Why Do I Get So Overwhelmed?

Understanding your Nervous System, and Realising It’s not Your Fault

Do you find yourself feeling overwhelming anxiety in certain situations?  Struggling to think?  Heart racing?  Stuttering, confused, blushing?  Or quick to anger – seeing red, wanting to shout, attack, hurt?  Or just shutting down completely and going blank?  Does it feel like there’s something wrong with you?

Well, the good news is that a) there isn’t and b) you’re in good company (despite how others may seem to portray themselves).  These are all NORMAL and adaptive reactions to threat, and your nervous system doing what it’s been designed to do.

I frequently have this conversation with clients at the start of therapy and find that many experience significant relief once they understand what’s happening to them and that it’s just their minds and bodies doing what they have evolved to do in order to survive.  I hope the following information is useful in making sense of your own experiences.

What Are These Feelings?

When you’re experiencing intense feelings of anxiety, panic and fear, or constant low to moderate stress and anxiety and you’re not sure why this is happening to you, it can be a deeply troubling time.  These emotional states can have a significant impact on our basic human functions such as sleeping and eating, as well as our ability to perform at home, school or work.

 When they continue for some time, or when we are experiencing very high levels of threat, we can also enter a kind of ‘shut down’ mode, in which we can feel exhausted, depleted, lacking in motivation, extremely sad, cut off, zoned out or completely numb of all emotion whatsoever.  When we enter into this mode (sometimes framed as ‘burnout’, other times as depression) it can be very disturbing and frustrating.

We are evolved to survive

One of the most helpful things I do to support clients in my therapy practice is to provide a clear explanation of what’s happening to us when these emotional states arise. Whilst the details of theories regarding the specific mechanisms causing these states are in constant debate, the basic principle is that these emotional states are physiological in nature and created by the human brain’s amazing capacity to adjust our basic physiology to prioritise survival when faced by threat. 

This phenomenal capacity we have to automatically adjust our physiological state the instant a threat has been detected, has evolved over millions of years as a way of ensuring that the human species survived.  Essentially our brain is a super-efficient ‘don’t eat me machine’ which is brilliant at detecting threat quickly and activating an effective chain of events to prepare our bodies to survive.  Emotions are the way we experience that survival response in our physiology.

Fight/Flight Response

So, when our super-efficient threat detection system (located somewhere in the middle of our brains) detects a threat such as:

• a physical threat such as a car moving towards us, or a loud noise
• or a social threat such as an argument with a valued group or making a mistake at work
• an imagined threat – ‘what if…?’
• financial threat – realising there aren’t enough resources to go round
• comparisons – I’m not doing as well as others – I’ll be left behind…

it sends an instant signal to a branch of our nervous system called the Sympathetic Nervous System.  This happens so fast we are unable to stop it, usually before our conscious mind has even registered the threat and put a name to it.  The Sympathetic nervous system then activates the body to survive to either stand up and fight or run away (flight).  The experience is usually described emotionally as either anger or fear/anxiety and the physiological experiences of both fight/flight are very similar.  The body is activated and ready to move. 

When the sympathetic nervous system is activated we might experience increased muscle tension, increased heartrate, higher blood pressure, raised temperature and perspiration, faster, shallower breathing, nausea, racing thoughts, tunnel vision ( a focus only on the threat), and a whole host of other reactions.  Believe it or not, all of these reactions, whilst often unpleasant, are an incredibly adaptive response and just the brains way of doing what is was designed to do, which is to keep us safe and protect us from danger.

Freeze

When Sympathetic Nervous System activation goes on for a long period of time (chronic stress or threat) or when the threat is so intense and it feels as though there is no escape (for example if being trapped and seriously assaulted) the brain has another safety system which can be automatically switched on.  This is our so-called ‘freeze’ or shut down state, which is activated by a different branch of the Central Nervous System, called the Parasympathetic nervous system.  This ‘freeze state’ is also essential for survival and is the evolutionary equivalent of hiding away or remaining still so as not to be detected by a potential predator.  If we become unresponsive, potentially the threat might move away more quickly.  What we might experience when in this state includes a sense of slowing down, reduction in motivation, extreme lethargy, feeling cut off from our emotions, a sense of ‘fuzziness’ and being unable to think effectively, feeling numb and just wanting to sleep.  In extreme states we may shut down completely and become unresponsive.

