One of the hardest things about stress and anxiety is that it often leads to overwhelm. Because of this, it is tempting to implement strategies that manage the discomfort but fail to offer lasting change. For example, many people choose to avoid situations that trigger anxiety, but they rarely address the sensations, feelings, and thoughts associated with it. It is natural to want to avoid feeling anxious. However, quick fixes don’t tend to bring long-term recovery. An integrative approach that includes both short- and long-term solutions is usually needed.

There are two main reasons for this:

1. Overwhelm feels more convincing than your ability to change it.
2. When you are immersed in overwhelm, short-term strategies become necessary for immediate relief before being able to consider long-term solutions.

While psychotherapy, social support, a nutrient-dense diet, spending time in nature, and exercise are important to prevent overwhelm, three key ingredients are necessary: expanding your window of tolerance, mindfulness, and self-compassion.

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Becoming Aware of Your Window of Tolerance

One of the most important aspects for reducing overwhelm is to become increasingly aware of signals that you are about to “flip out” or “shut down” (known in psychotherapy as hyperarousal and hypoarousal). The space between flipping out and shutting down is the zone in which you function most effectively. In this space, you can think clearly, communicate well, engage respectfully, and work effectively. In other words, you are in your window of tolerance.

As you might imagine, everyone’s window of tolerance is different. Understanding your baseline window of tolerance and how to expand it contributes to long-term well-being because it offers you the chance to change your relationship to difficult emotions.

You might wonder how you can come to know and expand your window of tolerance. One of the more effective ways is through mindfulness and self-compassion.

Expanding the Window of Tolerance with Mindfulness

Expanding your window of tolerance helps you navigate increasingly difficult experiences without becoming so easily overwhelmed. To expand the window, you must learn to notice when you are “triggered” or “hooked” into a negative reaction. Mindfulness helps you to tune into subtle messages in your body/mind, giving you insight about where and when you are triggered.

Mindfulness simultaneously offers immediate relief and long-term benefits. It is often described as the state of being intentionally aware of what is happening, as it is happening, without judgment. Psychiatrist and educator Dr. Dan Siegel describes it as “waking up from a life on automatic and being sensitive to novelty in our everyday experiences. Instead of being on automatic and mindless, mindfulness helps us awaken to moment-by-moment experience.” In other words, mindfulness gives us what psychotherapist Linda Graham calls “choice points” or opportunities where change becomes possible.

Mindfulness teaches you to be an observer of sensations in the body and the feelings associated with them. In this shift from immersion to observation, you can tolerate painful feelings as they arise and access your thinking mind with more clarity.

Change becomes possible because mindfulness prevents over-identification. When you are triggered, you are immersed in the experience and accompanying sensations, feelings, and thoughts. Mindfulness teaches you to be an observer of sensations in the body and the feelings associated with them. In this shift from immersion to observation, you can tolerate painful feelings as they arise and access your thinking mind with more clarity.

According to meditation teacher and psychotherapist Tara Brach, mindful awareness has two qualities: seeing what is true and holding with love what is seen. You can ask two simple questions to create mindful awareness.

• What is happening right now? Seeing what is true is noticing the thoughts, feelings, and/or sensations arising in the moment from the observer’s point of view.
• Can I just let it be? Holding whatever arises with love means gently noticing each thought, feeling, and/or sensation with as much self-compassion as you would for your best friend. It’s one thing to get some distance on the patterns leading to overwhelm, but holding yourself and the part of you that is overwhelmed with compassion will make or break your ability to calm yourself.

Continuing to Expand the Window of Tolerance with Self-Compassion

If there is one thing I’d like you to take away from this article, it is to know every moment of suffering is an opportunity to give yourself love and compassion.

Self-compassion helps transform overwhelm and other difficult feelings by teaching us to cultivate kind, connected presence for ourselves. Kristin Neff, researcher of self-compassion and co-creator of the Mindful Self-Compassion program, says there are three main ways to initiate self-compassion:

1. Kind words
2. Caring tone of voice
3. Soothing gestures

Self-compassion increases oxytocin, a powerful hormone that acts as a neurotransmitter in the brain and, in turn, amplifies feelings of trust, calm, safety, generosity, and connectedness. A key thing to remember, however, is that self-compassion is a practice of goodwill, not good feelings. If you use self-compassion practices only to try to make bad feelings go away, you create the requirement that receiving compassion is valuable only if it removes the pain of life. Continue the practice of giving and receiving loving kindness without conditions, even when the pain doesn’t go away. By doing so, you create the habit of approaching yourself and others with kindness. You may feel more positive emotions as a result, but treat them more like a wonderful side effect than a goal. The long-term goal is to cultivate mindful self-compassion in as many situations as possible, and this takes time.

