Be sure to read to the end where I share an easy yoga tool you can use to stop overwhelm
Have you come to a stand still in your life? You know you need to accomplish your daily activities, continue your social encounters with friends, family and work, along with your continued planning for the future for your best and highest good, but any thought about those things or perhaps any one of those things causes you to freeze up. You mentally block life without being able to be productive and default to an emotional tidal wave that feels like stress, maybe a panic attack, impending doom or just a feeling that you are spinning your logic into irrational emotional actions? You may wonder what happened since most of the time you can handle a busy life just fine! These feelings you have can be whats called overwhelm.
Emotional overwhelm entails more than being stressed. By definition being emotionally overwhelmed means to be completely submerged by your thoughts and emotions about all of life’s current problems, to the point where you lack productivity and feel frozen or paralyzed.
Jill E. Daino, LCSW-R https://www.talkspace.com/mental-health/conditions/articles/feeling-overwhelmed/
It Starts With Mental Exhaustion
In my opinion, yes it starts with mental exhaustion. You might wonder why that is since you feel so overcome with emotions instead of intelligent answers for circumstances in your life. You might even have some feelings of anger, shame or guilt because of being unable to participate and feel like yourself in life.
The feeling of overwhelm can creep in from anywhere. You may usually find its several things that mentally get jumbled together all at once and your emotions take over. Then as you think and ruminate over the thoughts and feelings about them the stress increases until it seems too much to filter through or figure out answers to each situation. I used to think of it like a slow moving fog that starts to hinder my vision, until all of a sudden I was enveloped in it and couldn’t see which way to go first. So panic and irrational emotional actions would go on auto pilot to create a way out.
Whether brought on by exceptionally stressful time at work, a traumatic personal experience like losing a loved one, or another inciting factor, emotional overwhelm can occur for a short burst of time or over a much longer period. Sometimes, a series of hardships and challenges occurring in rapid succession can trigger someone to feel overcome by unwieldy emotions. Common experiences that can lead to emotional overwhelm can include:
Physical or mental health illness
A demanding job
Financial distress and insecurity
Significant life changes
Time constraints
Death of a loved one
Habitual lack of sleep
Jill E. Daino, LCSW-R https://www.talkspace.com/mental-health/conditions/articles/feeling-overwhelmed/
At those times of commingled current stress factors and sometimes with past stress factors returning, your brain goes in to overdrive and its gets exhausted. You can feel like you just want to shut your brain off for awhile but even thinking of relaxing causes more stress and more panic and more overwhelm and .. irritability, anger, fear, …you could add more to that list I am sure!
So what happened? Like I said before, you can handle more than one thing quite well most of the time. Why is your brain doing this?
Brain, Meet Your Emotional Psyche
In my yoga sessions you will hear me talk about this topic a LOT. Its so crucial to understand how it operates so you can understand why being overwhelmed is so mentally exhausting.
First, you need to understand that emotions take up a lot of energy. The reason for this is because they ARE energy. Emotions cause a lot of responses in the body because energy reactions involve activation of the nervous system. Once the nervous system is activated, all sorts of responses are put into action such as neurotransmitters, dopamine, adrenaline, release of hormones, heart rate speeds up, eyes dilate, breathing speeds up, blood pressure increases, cortisol is released and keeps the brain on high alert and so forth. The cascade of response events happens because the autonomic nervous system is like the gas pedal and it speeds up the body in preparation for fleeing or fighting.
Because of this energetic reaction in the body, you might be able to feel emotions rush through your body too as you experience them. According to this great article titled “Emotions Are Energy : The bodymind connection and e-motion” Posted on: April 7th, 2022 by Dr Kim; Dr Hil
What we think of as emotion is the experience of energy moving through the body. This is generally felt as sensations of contraction such as tension or expansion such as calm. The Latin derivative for the word emotion, ‘emotere’, literally means energy in motion.
