What Exactly is “Being OverwheLmed”?
If you have ever felt the weight of your life so heavily that you feel overwhelmed? We've all been there. Sometimes the to dos, have tos and want tos are too much and we feel like we can't handle it. We've all been there. There's a emotional sliding scale to overwhelm, uniquely ranging from wanting to shut down and call it quits to feeling high energy with a lack of control. This article will help you better define what overwhelm is in the brain, so you know what's actually going on in your body. Knowing how the body works can be a helpful bridge to making personal development more accessible and betterment more belivable. While your overwhelm experience is unique to you, it's not a unique phenomenon.
Before going into detail, the general gist of overwhelm in the body refers to the physical and physiological responses that occur when a person is exposed to excessive stress or demands. Work pressure, personal issues, relationship challenges, and environmental stressors are examples of these.
But what exactly is being overwhelmed?
Let's start with the nervous system which is made up of the brain, spinal cord and nerves. Information is collected and passed to each other so they make work together, especially nerves that they take information from outside in and help execute our responses outward. This data collection and interpretation happens quickly as we are built to survive danger, enjoy pleasure, and pursue rewards.
Now let's get into the details of what makes up the sensation of being overwhelmed:
There's a region in the brain called the basal ganglia, helping the brain power down and manage energy by automating sequences of information and behavior. In simple terms, once the body recognizes a pattern in behavior, ritual, or thought, the basal ganglia stores it as habit. It's essentially helps our laziness--striving to change conscious action into instinctual actions.
It's fact that 20% of body energy goes to powering the nervous system. We only have so much energy, it's finite, but this amount of energy is big considering the brain is only 2% of our body weight. Conscious processing-thinking is hard work and requires a lot of us. If you think about it, it takes considerable energy and effort to make decisions, strategize, brainstorm, engage in conversation, etc. Thus more reason why our body's looking to take short cuts by automating to conserve energy. So, overwhelm is also from the diminished energy your body has left due to the high expenditures on a daily basis.
Another region of the brain called the cingulate cortex is also involved in overwhelm. This part's job is to detect what's new and different, and so when the cingulate cortex is activated, it goes into hyperalert mode like anxiety. Over time, this makes us over stimulated, highly distractable, yet depleted because-you guessed it--we max out our energy.
Other brain areas like the dorsal frontomedian and ventrolateral prefontal cortext help with self-control, or putting a stop to intended actions. And when we practice self-control the next impulse that comes along is actually harder to resist. This is important information because we steadily lose the will power to stay on task, getting more anxious. Enter in overwhelm.
In summary: Overwhelm is actually an instinctual response. Our nervous system tells us there's something new we need to pay attention to. It's a feeling we get from the experience of our nervous system interpreting information from the outside world: A build up of factors like the amount of that information from the world, the novelty of it, our limited energy, and diminishing self-control ability. All of those physiological factors come to a head and we get our personalized version of overwhelm! What does your overwhelm look like?
Next time we'll dig into what to do about it.