Stop Beating Yourself Up!

Our capacity to criticise and berate ourselves for these reactions can be outstanding.  Our minds constantly tell us how we should be doing better, how we should just be ‘getting over it’ and noticing how other people seem to cope far better than we are.  For example:

• Feeling intensely anxious in social situations can lead us to hide away from people or stumble over our words, and then spend hours ruminating over the interactions later on, unpicking everything we think we did wrong.
• Being overwhelmed by anger when someone says something mean to us, and either shouting and hitting out or being unable to speak because we are full of rage, and again spending hours ruminating over all those things we ‘should have said’ or feeling guilty about retaliating.
• In emergency situations (such as a serious assault) complete shut down is frequently described by victims and can be a source of intense shame and regret following the incident as individuals berate themselves for not doing more to defend themselves more effectively.
• When freeze state shows up after prolonged periods of stress and/or threat, we may find it difficult to get out of bed, work out a plan for the day, communicate effectively or be motivated to do anything. Many people then pile intense criticism upon themselves for being ‘lazy’ or ‘stupid’.

The tendency we ALL have to ‘beat ourselves up’ for not being able to ‘just snap out of’ the feelings and behaviours associated with highly activated states or shut down in response to threat is rarely helpful.  It simply adds another layer of distress and can push us further into threat response, making life a lot harder. 

We don’t tend to have a lot of immediate control over our automatic reactions to threat (although over time we can practice techniques to help us to reduce the intensity of these reactions).  But what we do have immediate influence over is this tendency we have to layer on additional judgements and self-criticism relating to our reactions.  The judgements and criticisms we direct towards ourselves are just thoughts, they are not facts and we can choose to step away from them.

Understanding your nervous system and having a way to make sense of your reactions is a helpful first step in being able to unhook from these thoughts and managing emotions more effectively.

‘It’s Not Me It’s My Nervous System’

As we’ve seen above, the key message to convey in relation to our experience of these threat reactions is that they occur outside of our conscious control, and there is nothing immediate we can do consciously to stop them.  Our brains are simply doing what they have evolved to do, and we do not have much choice in the matter. 

So we are unable to prevent these instant physiological reactions from occurring in our bodies.  However, what we DO have a choice about is how we respond to these reactions when we notice them arising. 

Building Awareness – frequently we are so busy and frantically trying to meet the demands of modern life that we are not fully present or aware of what’s happening to our physiology.  Taking time to become more aware of our mental and physical states and checking in with ourselves more frequently can really help us to notice when we are activated.

Taking More Effective Action -  responding kindly to our physiological state and reassure it that we are actually safe.  We know that trying to block out, suppress and struggle with these states tends to make things worse over time.  We also know that criticising ourselves or our bodies for reacting in this way, serves to increase the threat perceived in our emotion centres and ramps up the threat reaction even further.  We become ‘our own worst enemy’ and the source of threat becomes internal, rather than a genuine external threat that we can deal with effectively.

Becoming more aware of and connected to our emotional states and taking a more compassionate, caring and reassuring stance towards our nervous systems has been shown to have a dramatic effect on our ability to respond effectively to threat.  Developing these skills can serve to widen the so-called ‘window of tolerance’ and support us to hold onto our minds and perform effectively in the face of adversity.

So next time you notice you’re experiencing overwhelming anger, fear or anxiety or feeling burnt out, shut down or exhausted in the face of difficulty, it’s useful to remember that it’s not YOU, it’s your nervous system doing what it’s designed to do – to keep you safe and protect you from danger.  Let go of the self-criticism, take a breath and be just a little bit kinder to yourself.

If you feel you would benefit from further help and support you can contact us here.