Your brain on overwhelm

- One of the biggest challenges with overwhelm is the fog of stress it creates in a situation making it really hard to see a way out. When we experience a challenge, we usually adapt and figure out how to work our way through it, but when overwhelm is involved, it can feel like it's just too much. Instead of getting a quick energy surge to help us to push through, overwhelm triggers a type of brain hijack that makes it impossible to think in creative or flexible ways. It can also shut down our sensibility to reach out to other people for help. Let's take a look at how this happens. There are three primary players in what I call the overwhelm effect. We've got our demands, capacity, and perception. Demands are pretty obvious. They're the things we think are causing our overwhelm, like our never ending to-do list. Our capacity has to do with our ability to get things done and cope with the pressure or stress involved. And then finally, we have our perception, and this one is really important because when we believe that we have the resources to cope with a situation, the brain triggers a specific set of stress reactions fueled primarily by adrenaline. It's like pushing the gas pedal down to push through our problems. We can think of this as a fast fix, but when we don't have enough resources or we don't think that we have what it takes, the brain triggers a second set of reactions fueled primarily by other stress hormones like cortisol. This adaptive process that's trying to help us actually ends up hurting us if we're not able to come up with better solutions. I think of this one as the slow roll and it's why overwhelm can be such a vicious cycle. The longer we stay stuck, the more helpless we feel. But if we can recognize it when it happens and actually move through it, we start to build our capacity and our confidence, kind of like working out at the gym and getting stronger over time. As we continue to train our brain to recognize and reset, we build our cognitive strength and flexibility. Once we know how to relieve the pressure of the overwhelm effect in the moment, we can move through it more quickly and keep it from taking over in the future.