Feeling Overwhelmed? What's Actually Going On, and What Helps

If you've ever thought, "I should be able to handle this," this is for you.

Maybe you know exactly what would help. Breathe. Take a break. Talk to someone. Do the one task instead of staring at all ten. You could recite it fluently if someone asked. And yet, in the moment, none of it is reachable. You go blank. You freeze. You snap at someone you love over something small. Afterwards, you're left with the feeling on top of the feeling: not just overwhelmed, but ashamed of being overwhelmed, as if knowing better should have been enough.

Understanding why that gap exists changes what you can actually do about it.

What Overwhelm Actually Is

Many of us view overwhelm as a problem with our to-do lists: too many emails, too many demands, and too little time. Therefore, the solution seems clear: shorten the list.

Overwhelm runs on something different underneath, capacity. It's what happens when whatever you're feeling, stress, grief, anxiety, or a pile-up of smaller things, exceeds your ability to process it right now, even if the feeling itself is nothing unusual. What's changed is your capacity to make sense of it.

Building that capacity, learning to sit with what you're feeling, tends to help more than trying to make the feeling disappear.

What Happens in Your Brain

When you're overwhelmed, the brain systems involved in attention, planning, working memory and emotional regulation can become less effective. At the same time, your brain becomes more focused on detecting and responding to what feels urgent or threatening, narrowing your attention and making it harder to step back, prioritise and choose how to respond.

Which is why "just think it through" tends to land nowhere when you're already overwhelmed. The knowledge hasn't disappeared. It's simply harder to access and use when you're under a high level of stress.

Signs You May be Overwhelmed

🔸 Difficulty concentrating or holding things in mind - you read the same email three times, lose your train of thought, or can't quite remember what you were about to do.
🔸Difficulty making decisions or prioritising - everything feels equally urgent, so choosing where to start becomes surprisingly difficult.
🔸Finding ordinary tasks harder to initiate - you know what needs doing, but getting yourself to begin feels disproportionately difficult.
🔸Becoming more reactive or less able to regulate your responses - you snap, become tearful, irritable or impatient more easily than you normally would.
🔸Feeling mentally or emotionally flooded - there's so much going on internally that it becomes difficult to step back, think clearly or work out what you need.
🔸Switching between feeling wired and shutting down - you may feel restless, tense and unable to settle at one point, then foggy, numb or withdrawn when it becomes too much.

When stress is high, the problem isn't necessarily that you've forgotten how to think clearly, prioritise or make decisions. Those are exactly the kinds of executive functions that can be affected by stress. So the experience of "I know what I need to do, but I can't seem to do it" can be a genuine consequence of being overloaded, rather than evidence that you're lazy, incapable or not trying hard enough.

What Can Help in the Moment

When you're already overwhelmed, complicated advice tends to make things worse. A few things help here, mostly because they don't ask much of the part of your brain that's currently hard to reach:

🔸Name what you're feeling, as specifically as you can. "Tight-chested", "wired", "foggy", "on edge" or "frustrated" is more useful than simply "I'm stressed". Putting feelings into words, known as affect labelling, has been shown in experimental research to reduce emotional reactivity and distress.

🔸Come back to your body. Feet on the floor, a slow breath out that's longer than the breath in, giving your nervous system one small, manageable job instead of asking it to solve everything at once.

🔸Lower the bar to the next small, physical action, rather than the whole list. Overwhelm thrives on everything feeling equally urgent, so choosing one thing on purpose interrupts that pattern.

Why This Often Needs More Than a Few Good Tools

These things can help in the moment, but if overwhelm shows up often rather than occasionally, in-the-moment strategies may only take you so far. There may also be something worth exploring about what makes intense feelings difficult to stay with, regulate or recover from.

Over time, it's possible to develop more room to feel something intense without losing your ability to stay present, think clearly, and choose how you respond.

This is a large part of what I do in sessions. I work with hypnotherapy alongside approaches like Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) and Compassion-Focused Therapy (CFT) to help you build a different relationship with difficult feelings, one where intensity doesn't automatically mean loss of control. I also teach self-hypnosis, so the tools stay usable long after our sessions end, in the moments that actually call for them.

If this sounds familiar and you'd like some support, you can read more about how I work with stress and burnout, or book a free 20-minute discovery call to talk it through.