Overwhelm

So many of us are feeling overwhelmed. We are still living under the heavy weight of a pandemic,

There seems to be more uncertainty in the air about the future, we are trying to somehow homeschool are kids and do other jobs, and our social lives have not gone back to normal. Normalcy is the balm we are missing and we don’t know what the new normal is going to look like.

In the pandemic our nervous systems have become over stimulated and we are on edge and at extremes. The best and worst of us comes out.

We are overwhelmed! There is so much on our plates and we don’t know what we can do to make a permanent dent in a heavy, messy load.

Many people face overwhelm by flipping into motivated task-maskers who multi-task and take enormous pleasure in checking things off our list. They often act as workaholics in times of great stress.

Others go to another extreme.. We get paralyzed or frozen and don’t do anything except wish we could just go back under the covers,, womb-like, and hope that things will pass.

Neither extreme is a healthy way to live, day-to-day. Our busyness can take a toll on our mindfulness and on our relationships with people we love. Getting frozen prolongs the sense of overwhelm and just makes us feel worse.

I believe overwhelm strikes in us a triggered traumatic punch before we react by flipping to over- or under- producers.

If we think about parts of us, then it would be the Adapted Child who faces overwhelm and goes into the only coping skills they have, which is trying to conquer it (getting grandiose) or shrinking down into a hiding self.

So it is that moment between overwhelm and reaction that triggers us into an archaic and Child like coping skill. It is up to our Executive Functioning or Functional Adult to step in and relieve the Child from the burden. If we choose Door “B” instead of Door “A” we can take a breath and respond in a middle ground. Our neuro-cortex covers our limbic alarm by saying “shhh” and putting the Child at ease.

Challenge: the next time you get overwhelmed, notice how you react. Does your breathing speed up? Do your thoughts get speedy and send you to one extreme? Recovery is in the big breath. Go slow and low. Take loving care of the freaked-out Child and give the job to whom it belongs; your Functional Adult.