Overwhelmed? Overcome!

Anxiety causes your body and brain to turn traitorously against you, thereby limiting and frightening you. One of the ways it twists your reality is by causing you to feel completely overwhelmed by even the littlest things. 

Most people feel overwhelmed from time to time, but when you struggle with anxiety the smallest things feel like enormous mountains that need to be climbed. Add to that the fact that you feel as competent at mountain climbing as an arthritic goat with four left hooves shoved into rollerblades and you end up with a recipe for disaster. What disaster could result from feeling overwhelmed by literally everything you ask? Panic, dread, irritability, hopelessness, exhaustion, insomnia… and the list goes on. 

In case you don’t have any experience with anxiety, here is a sampling of some of the random things I was overwhelmed by at the height of my anxiety disorder (if you are in the anxiety-boat right alongside me, know that the boat is a fifty-level cruise liner and neither of us is as alone as we feel):

• Talking to strangers on the phone or face to face – I’m referring here to simply asking another human if I can make a doctor’s appointment or telling said doctor that I need a prescription for tranquilizers because my life is one giant panic attack (I’m not even joking, I still have 95% of the pills even though they’re probably expired, because you just never know when you are someone close to you may need a little physical and mental time-out).
• Talking to friends and family on the phone or face to face – Caring so much about them and yet feeling so defeated that I was afraid I would drag them down with me if I shared what was going on. 
• Leaving the house – It didn’t matter where to, it could have been ten steps down the road, it could have been to a classy all-you-can-eat buffet with all expenses paid (it actually was a couple of times). 
• Work – Just work. Whether it was an order to process or a piece of writing to do it all just felt very heavy. 
• Everyday things – This is where we overlap with depression in case you hadn’t picked up on that till now. Getting out of bed, doing washing, cooking all felt like too much. 
• Changes in plans or plan ambiguity – Any deviation from the set plan I had in my head or not being able to get agreement on that plan e.g. being invited for breakfast at a restaurant (see above point about leaving the house) but then the restaurant changes… dun, dun, duuuuun… Also, there is no set plan for what we will do afterwards. Will there be more “leaving the house” to follow or can we head back to relative safety? 

Some of these things still feel overwhelming at times to a greater or lesser degree as ridiculous as they sound. The thing is that no matter how much they are struggling, people living with any kind of mental illness usually develop the ability to fake “normal”. So you would never know from the outside, that the inside of my mind looked like a piñata factory with monkeys amped up on Red Bull testing everything coming off the assembly line. 

With all of that said, I can tell you that there is hope and there are ways to cope with the feeling of being overwhelmed no matter where you are on the mental illness versus mental health continuum. 

Feeling overwhelmed is just like any other feeling – it might pass like a tiger through a chicken-run, but it will pass. If you can keep bringing your mind back to this thought you will be able to think rationally and focus on solutions instead of whatever caused the feeling in the first place. 

This is a technique that works extremely well in any situation where your fight or flight response kicks in (I’m still learning to utilize my fight response because life has beaten it out of me, so “flight” is my default setting) . The acronym stands for Stop, Take a deep breath, Observe, Proceed. To demonstrate how to implement this technique, I’ll give you an example of how I have used it when responding to e-mails from clients who are dissatisfied. My initial response would be to take it extremely personally, feel that I am a failure as a human being and then feel completely overwhelmed because I don’t know how to respond (side note – we rarely get complaints at work so it’s a big deal when we do). The first thing I would do is stop and try to slow my thoughts down, take a deep breath (or two, or twenty) and then observe the situation from the outside. Does the client have reason to be upset? Did the client even state what exactly is upsetting them? Did I have any part in the matter? Was it negligence on my part? You get the idea… The point is that by taking yourself out of the situation you can think rationally about it without placing unnecessary blame on yourself. If you are in any way to blame, it shifts the focus from what you might have done wrong to what you can do to fix it. Once I have a grasp on the situation I can decide how to proceed. I can ask for clarification, explain if there has been a misunderstanding or offer another solution if anyone on my side was at fault. 

Very often there is no need for an immediate response to a situation which makes you feel overwhelmed. Even taking a few minutes to do something distracting before you tackle the situation can make it feel less threatening. If I need to deal with something overwhelming, like starting a new project for work or making a phone call to a stranger (yes, that one still elicits a visceral fear response for some reason), I will do something else first to distract myself (intense cardio works really well for me, but listening to your favourite song or watching a YouTube video will work too). Doing this short-circuits your initial response and gets you into a more rational space. Going to bed and dealing with it in the morning doesn’t work for me because it becomes the piñata factory all over again… 

Desmond Tutu once said: “There is only one way to eat an elephant: a bite at a time.” As horrific as the mental imagery of this might be, the sentiment is extremely useful. Many times when we are feeling overwhelmed, we see a giant immovable rock-fall instead of a heap of rocks which can be moved one at a time. When I have a writing project to do, I’ll break it down into its component parts and then plan as many as necessary per day in my bullet journal (I’ll write a blog post on bullet journaling soon because it is such a great way to manage anxiety) – ideas, outline, research, introduction, conclusion and body. Ticking off each part of the process is satisfying and if you stick to the plan, you will complete the task within the given time frame. 

This was a big one for me because I felt that I had to do all the things all the time. I remember a time when just looking at the to-do list I had made for the day left me feeling overwhelmed. I was a stressed-out hamster on a warp-speed wheel I had created for myself. What I’ve realised is that life is for living and even though there are things that need to get done, they don’t have to all be done at once and there are so many that don’t need to be done at all. My advice is to try to pick two or three important tasks or pieces of tasks for each day and focus your energy on those. You’ll feel less overwhelmed because you are only committing yourself to a few things instead of a whole heap of things. You’ll also end up procrastinating less and doing the few things better than you ever would have if you were hopping between endless tasks like a concussed kangaroo. You don’t have to please everyone, you don’t have to say yes to everything and you definitely don’t have to feel guilty about freeing up some time to do the things you want to do. 

Finally and often most importantly, tell someone how you are feeling. Just saying the words and then going through all the different aspects of the situation can make you feel so much better. Having my mom tell me not to worry when I’m freaking out because my tummy-ache might be my appendix crying mutiny, or a friend convincing me that I have something worthwhile to say on this blog or at the support group I facilitate, diminishes the feeling of being overwhelmed. When you verbalise the feelings you’re having the people around you also know how to help you. I told my parents-in-law that sitting amongst lots of people is overwhelming for me and since that day they have religiously settled themselves in the back of the church with us without further comment. 

Coping with anxiety means taking control of your life and thoughts in a healthy way, so I sincerely hope these ideas help you overcome the feeling of being overwhelmed and move you to a place of balance and peace.