Overwhelm! My Journey and Lessons for You
Overwhelm is everywhere. When overwhelmed, even briefly, we don’t have the resources we need to solve our problem, or sometimes even to see it clearly. We all feel overwhelmed from time to time, but sometimes we get stuck. Here’s part of my story of overwhelm, and how I got stuck, and how you can learn from my blind spots.
At a recent training I delivered on leadership and resilience, I talked about managing chronic stress and overwhelm. As an example, I told the group about my experience having two kids back to back, in a job with little flexibility. In that situation, I made a very reasonable and appropriate decision to push through. I accepted that if you had young children, you were sleep deprived and often sick. I also accepted that I would double down and suffer through it. I was in my first leadership role, and I wanted to do well. I was overwhelmed and my stress and activation levels were super high.
I look back on that time with self-compassion. I also recognize that while there were changes I could have made, some of these challenges were situational and hard to mitigate.
A participant in this training asked me how long it took me to adjust and bring down those stress and activation levels. The answer: 22 years. When my situation evolved and presented opportunities to build resilience, I didn’t downshift. I just stayed in high gear.
That was not wise or necessary. I became used to being tired and always in crisis mode. I gained increasing responsibility over the years, being a mom got hard, and I volunteered in my spare time. Then being a mom got extra-hard, and I volunteered even more. I was busy, but more importantly, I was stressed all the time. My blood pressure went up, and I was often sick. Unsurprisingly, over time I found myself more sick, more often.
What I know now is that I could have made different choices. I could have paid attention to how I felt, physically and emotionally, and taken time to adapt. I believe I could have spared myself, my friends, colleagues and family some of the stress I carried with me.
I thought this was normal. I worked in a high-intensity environment where crisis was common. I became so good at handling a crisis, or many crises. I didn’t realize that I didn’t need to carry that much stress, even in that intense context. On top of this, I ignored blatant physical warning signals.
I was not alone. Many of us dismiss our stress, knowing that others also have pressures and stresses. We know that others have pressures, but we do ourselves no favors by discounting our own situation and challenges. We do ourselves a big disservice when we disconnect our warning signals, overruling the physical and emotional warning lights and telling ourselves that it is normal to feel overwhelmed and unwell.
Here is what I offer you to help build your own awareness and toolkit:
Know what stress feels like. Where do you feel it in your body? What tells you you are overwhelmed?
Check on how you feel, and what that tells you. Listen to yourself with self-compassion. Do not dismiss your emotional and physical needs and feelings
Track what elevates your activation and stress, use a tool like the Subjective Units of Distress table to see where you are right now (I’ve adapted this from many online models, you can use this one or search for the one that speaks to you).
Notice what helps you decompress and rebalance your activation level. These are your tools to hold close and reach for when you feel overwhelmed again.
I don’t have regrets about the life I have lived. I made the choices I could with the tools I had. At the same time, I hope to offer tools to others, and to use these tools for the life I live now.
Awareness that we are overwhelmed is a first step to clarity. We reconnect with our bodies and open ourselves up to seeing where we are, not where we tell ourselves we are or where we think we should be. Awareness helps you find your way through the work of bringing back more presence, acceptance and joy into your life.