Another reason emotions can exhaust your brain is because of how the relationship of your nervous system, the analytical brain and the emotional brain are set up. The way these parts of the brain are involved in their relationship allows the concept that the emotional brain has the executive power in the brain. So as a simple explanation, your emotions are the power house of the brain. Here is a list of discoveries about that from the same article above:
Several key discoveries have significantly changed our understanding of the relationship between the emotional brain and the analytical brain.
Based on neural circuitry, our emotional brain responds faster to incoming information or stimuli than our analytical brain does.²
The emotional brain has more neural circuits connecting to the analytical brain than the analytical brain has connecting to the emotional brain.³
The emotional brain is connected to every area of the brain, whereas the analytical brain is not.4
On the basis of survival, the experience of stress and feelings of worry, fear, or anger take priority over feelings of happiness and peace of mind.5
Notice the last bullet point above. The negative feelings take priority over the good feelings. Its a self preservation response. What does that also mean? It means you are stuck in a high stress state and your body and mind wont let it go until it gets the signal that everything is OK. Your negative emotions take over the feelings you have, making your mind have compulsive thoughts while getting exhausted because it doesn’t stop and you output so much emotional response. I think of it as a form of emotional suffering.
Stop! Stop! Stop!
You just might default to saying that to your mind too. But the little secret to doing exactly that is taking an action that directs your mind in another way. You see, you have to induce the good feelings you want. You have to clear out the energy of the negative feelings so the good ones can surface again. When you do that, the feeling of overwhelm can shift to a more manageable space, and with practice, disappear altogether. You create new mental prioritizing habits. When you do , you either prevent the overwhelm from getting stuck or you can re-pattern your response to it.
What you are doing when you redirect the mind is you engage in a different nervous system response. Its the parasympathetic nervous system . Its the calming side of your emotional nervous system. The fight or flight response of overwhelm is an automatic survival response. Being calm and happy has to be induced. So the survival response needs no thought its just a reaction that fires off, but the relaxation response needs your input and participation to happen.
Yoga To The Rescue
Now, for me, when I say yoga I mean meditation, breathing practices, postures, and a whole lot more of related mindful techniques. To me yoga is a vast array of processes dealing with the mind/ body connection but also the spiritual connection. All three are the triad of success to managing the emotional landscape. They team together to go into past emotions and into present day emotions. They sort through the finished, the unfinished and the unrecognized needs. My favorite part is they put YOU in charge of your mind and emotions. YOU become your own powerful manager of your mental landscape.
When you engage in your own mental management, you are no longer easily swayed by emotions that take you helplessly into wayward reactions. And if you do get overwhelmed, you can remedy the unhappiness faster and stay engaged in life with less stress and mind turmoil while enjoying the positive feelings you want. The bonus is you can focus more clearly on the remedies that are needed for the stressful situations too.
Being in control of your own mind is a skill. And its best that YOU know how to own that skill for yourself.
Yes, yoga, meditation and breath techniques can do all that for you. They have done that for humans for a very long time on this earth!
When you own your breath, nobody can steal your peace – Anonymous
Lets try a short technique now that helps you stop overwhelm.
Read about it below or see the video I made for you here
To start, set up your place to practice.
Sit upright in a quiet place
Turn off Tv’s phones and computers
Make sure you will not be interrupted
Dim the lights to help quiet your mind
The technique:
Eyes can be open or closed
All breathing is through the nose
Inhale and retain(suspend) the breath while you mentally say to yourself
“Breath-and-me”
Then exhale out the nose
When you say the phrase in your mind it goes like this:
BREATH(pause) AND (pause) ME(pause)
then a normal exhale
repeat several times
Start with a 3 minute practice. This simple breathing routine can be done up to 11 minutes as a meditation on its own.
Once you are familiar with it, you can do it anywhere, anytime you feel your emotions starting to overwhelm you. Its so simple and because you can keep your eyes open, nobody knows you are doing anything so amazingly powerful for yourself!
Remember, no one can live your life for you, so be your best life… and until next time..
Hugs, laughter, and enjoy an Undivided Life.
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