Consciously Dropping Overwhelm

So you want to start consciously dropping overwhelm—but then there’s the tight pull of tension as you suck your breath in, near the diaphragm. Someone has just handed you something else that you need to do. More on the list.

Or perhaps you just realized you forgot something.
Or perhaps you’re keeping pace with everything that you want to squeeze out of this life, but you’re feeling…well, squeezed.
Or perhaps you’re realizing that you’ve worked hard to get where you’re at, and you’re not happy, and you’re wondering why–what do you let go of? How do you choose?

You’re looking around asking yourself if this is really what happiness is supposed to look like.

I’m really interested in “overwhelm,” that particular brand of stress that I see amongst intelligent, high-achieving women who are just-this-side of keeping it together, but always dangerously tottering close to the line of dropping-the-ball.

(Note: I know this feeling, intimately.)

Consciously Dropping Overwhelm

The only success I’ve ever had with dropping overwhelm has been this: consciously dropping overwhelm.

It’s essentially a mental cognitive reframe where I pause, step back and try to see the delusion I happen to be in in that moment, and remind myself: The overwhelm is just a delusion. It’s just a Story I’m making up. It’s not real.

We can feel things in our bodies—somatic sensations, stress—but we have to understand that those feelings might feel real, but they are based on a perception of reality that is not objectively true.

The overwhelm is our projection onto the moment, onto the situation. Consciously dropping overwhelm means reminding myself that someone else out there is just having a day—perhaps even the best day of their life (because that’s their Story). To someone else, it’s the worst day. To someone else, it’s a boring day.

“That’s gas lighting yourself,” someone said to me, once. “It’s invalidating what you feel!” They were deeply concerned for my well-being. They were also very worried that perhaps my overwhelm stemmed from trauma that I had never processed.

I laugh when I think of this, though not unkindly. Good glory, if anyone knew how much I’d done to process old trauma. This isn’t to say that trauma is no longer a part of my existence—I think it exists, for me and everyone else—but it didn’t ring true for me that I was traumatized, invalidating myself, or gas lighting my experience.

It just rang true for me that I was tired of the drama around overwhelm. I was tired of spinning it around, making it a “thing” when I could also see a path to my own freedom: consciously dropping overwhelm by reminding myself that the more I thought about overwhelm and ruminated on overwhelm and focused on overwhelm…the more overwhelmed my experience would be.

What if It’s Both?

There’s so much “side picking” that I’m seeing these days. It’s so binary to pick sides. It lacks nuance.

What if it’s not just that we are overwhelmed because we are traumatized—what if it’s both that we are overwhelmed because we’ve experienced trauma, AND, we are helped when we consciously drop the overwhelm?

What if overwhelm is part of every human’s experience including those who have not experienced significant trauma, AND, we are helped when we consciously drop the overwhelm?

What if it’s all both, at the same time, messy and nuanced and requiring critical thinking for us to move between the liminal spaces of needing to process old hurts, and needing to just let old shit go, already, and then again move into processing old hurts, and then again deciding to drop the overwhelm?

You can probably already tell that I tend to land in that space and advocate it for others. It seems more human to all all of it, to move in the “and/both” of life.

Process the hurts and the overwhelm as much as you can. Then also see if you can let it go. Then pick it back up again when old hurts resurface (they will). Then consciously drop them (again) and let them go.

This is the same practice I see happening when I’m consciously dropping overwhelm. It reminds me of meditation, and thoughts that toss us away and then coming back to the breath. There is no arrival point. There is only moving with the new experience that comes to us in each fresh, new moment.