A different way to think about overwhelm

Something that’s been coming up in my therapy room this week is people being overwhelmed.

It’s a good word, overwhelm – from Middle English, whelmen, to be covered by a breaking wave. Notice how it locates the problem in the situation – the breaking wave – not in your head.

How does overwhelm show up for us? People tell me they’re anxious or tearful, and that they can’t focus. There are so many things coming at us, we’re paralysed by the too-muchness of everything. And so 21st-century life has a constant baseline of unease, of getting behind, of guilt. I think most of us now feel somewhere in-between vaguely guilty and actively tearful, all the time.

These times are dehumanising. We have to keep pace with an existence that has been artificially accelerated, beyond the terminal velocity of human being.

Humans are not fast processors. That’s a misunderstanding of who we are, evolutionarily. Houseflies are fast processors. They can plan their whole day while your slow-motion hand is moving to swat them. Humans are gloriously, idiosyncratically, and productively slow. Our consciousness has a very special feature, which is that it deepens when we dwell with something. We slowly notice patterns and undercurrents in existence that allow us to survive in our environment and thrive with each other. We’re not fast, we’re deep.

Human depth pays off slowly – often across generations – but you and I can experience the phenomenon in a single free afternoon. Maybe we spend an hour watching the sea, and we notice that we come away changed by it – with something of the sea now living in us. The world inhabits our mind, if we give it time, just as our mind inhabits the world. Our existences flow into each other. And this is what human being is, in fact. It’s not a mind asserting its truth over the world. It’s a world and a mind that have arrived into each other.

We can call this authenticity, if you like. And authenticity is not some heroic act. Authenticity is just what arrives, if you give us a moment to let the pressure of our minds and the pressure of the world equalise.

Acceleration culture makes us live like someone dunking a hundred different teabags in and out of hot water all day long – but never letting any of them stay in the water long enough to become tea. People imagine that they’re somehow failing at being human, whereas in fact the culture is failing humans.

Overwhelm, then, is not mental illness. It’s not your dysfunction. Overwhelm is probably the signature experience of being human in a dehumanised world.

And so, practically, what can you do about it? This has been a conversation with my visitors in therapy this week.

And we’ve been noticing that it doesn’t work to try to match the energy of the wave that’s overwhelming you. These times are loud with invocations to do more and feel more and love more and be more – but more is not a human answer.

We become human again when we stop blaming ourselves for overwhelm, and so we stop trying to fix or to cure that experience. Instead we can start to just notice it. When you notice overwhelm rising as a tightness in your chest or a franticness in your mind, perhaps you can remind yourself: this isn’t my malfunction – this is the world’s frantic situation, showing up in my personal body and my personal mind. This is an authentic experience, in fact.

Tomas Tranströmer has a beautiful closing line in his poem Midday Thaw:

“[...] the jet curtsying in its thundering skirts

intensified the strength of silence on Earth.”

His insight is an invitation we can tune into. Overwhelm is the thundering noise of the 21st century. And the poet’s invitation is not to shout louder, but to notice what the noise reveals. Overwhelm reveals that we are not ourselves at speed. We only come alive at depth.

And if overwhelm reveals our need to live authentically, then overwhelm is the subtle gift as well as the obvious curse of this century.

The next time you feel the guilt and the dread – the impossible too-muchness of everything – perhaps don’t immediately try to optimise your way out of it. Instead, if conditions permit, maybe call a truce for a moment. This is one small power we still have, after all: to take ownership of small moments, using the authority of our attention. Robin Wall Kimmerer puts it well in Braiding Sweetgrass: “Paying attention is a form of reciprocity with the living world.”

When overwhelm peaks, try to let one thing in the world fully arrive in your attention: the quality of the light from the window, perhaps, or the face of the person beside you. Not because this solves overwhelm, but because it refuses – just for a moment – the acceleration that causes it. And in that refusal, maybe something human begins to return.

If this way of thinking about overwhelm interests you, you might enjoy the work of Hartmut Rosa on social acceleration and resonance; Byung-Chul Han on burnout and exhaustion in modern culture; and Robin Wall Kimmerer on reciprocal relationship with the living world.