When Overwhelmed, Slow Down
When you feel overwhelmed, slow down.
I know this might feel like the exact opposite thing your system wants to do when you feel overwhelmed. But it's not...
What if the feeling we associate with overwhelm is actually a message, sent by our system, asking us to please slow down?
And what if the negative outcomes we associate with feeling overwhelmed are actually a result of ignoring that message—of working harder and faster and more frantically instead?
I have a saying I throw at my children almost daily: haste makes waste. It's obnoxious, but it's true.
Most injuries to our body, to our relationships, to our mental and emotional health, come from rushing. Not from going too fast, but from going faster than we actually want to go.
Picture a runner who loves to run. They're running fast and loving it. That is fast, not rushing.
Now picture someone who is running faster than they want to run. They're running away. They're not in pace with their own self. Part of them is behind, and part is ahead.
This is how we injure ourselves—we literally fracture ourselves when we rush.
When I wake up in the morning and I feel overwhelmed, my habitual response is to react by getting rid of that feeling as fast as possible. This ends up hurting me. So I've learned over time to hate the feeling of overwhelm. But it's not the feeling of overwhelm that causes me pain—it's my reaction to it. I shoot the messenger and end up hurting myself.
The solution is not to get rid of the feeling of overwhelm; it's to change our relationship with it, and our response to it.
How do we do this? I believe the answer is to slow down, and listen.
I feel overwhelmed right now. What is this feeling trying to say to me?
It may be saying something like: "I'm scared." "I can't do this." "It's too much."
Is that the voice of someone who needs to be gotten rid of?
Do you see the opportunity in this?
Normally, we jump to reaction: "It's fine." "You're fine." "Stop complaining." "You just need to work faster and harder."
Is that the voice we want to embody?
That reaction is like noticing the low-gas light turn on in our car, and immediately slamming on the gas to try to get where we're going before the fuel runs out. It only leads to an empty tank. Burnout.
The opportunity is to slow down and listen. To pull over and to tend to the need. It is crying out from the body: "This is too much for me!"
How would it look to really hear this message? To honor the messenger?
The feeling of overwhelm is an opportunity—to come back. To reconnect with ourselves as we are.
Like it or not, our self has limitations. And like it or not, these limitations come in waves that are beyond our control. But the reverse is also true: our strength also comes in waves. It takes a tremendous amount of trust to move with the waves—to honor them rather than to fight them.
This is hard because it forces us to accept a potentially terrifying truth: that we are not fully in control. Of even our own self. The waves are in control, not us. That's disconcerting. But it's worth the shift.
If this is our nature, there's no sense in trying to change it. We're not robots. We're living beings. We are made of movement and vibration. We're composed of billions of living, moving cells. Ignoring that sets us up for a lifetime of pointless struggle, trying to control the waves.
But more importantly, this shift puts us on a path that leads us where we actually want to go...
I don't believe we actually want to be perfect, robotic performers. I believe what we actually want is the thing we believe perfection will bring us, which is love. Love from others. Maybe even more than that, love from ourselves. And underneath this desire for love may be an even deeper longing: for rest.
When I know I'm loved, when I love myself, I finally give myself permission to rest. To breathe, to see, and to enjoy.
And that may be our deepest longing of all: we long for joy.
We will never find joy by dehumanizing and perfecting ourselves.
We won't find joy by shaming ourselves for feeling the way we feel.
We won't find joy by pushing and rushing ourselves to always be somewhere we're not...
We will only find love, rest, and joy here. And now.
We can skip all the requirements and all the should's, and move straight to love, rest, and joy—by just being here, where we are.
The irony is that once we begin to allow ourselves to be where we are—to feel and receive the love, rest, and joy that are always available to us—the circumstances we thought would get us there often end up happening on their own. Or they don't. Either way it's fine, because we already have what we wanted all along.
At the end of the day, the most important thing of all may be that a voice deep inside us finally got to be heard.