One of the most important points about this approach is to fully receive the compassion you offer yourself. This means to give yourself permission to get into it! This may be challenging at first because you are likely used to spending your energy on avoiding or managing overwhelm. If you shift your focus from avoidance to being compassionate with the part of you that is overwhelmed, you may be surprised how much you are able to expand your window of tolerance.

Reference:

Neff, K. (2011, June 27). The chemicals of care: How self-compassion manifests in our bodies. Retrieved from https://www.huffingtonpost.com/kristin-neff/self-compassion_b_884665.html

Many of us linger on the things we wish we could do better, more frequently, or at all. Sometimes, we find ourselves feeling “stuck” and unable to move forward—or in any direction. Delving into what keeps us in this state, paradoxically, feels like it may only fan the flames. When this occurs, we might notice we are frightened, nervous, anxious, or confused. More often than not, there is a sense of overwhelm in this condition. The overwhelming feelings then cause us to feel even more paralyzed and we find ourselves more and more rooted in the sense of inability to take action toward the things we look to build in our lives.

This process raises the question: How do we stop procrastinating? Each of us may have experienced an occasional bout of discomfort with intermittent procrastination, yet some find themselves continuously battling the cycle of overwhelm and procrastination with most of their goals and deadlines. With repetition, not only can this become exhausting, but it can feel almost threatening to strive for goals as well as take on projects—even if they are required of us.

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An important thing to keep in mind is procrastination is representative of a bigger underlying factor. In order to address procrastination, it becomes imperative to look at the underlying issue. Often, feeling overwhelmed presents as procrastination. In other words, if we are feeling engulfed by what might be required of us, it may feel impossible to take any action toward those tasks. To facilitate circumventing procrastination, we need strategies for keeping overwhelm at bay.

One reason we may feel overwhelmed by our tasks and goals may be that we are intimidated by carrying out the task or what it might entail. We may find ourselves thinking the task is too complex or that the stakes are too high. This can lead us into a numbed state or hiding from the activity. At times, we might even find ourselves fixated on it, even becoming irritable, and yet unable to take any action. From this point, as the deadline approaches, we may find ourselves becoming even more and more rooted in fear, overwhelm, anxiety, and inaction.

The antidote is to break the task down into much smaller chunks. As we become overwhelmed, it can become more and more difficult to take notice of the smaller pieces of a task or activity. Overwhelm tends to come from stacking too many parts of the same task together. It can be invaluable to break tasks down to the point of noticing the obvious things you can do that are in front of you. Making use of coping skills and mindfulness tools can help us find an aspect of the task to break down in this way. In doing so, we begin to tip the mind-set scale away from the shut-down and paralyzed state that the overwhelmed feelings brought on. Furthermore, we begin to show ourselves that we can make progress—even if we are not quite done, we have started.

Feelings of overwhelm can lead to a state of paralysis. This, in turn, can compound the stress and anxiety we might experience in response to challenging tasks.

This leads us to an additional strategy for overcoming overwhelming, paralyzing feelings: getting started in the smallest increments possible. We often find ourselves believing we must devote big blocks of time to effectively complete our tasks. Yet, this approach can preclude us getting started and increase our anxiety, stress, and sense of feeling overwhelmed. Getting started with a restricted 5-minute block of time can allow us to begin making a dent in the task in a less pressured way, allowing us to even perform better than we otherwise might have.

Another consideration as we navigate our tasks when we are overwhelmed is where to start. Many of us convince ourselves that we must start with the first step. Yet, this first step may feel elusive to us or perhaps we are just unsure of what it is or how to do it. It may help to start with aspects of the task we do know how to accomplish. As a result, we find ourselves having begun, which alleviates some of the pressure, stress, anxiety, and difficult feelings. At the same time, we begin to see progress and our confidence in our ability to keep moving forward may increase.

In the same vein, if we find ourselves making mistakes along the way, it can be helpful to keep moving forward and correct our mistakes as quickly as possible. Doing so begins to train our mind that forward movement and correction are the way we respond to errors rather than with defeated inaction. Hence, we come away with a mentality that mistakes are not what ultimately matter, but rather, our reaction to the mistakes.

Conclusion

In sum, feelings of overwhelm can lead to a state of paralysis. This, in turn, can compound the stress and anxiety we might experience in response to challenging tasks. With this in mind, we can take steps to ensure overwhelmed states are mitigated so we can continue to build on what we value in our lives.

If you need help managing stress and overwhelm, consider working with a therapist who can teach you the skills you need to stop procrastinating and start moving forward.