Climbing out of Overwhelm

So last week, we talked about building a ladder. I wasn’t ready to share then, perhaps because I hadn’t quite built the ladder yet… and I was stuck on a pretty low rung.

I was stuck in overwhelm.

In my coaching curriculum, overwhelm was taught as one of the “indulgent emotions.” 

This was defined as: an emotion that doesn’t give you the result you want. There’s no traction, growth, or movement. These emotions keep our brain busy but are not productive; the often sited examples often are confusion, overwhelm, worry, doubt, boredom. 

Jimmy Turner is a great physician coach, has his own podcast and coaching company, and recently wrote a book Determined: How Burned Out Doctors Can Thrive in a Broken Medical System.  I’ll try to get to a summary soon because he has some amazing points I’d love to share. On this topic, he talks about indulgent emotions. They often happen due to unintentional thoughts;  “the work is to figure out what unintentional thought is driving these indulgent emotions and then to get ride of it. In other words, indulgent emotions happen when we have broken stories, perspectives, paradigms, or soundtracks. Playing them on repeat isn’t helpful.”

Bottom line: These emotions keep our brain busy but are not productive.

It got me thinking a lot more about overwhelm. It didn’t feel indulgent at all. I could certainly see it was keeping my brain busy and it surely wasn’t productive… but I was struggling to ‘figure it out’ so I could stop it.

This work took me back to Atlas of the Heart by Brené Brown. In Chapter 1: Places we go when things are uncertain or too much: stress, overwhelm, anxiety, worry, avoidance, excitement, dread, fear, vulnerability.

I like her distinctions between stress and overwhelm and found these pieces really helpful:

“Feeling stress and feeling overwhelmed seem to be related to our perception of how we are coping with our current situation and our ability to handle the accompanying emotions: Am I coping? Can I handle this? Am I inching toward the quicksand?

Jon Kabat-Zinn describes overwhelm: “that our lives are somehow unfolding faster than the human nervous system and psyche are able to manage well.”

…Kabat-Zinn suggests that mindful play, or no-agenda, non-doing time, is the cure for overwhelm.

…we don’t process other emotional information accurately when we feel overwhelmed, and this can result in poor decision making. 

…the term “overwhelmed” to describe an experience where our emotions are intense, our focus on them is moderate, and our clarity about exactly what we’re feeling is low enough that we get confused when trying to identify or describe the emotions.”