This month’s blog is about overwhelm because people who contact me for help often talk about being overwhelmed or feeling overwhelmed. It’s quite a commonly used term so I thought to start with I’d look it up and I found the results quite interesting. I was particularly interested in the things that the people who contact me talk about and the definition that seemed most relevant was “being overwhelmed by a feeling or an event that affects you very strongly and you don’t know what to do about it”.
The other definition I found, which was for a more physical type of overwhelm, was to be buried or drowned beneath earth or water. Now that definition also works well for me in terms of emotional or mental overwhelm, feeling buried or drowned beneath a huge mass of ‘something’. That something could, as the previous definition said, be a very, very strong emotion or disturbing event. However, it can also relate to just having too much to do and not enough time to do it, which for me personally, can be a real panic state that you just don’t know how to get out of. You literally are being overwhelmed by having lots to do and you can’t think about what you should do first. I don’t know about you, but I try doing six things at once and that doesn’t work terribly well either because you do none of them quickly or efficiently.
Just Breathe.
So what I do, in that latter case, and what I recommend, is just to stop and breathe, deep, slow breaths, breathing from right down in your belly, breathing in for six and out for six if you can. If you can’t manage six, go as far as you can on the in breath and just make sure the out breath is at the same length, so if you only get to four in, do four out and you’ll find if you keep going gradually you will get to six. The deep breathing just makes everything stop, almost like being in the eye of the storm, there’s a little moment of calm in there which enables you to think. It enables your conscious mind to get a word in and actually say how am I going to tackle this? It may be that you are able to prioritise and put the things you have to do into some order or maybe you need to get some help, to delegate whatever you can. Stopping and breathing stops the panic and that is important because, once we’re in that panic mode, not necessarily a full-on panic attack but in that “I’m just not going to get it all done in time”, we feel out of control and maybe scared. However, just taking a few deep, even breaths gets you out of that panicky state so that you can think and decide what to do
The breathing also helps with the first definition, being overwhelmed by a feeling or an event that affects you very strongly and you feel you don’t know what to do about it. Again you need to find that moment of calm so you can spend some time thinking how you’re going to deal with this. In NLP we talk about the fact that it’s not what happens to you that matters it’s how you choose to respond to it. The problem we have with that is that we all have some pre-created triggers, habitual ways of reacting to something that’s happened or something that somebody said that has upset us. This automatic reaction can be unhelpful and again makes us feel out of control. What the breathing does is to give us a breathing space to say okay I don’t want to react in the habitual way, either because this situation is too big or because it doesn’t work, it’s just become a habit which isn’t helpful. Breathing literally gives you a breathing space to say what do I want to do about this? Now it may be that in that breathing space you can think about what to do because there may be a practical response to what’s happened, it may be in that breathing space you feel you need more time and it maybe you need help because this thing has overwhelmed you so much that even though you’ve calmed yourself down a little bit you just genuinely do not know how to respond and that’s absolutely fine. It’s okay to need help in that situation and the quicker you get help the better, because sometimes people leave this too long and let it just grow and it digs itself deep into your subconscious mind and begins to have a negative effect on your whole life.
Self-Hypnosis as a Tool to Help with Overwhelm
Sometimes there’s something you can to help yourself and I teach everybody who comes to see me some techniques to help them with whatever it is they are currently dealing with and may have to deal with again. For me, after I’ve calmed myself down, got myself out of the habitual reaction, got myself out of the panic state of “I really, really do not know what or how to respond to this”, I would, as soon as possible, do self-hypnosis. I find self- hypnosis very useful as a way of ‘going inside myself’, getting out of my head and giving myself a calm place to just ask the question “what do we do about this?”. Often the answer comes if you ask the question, often the answer is there but we’re in such a panic and so overwhelmed, buried, drowned by what’s going on that it’s not possible for the answer to come. However, it may come if you can get yourself into as quiet and calm state as you can, in whatever way works for you.
Alternatively, you could talk to somebody that you trust and get another opinion on it, because when you are in this state of being buried or drowned you literally can’t see your way out and somebody else can perhaps see it differently.
Don’t Try and Bury Your Overwhelm
If you’re in that extreme state where you really don’t know what to do then please, please, seek some help. If you don’t know how to deal with it, if you do feel you are absolutely buried underneath this thing that’s happened, that you are just completely submerged and don’t know what to do, then reach out and seek some help as soon as possible. The alternative, and a common coping mechanism, is to bury it even deeper, literally to put it away in a corner somewhere and forget about it. We often feel proud of doing this because if you don’t know what to do about it, what’s the point of thinking about it, this is the logical conscious mind’s approach to the problem. I, at one time, had this very strong sense that what I’d got was a pirate’s chest, with chains around it and padlocks and that is where I put the stuff that I didn’t know how to deal with. That can work, it can work for years and years but it’s a very dangerous solution because, however strong the chest and the padlocks are, things leak out and you can find yourself uncontrollably weeping or shouting and screaming in anger. You’re just letting off a little bit of pressure and then you can lock it back down again and that can go on for years. It’s not a good way to be, as I learned, and ultimately there’s always a risk that the whole thing’s just going to explode and you’re going to have a complete breakdown of some kind, where you literally can’t function properly anymore.
So overwhelm can be a practical thing, like too much to do which is horrendous at the time but hopefully can be resolved in some way, right the way through to this really serious problem that you don’t know what to do with, so you literally park it somewhere, you sit upon it and are continually damaged in some way by it until you deal with it. So the sooner you deal with it the better and, if any of this sounds familiar, if you are aware of a pirate’s chest or cave or anywhere you’ve put all the things you don’t know what to do with then, NOW is the time to seek some help and deal with it. Generally, it is a lot easier to deal with than you expect, it’s just become this big thing that you could not cope with at the time, so you believe that you’re never going to be able to cope with it and that, in my personal and professional experience, is absolutely not true.