The Mechanics of Overwhelm

Alright, so depending on when you're reading this, we may or may not have just gotten to the other side of a Virgo lunar eclipse whilst also navigating a simultaneous Venus and Mercury retrograde.

If you're reading this around this time, I'm sending you a lot of tenderness and rest. And, I hope this series on overwhelm supports you and offers you some guidance on how to tend to yourself during these deeply turbulent and overwhelming times.

If you haven't already read my post on Busyness as a Form of Belonging, then you may want to start there before diving into this post as it sets up some background about things that are driving feelings of overwhelm in our society.

If you've already read that post, then welcome! Today I'll be talking a bit about the mechanics of overwhelm: what it is and how it feels when it shows up so we can be clear about what it is that we're talking about. I wanted to write this post because I don't think we as a collective really know what overwhelm is. That is to say that we generally have an idea of what it is and are comfortable saying "I feel overwhelmed" in a sentence, but besides that, our understanding of it and where it comes from is very surface level.

I think that's because our natural instinct is to make overwhelm go away the instant that we feel it. So in this series, instead of talking about how to make overwhelm go away, I'm going to talk about what it feels like, what it is, and what causes it so we can start to understand what's happening below the surface for ourselves.

Today, I'll be talking about how overwhelm feels.

Understanding Overwhelm

So like what is overwhelm? I think the answer to this question depends on the person. The last time I asked a few folks how they would describe overwhelm, this is what some of them said:

"It just feels kind of yucky."

"It feels like my body wants to crawl out of my skin."

"No matter what I do I can't calm down."

"It's a trauma response. Specifically, freeze or fawn."

"It's very overstimulating."

"I don't really know, I just always feel like I'll do anything for it to end."

I think it's interesting that only one person answered this question by trying to say what overwhelm is (they said it's a trauma response). Everyone else described how overwhelm makes them feel.

So the first thing I'll point out is that the one through line in all of these responses is that overwhelm is inherently uncomfortable. It's yucky. It's dysregulating. And no one seems interested in staying overwhelmed for long.

I personally relate to all of these descriptions and notice that I experience two different types of overwhelm. One relates to feeling like I can't keep up and another feels like I'm drowning. Sometimes I feel one or the other, but sometimes I feel a combination of the two.

Overwhelm as an Inability to Keep Up

As a neurodivergent person, I have to say that the worst kind of overwhelm is the kind where it feels like I can't keep up. I often experience this version when I feel extremely inspired and have a lot of ideas and mental breakthroughs. My brain is working on overdrive, I'm excited, and the number of ideas coming through sends me into a frenzy where I try to do everything at once but also don't know where to start.

The worst part of this type of overwhelm is that I've never really figured out how to organize myself to manage it. When I have that many ideas coming through at once, I can't really organize them or map out a plan to work on them. Any systems I had for tracking my ideas falls apart. And any project management tool I used for making progress a step at a time falls by the wayside.

Everything becomes complete and total chaos.

I don't have a perfect solution for how I deal with this type of overwhelm, but I do have two coping mechanisms:

1. I use AI transcription to do a brain dump of every idea I have to AI while it records me. I take the .txt file of the transcript, put it into Claude AI, and ask it to organize everything I said, help me prioritize it, and make a bare minimum plan for executing my ideas. This really helps me shift out of the state of panic and back into a state of feeling like I kind of know how to move forward.
2. If I want to make a project plan with actual due dates because it's something work-related, I call my friend Dana and do a project management session with her.

The reason I say that neither of these ideas is perfect is because they don't actually involve me making any of the ideas a reality. Yes, they are a preliminary step in that they help me get organized, but once I finish either of these processes, all of the ideas remain unrealized.

It does reduce my overwhelm in the sense that all my ideas live in a single place and are organized, but I usually then start to feel panic about everything I need to do.

It's a vicious cycle.

Overwhelm as a Flood of Emotions

The second way I experience overwhelm is less of a vicious cycle and more of an emotional KO punch. It usually happens when my body is trying to process something traumatic and/or something intensely emotional.

When this particular version of overwhelm happens, I feel heavy – physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. It feels like I'm carrying extra weight around that's not supposed to be there and it makes me exhausted while the other kind of overwhelm makes me overly anxious.

I often have trouble keeping up with my self-care tasks like meal prep, hair washing, doing laundry, and regular body movement to name a few. All I want to do is lay on the couch and read a book, watch mindless TV, doomscroll social media, or escape into a fantasy fiction novel.

And I don't have any solutions for this type of overwhelm. Not even quasi ones. Because I've learned that feelings take the time they take. So I let myself journal and do some tapping as it comes up, but this type of overwhelm tends to have its own timeline that I simply do not control.

When Inability to Keep Up Causes the Emotional Flood

Then there's a third type of overwhelm, which is a combination of the other two. It usually starts with an ADHD hyperfixation where my brain is firing off ideas. When I start to panic about trying to keep up with my brain, this can sometimes trigger ADHD trauma of feeling incapable.

I've worked through a lot of that in the past, but every now and then, little remnants of it come up in this context, and a swell of feelings I didn't know I was still holding onto rise to the surface. The result? I'm both insanely anxious and emotionally exhausted.

This particular combo is where shit hits the fan for me. In the past, it's been the combo that requires medication to get me out of it. But lately, I've been able to intervene before medication is necessary. Things like doing a brain dump with AI, making a plan with Dana, or turning to creativity and allowing myself to rest have been crucial to stave off a full breakdown.

So these three examples are my primary experiences of overwhelm. I'm sure there are others, but lately, the ones I most remember have to do with an ADHD hyperfixation spiral, intense emotional processing, or a combination of the two.

What about you?

Join the Conversation

I invite you to take a second to answer some of these questions so you can get clear on how you experience overwhelm:

1. How would you describe your experience of overwhelm?
2. What causes you to feel overwhelmed?
3. What happens to your physicality (mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual state) when you're experiencing overwhelm?

Feel free to share your responses below in the comments. I'll see you next week where we'll continue to deep dive into befriending overwhelm. Thanks for reading!