What To Do When You’re Completely Overwhelmed
The immediate steps that you need to take when you’re on edge to make sure that you don’t end up suffering any more than you need to.
If I had to describe my experience with depression, I’d call it emotional asphyxiation.
Because depression, and for that matter, any kind of emotional overload, can feel like it’s suffocating the life out of you. Your feelings start weighing you down, and things start piling up until you can’t carry them anymore, and it starts to feel like you’re drowning.
Our emotionality can often wreak havoc on our lives. Our feelings can sometimes get the best of us and present a skewed perspective on our circumstances, causing us to act out in ways that end up doing more harm than good.
It is important to understand that we exercise little control over our emotions and what triggers them, and that getting overwhelmed is an inevitable part of life that we usually can’t avoid. Everyone has their limits, and it is essential to recognize the signs of emotional overload and take measures in order to ensure that it doesn’t result in any damage to your life and the people around you.
Stop Yourself From Acting Out
A few years ago, when I found myself in a particularly stressful juncture in my life, I became quite prone to bouts of depression. I’d consistently mishandle my emotions, bottle them up, and try to ‘tough it out’. This was a terrible idea because I’d often get completely overwhelmed, and act out on impulses that usually ended up making things much worse than they’d initially been. I’d constantly say and do things against my better judgment, uncharacteristic of me and my nature.
This put a great strain on my work life, and the relationships I had with my loved ones.
What I needed to do in those situations was to stop adding to the negative narrative that my feelings had created. Because I was so stressed out, things often seemed to be a lot worse than they really were, and generally didn’t warrant such extreme reactions on my part.
It is pivotal to understand this dishonest nature of our feelings. And while we can’t always control what we feel, we can control whether we feed into them.
It is a better idea to just stop this chain of negativity and to reserve judgment for when you are in a better frame of mind. Try and recognize when your feelings start to get the better of you and you start to lose your sense of objectivity, and ensure that you don’t take any untoward measures at that time.
Remember, acting out of frustration is likely to result in further frustration.
You will thank yourself for exercising this restraint.
Try and Make Yourself Feel 1% Better
Looking back, a lot of the times when I felt really depressed and ended up saying and doing things I didn’t mean, I wasn’t really in good shape. My spirals would often come late at night after long, exhausting days. I desperately needed sleep in those moments and was often hungry or dehydrated as well.
This feeling of exhaustion and weakness made me more vulnerable to overwhelm and made everything seem a lot worse than it was.
I started to recognize this trend and started making an effort to make myself feel just a little bit better whenever I’d start feeling overwhelmed. I’d focus on finding a way to feel just 1% percent better in my own skin.
I’d eat something, drink some water or take a nap if I needed to. Sometimes it also meant putting on a comforting song, watching one of my favorite films, or just engaging in a conversation with one of my friends.
This effort greatly reduced the damage dealt by my depressive spirals. By directing my attention to feeling just a little bit better, I not only distracted myself from damage-inducing impulses, but also found myself in a more capable frame of mind, which helped me step up to the situation and properly deal with my issues.
It is paramount to pay attention to your general well being when going through a challenging phase. You need yourself to be in the best possible condition in order to adequately handle your situation. And in case you’re already overwhelmed, it is important to bring yourself back into a position where you can be rational and properly manage the problem at hand.
Open Up
The only way to properly handle our feelings is to go through them. There is no way to skirt around them, and making an effort to bury them is what causes overwhelm in the first place.
It can be difficult for us to face our emotions. A lot of the times we’re ashamed of them and what they mean. And it’s natural to try and avoid this pain. But it is important to understand that escaping them in such a manner only causes denial, and ends up creating a lot of emotional scarring.
Opening ourselves up to what we’re feeling is the most important step in getting better. It validates the pain we’re feeling and helps us accept that there is a problem that we need to address.
Opening up doesn’t necessarily have to involve someone else. You can also open up to yourself. Be honest with yourself, and accept exactly what you feel. You can’t be ashamed of your feelings, because you have very little control over them.
Find a good outlet where you feel safe with your feelings. Writing my feelings down and speaking what I felt out loud helped me a lot. And obviously, it is always a good idea to open up to a loved one whom you can trust and rely on.
There are always times when life manages to get the best of us. We don’t really control what we feel for the most part and it’s not something we can really avoid.
But we can make an effort to ensure that we don’t end up causing any more damage than we need to in these vulnerable moments. Accept your limitations, and do your best to take care of yourself.
