When you experience emotional overwhelm, it can feel all-consuming. For the many people who will face this feeling at some point in their lives, it entails being completely overcome by an intense and unruly emotion that something is too challenging to manage and overcome.
When confronted with this feeling, it can be difficult to think and act rationally, and even function in a normal way. Needless to say, the experience of being overwhelmed is uncomfortable and the causes can span across your personal and professional life.
What Causes Emotional Overwhelm?
When a person believes the stressors are far too great to manage, they become overwhelmed — which means that any number of causes are possible.
Whether brought on by an 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:
- Relationship issues
- Physical or mental health illness
- A demanding job
- Lack of nutrition
- Financial distress and insecurity
- Significant life changes
- Time constraints
- Death of a loved one
- Personal traumas such as abuse
- Habitual lack of sleep
Symptoms of Overwhelm
When a person is experiencing an overwhelming feeling, it can take shape in a variety of ways. In each instance, a person is generally more likely to be overwhelmed by negative emotions — anger, fear, anxiety, or guilt — and it is often difficult to understand and verbalize the exact source of the stress.
The reason a person’s physiology responds so strongly to this negative emotion is the release of cortisol, the “stress hormone.” When you begin to feel overwhelmed, cortisol surges through your body and leaves you overloaded with intense anxiety. At the same time, our serotonin stores, the chemical that helps our bodies fight off depression and anxiety, start to deplete. This combination causes the intense feeling of total despair associated with being overwhelmed.
Often, overwhelm is as uncomfortable as it is uncontrollable. It rears its head as anxiety, anger, or significant irritability and worry. Doubt and helplessness also make their way into a person’s normal thought process.
Physically, it can manifest when a person lashes out verbally, cries, or has a panic attack. These feelings are often paired with a quickened heartbeat, perspiration, shortness of breath, or even chest pain.
Preventing or Stopping Emotional Overwhelm
No matter the reason, if you feel the onset of overwhelm, there are some ways to help address the emotions both on your own and by leveraging outside support.
Accept the anxious feelings
Fighting off all-consuming emotions likely doesn’t do much to ease them in a particularly anxious moment. Try to remember that anxiety, to a certain degree, is a “normal” part of the human experience and use acceptance as a tool to work through those uncomfortable feelings (when possible).
Reverse your overwhelmed thought processes
Feelings of unpredictability and complete despair fuel overwhelm. Those unreasonable thoughts build up as anxiety and can cause a person significant distress. Stop those damaging thoughts before they become habitual ruminations by honestly asking yourself if that way of thinking is unreasonable or unhelpful. At the same time, try to find alternative, more positive thoughts.
Take some deep breaths
When you consciously breathe in deep, it triggers your body’s relaxation response and can come in handy during particularly stressful moments. Additionally, practicing yoga, meditation, and progressive muscle relaxation can help calm your body’s response to anxiety, as each exercise helps you to focus your breath.
Be in the moment
If your thinking is focused on what the future holds — whether in a few minutes or several years down the road — it may make you more susceptible to becoming overwhelmed. Think about one moment, task, and experience at a time, in the present moment, to help remove the possibility of uncontrollable thoughts that may or may not come about.
Know your resources
Besides breathing and meditation techniques to help prevent overwhelm, there is plenty of scientific research available about how stress and anxiety impact our cognitive abilities. To strengthen your ability to manage those feelings, discover what studies and recommendations resonate with you by using online search tools.
How Therapy Can Help You Manage Overwhelm
When you are not able to prevent overwhelming thoughts or feelings, therapy is a helpful way to address your response to them.
In therapy, a qualified professional is able to help you sort through the issues causing your stress or anxiety and better understand its root causes. When you gain a solid understanding of what stressors and situations trigger this uncomfortable mental state, it helps cultivate a calmer frame of mind in the future.
When looking for the right type of therapy to manage overwhelming experiences, there are different types of practices to consider. Certain forms of therapy incorporate meditation, hypnosis, and centering techniques to help teach people to soothe themselves during times of distress. In addition, a therapist may also recommend journal therapy or physical exercise, which are also found to help prevent emotional overwhelm.
While there is no way to determine what life has in store at any given moment, there are ways to build up mental strength to better take on life’s challenges and build resiliency. When you take time to learn what triggers stress and anxious thoughts, you can better manage overwhelming experiences before they occur.
With the right tools and hard work, you can help minimize the occurrence and impact of overwhelm.
Originally published on Talkspace.
More from Talkspace:
Why You Try to “Save” People (and Why You Should Stop)
100 Ways You’re Making Your Life Harder Than It Needs to Be
How to Identify an Avoidant Partner and Improve Your Relationship
Follow us here and subscribe here for all the latest news on how you can keep Thriving.
Stay up to date or catch-up on all our podcasts with Arianna Huffington here.