is all too easy for our brains to pick up the slack, feeding us louder and more insistent messages about the myriad threats it perceives. Our routines and standard operating procedures have all been put on hold, as have many of our customary self-care options. Is it any wonder we are feeling overwhelmed?

For some the feeling of being overwhelmed may act like a physical weight. The desire to stay in bed or take naps will be paramount. Motivation will be hard to come by and even a simple day can feel exhausting. Overwhelm for these individuals feels paralyzing. On the other end of the spectrum we have individuals whose response to overwhelm is to run further, faster, harder. Neither response constitutes a workable strategy as both are, in effect, primitive avoidance strategies: hold still and hope the predator doesn’t see me or run like hell and try to get away.

So how do we approach overwhelm in a more methodical manner? The first step is to recognize that overwhelm is a disconnect between our processing power and our surplus of thoughts and feelings. Our attention is being pulled in every direction at once with each thought or idea insisting it is critical, that without attention it is likely to be life threatening. As soon as we focus in one direction, five equally urgent thoughts arise and divert our attention.

It may not feel this precise in your head as thoughts will be spinning from one to the other too fast for this interplay to be conscious. Under more normal circumstances, we have the mental reserves to focus on a perceived threat, evaluate it, and categorize it based on its real and actual risk level. This process allows us to feel in control as threat assessments can be made in real time. However, when there is an overwhelming volume of novel input, we do not have the processing power, or the focus, to thoughtfully evaluate the information our brain is feeding us. Instead, we persist in feeling a sense of intangible threat that requires constant vigilance.

Vigilance is effective and necessary in many situations, such as crossing a busy street with small children. To preserve your safety, you must be aware of all the other cars, people, and bikes around you. In this situation, a hyperaware state in which all your senses are scanning broadly for threats is helpful and necessary. On the opposite end of the spectrum, consider how the world focuses to a pinprick when you have a crashing patient. For the space of that rescue, you are unlikely to be conscious of anything outside a five-foot radius. You are not wondering whether you did in fact take the garbage out this morning. You are not ruminating over the case you saw last week that hasn’t followed up. You don’t remember you need to pee or that you haven’t eaten for 12 hours. You are simply there, now. Both are powerful survival strategies invoked to manage threat.  

However, crossing a street takes less than two minutes, and the laser focus needed to rescue a patient can often be relaxed within 10-20 minutes. This doesn’t necessarily mean the patient is out of danger, but the rapid-fire response required from you will have shifted. Overwhelm occurs when either of these states is repeated or sustained. When the whole day feels like crossing a dangerous street or an unending series of crises, both physical and mental reserves are exhausted. This exhaustion makes sense if we HAVE been dealing with crises or threatening environments all day, but when the threat that induces these states is vague or insubstantial, there is no rest at the end of the tunnel.

The longer this pattern repeats itself, the more physically and mentally exhausted we become. A sluggish body and agitated mind make it difficult to mount an effective response to the ongoing mental assault. So we end up curled on the couch or else frantically scrubbing the bathroom floor hoping accomplishment will relieve the pressure. Unsurprisingly, neither approach offers more than a transient reprieve. As long as we are experiencing a sense of global threat, our body and brain will respond accordingly.

So what happens when this overwhelming tornado is spinning out of control inside your mind and body and you still need to go to work? Or you need to reconfigure your entire family life because of a shelter-in-place order? Or both? Oh, and by the way, many of the typical stress-reduction and coping strategies you have developed over the years are now unavailable to you. You can no longer go to the gym, you can’t visit friends, your place of work is no relief because you are surrounded by others who are working within similar tornados, or worse, coworkers are viewed as a threat because they represent possible points of infection. You cannot drop into a coffee shop for a little me-time. You can’t connect with loved ones over meals out. There is constant worry about friends and family members who are approaching shelter-in-place differently than you, or perhaps they are models of good behavior but are immunocompromised or otherwise vulnerable. You are a boss watching your staff suffer from reduced hours and an inability to pay them. You are an employee who feels unsafe in your workplace but needs to take home money. You are a parent who is sure they are failing because your children are watching three times the TV they typically watch.

These situations, feelings, and thoughts are ON TOP OF what was likely a knife-edge balance of home/life/work/self that existed before the pandemic. Worse yet, if you were dealing with any kind of personal crisis or struggle prior to COVID-19, ‘overwhelmed’ is likely a gross understatement.

What do we do? How do we manage the new responsibilities of our ever-competing roles as person/partner/parent/professional/citizen/friend? How do we mount this herculean effort WITHOUT access to our typical coping strategies? How do we learn to be functional in this new landscape while simultaneously trying to map it out?

Like any of our other herculean tasks (vet school and parenting come to mind) the trick is to take one step, then take another step, and so on ad infimum. I am here to offer you a map. You will be doing all the hard work, but maybe I can help you steer in a productive direction.

Today’s step will be to complete a Mind Map and a Body Scan.

The goal of a mind map is to increase awareness and bring into sharp focus the individual items that form the milieu in an overwhelmed brain. Creating a map allows the brain to relax it’s vigilance. All possible threats are recorded, immobile, and directly in your line-of-sight. There is time now to evaluate each one and thoughtfully assess it’s actual importance.

With all the pieces safely on paper, you are also able to more objectively evaluate what pieces are grabbing a disproportionate amount of your energy. It can help to separate out the actionable items from items that are simply fodder for rumination. It may also highlight areas of concern that were not in conscious awareness. This can sometimes offer significant relief as the unknown or unseen threat is often the one that requires the greatest vigilance. A mind map can provide you with the information to accurately answer the question “what’s wrong” which can greatly facilitate conversations between partners and sometimes children. If you are able to get a family member to complete a mind map, it may highlight areas of disparate focus that have been a source of misunderstanding or conflict.

A mind map also becomes a journal entry of sorts as it represents those pieces of your life that were of most significance on the day the map was created. It can be instructive to review old mind maps and realize that a topic which took up half the available space on one does not even appear on another.

This concludes Part 1 of the three-part COVID-19 Self-Care Package. For Part 2 continue on to Revising your Routines. The TLC Wellness Journey will continue with a blog post and podcast release each Monday. Self-study handouts and additional resources will be included on a regular basis. I invite you to follow my blog, subscribe to my podcast, and sign-up for my Newsletter to keep abreast of my latest work.

Take care always,