Understanding Overwhelm
Did someone turn up the overwhelm dial?!
Overwhelm seems to be the dominant experience for so many of us lately. I know I’ve had to become more intimate with it in my own life. And in conversations I’m having with others, as well as with clients I’m supporting, the general theme seems to be one where overwhelm has decided to take up way more space in our lives.
Much of it seems to be around information overload x1000. I haven’t even tuned into social media yet this year and I can still palpably feel the collective nervous system at capacity. It’s a lot.
(I’ll be talking more about the impact of over-consumption of information on our systems soon so I won’t go into that in too much detail here. Just noting that it seems to be a major culprit in the dialing up of overwhelm.)
In our culture, we’ve been trained to relate to overwhelm by…well, not relating to it. We’ve been trained to override it, ignore it and steamroll through it. Certainly not pause and listen to it, listen to our nervous systems communicating to us through its trusty messenger, overwhelm.
Maybe this is why it’s been getting so damn loud.
You see, overwhelm brings wisdom and balance if only we stopped long enough to acknowledge its presence and stopped to feel how it's showing up for us. Yes, this isn't easy. But when we become overwhelmed, which is to say when we become identified with overwhelm, we can’t relate to it or to life. Instead, our systems go into whatever default stress response is most available to us in the moment, whether that’s fighting, fleeing, freezing or a combination.
Art by Gordon Magnin
Our systems go into overwhelm for these nuanced and interdependent reasons:
We’re holding too much unprocessed sensation and emotion, too much energetic charge (literally, our bodies and nervous systems are over-taxed) and we don’t have the capacity to meet and respond to life in a present and embodied way. This is especially true at the moment with so much unmetabolized collective grief and rage from the genocidal war on Gaza.
We’re holding and running energies in our systems that are not ours, and that are not ours to process - we’re spending excessive energy where we don’t have to and where it’s futile for us to do so.
We’re intellectually taking on information as true for us when it isn’t - the body and nervous system, which never lie, then go into a state of overwhelm because they can’t process what’s dissonant on a soul-essence level.
Understanding these reasons can allow for curiosity to open up: how can I work with this overwhelm to create more space and sovereignty in my body, my mind and my energy field?
It can allow for a whole new way of relating to overwhelm when it arises, through the recognition that overwhelm has the potential to be a portal into evolution and innovation.
(The paradox of evolution and innovation is that they require a radical turning towards what’s here now. This is also what alchemy is.)