Episode 296 Minisode: How to cope with overwhelm so you don’t NEED to drink so much

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Overwhelm has a way of sneaking up on you.  One minute you’re functioning fine, and the next minute you stub your toe on the furniture and you are flooded with emotions that say,  can’t do one more thing. Suddenly you wanna quit your job, get a divorce and move to another country. Most of us avoid that moment. We think that it is a personal failure. We think we have to push harder.  We think we have to just get our shit together. We shame ourselves because we can’t cope.

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But that is exactly why we end up so stuck. In this episode, I want to pull back the curtain on what overwhelm really is. It’s not a mindset issue. It’s not a lack of motivation.  It’s an actual physiological response that every single one of us can face. When you finally understand what is going on in your body that is causing your brain to want to hit the eject button, you can stop fighting the process of overwhelm.

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and start supporting yourself. Overwhelm is a sign that you are running on a deficit. And just like bitching at your car when you run out of gas doesn’t actually solve the problem, pushing through overwhelm drives you deeper into shutdown. I’m going to explain the five stages that your body moves through when the demands that you are facing exceeds your capacity to cope with those demands. I’m also going to give you a five minute.

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practice so that you can respond to your own overwhelm with compassion instead of more pressure.

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My name is Colleen and I’m a mindful drinking coach helping high achieving professional women permanently reduce their alcohol consumption by 80%. Join me each week for evidence-based holistic strategies  to regulate your nervous system,  balance your dopamine,  and activate the growth mindset that makes you so powerful in other areas of your life  so you can stop worrying about losing control  and trust yourself again.

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Get happy, not sober. It’s not about the alcohol.

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The first change that you need to make when you join this program  and in all contexts and areas of your life, the first change you need to make is how you deal with overwhelm. And in this episode, I’m going to explain exactly what overwhelm is  and show you possibly for the first time in your life why pushing through your overwhelm because you think that there’s no reason for it or that it’s a

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reflection of personal weakness, pushing through overwhelm makes things worse, not better.  Overwhelm is actually a state of your nervous system and technically it’s a fancy word for the trauma response. Let me explain quickly that we think of trauma  as bad shit that’s happened to us in the past, okay? Past events or chronic

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situations in relationships or in life that have left us emotionally wounded. And we all understand that past traumas trigger a trauma response  in our life, which is any reaction that seems outsized, either too little or too big.  It doesn’t really meet the situation. That’s how you know  you’re dealing with trauma. But in this episode, I just want to frame the trauma response as a normal state of your nervous system.

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that occurs  when the demands on you  exceed your capacity to deal with them, AKA overwhelm. And overwhelm  is a normal part of the human condition. At any point in your life, no matter how good your life is or how good your childhood was, you can experience overwhelm. And there’s a five step process that happens in your body. Overwhelm is physiological. You can’t think your way out of it.

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You can’t rationalize that the task in front of you is so simple that you shouldn’t be feeling the way you do.  Overwhelm is a feeling. And as much as we say feelings aren’t facts, well, feelings aren’t based on facts in the external world. But feelings are most certainly  the first facts that you have to deal with  and learn how to clear  so that you can show up to whatever situation is in the external world  with a rational, open-minded, unbiased,

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non-judgmental, curious and compassionate approach that will allow you to move forward. When you respond to your overwhelm with critical self-judgment and you allow shame and fear and anxiety to  spin you out even further, that’s how you stay stuck. That’s how you dig yourself deeper into the hole. So the first thing that you have to do in this program and moving forward in your life is change how you respond.

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to the felt sensations of overwhelm.  So I’m gonna break down the five steps that occur in the body so that you can make sense of them. It’s kind of like slowing down the movie. We’re gonna go frame by frame.  The five steps of the body’s trauma response, AKA overwhelm. Number one, there’s a startle. It’s the moment when you sense something is off  or it’s going to be too big  or it’s not going to work, whether that’s because you’re not

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capable or you don’t have what you need. The startle  is your body’s reflex reaction to a perceived potential threat and the startle gives you a subtle or large jolt of energy that puts you into a hyper alert hyper focused mode and this can happen and pass in seconds. So that’s why I’m breaking it down for you. So you can see  there’s a feeling in your body prior to the overwhelm that

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kind of hijacks your brain and brings all your focus into whatever problem you perceive. This kicks your brain into high gear. Your mind starts racing as you assess what you need to do and how much time you have to do it and what resources you have to do it with. We’ve all experienced this surge of energy many times in both dramatic and ordinary moments, catching a child before they fall  or rushing to meet an urgent deadline.

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or jumping out of the way of an oncoming car. In any case where our body is startled and perceives a threat, there is a very quick surge, a stress response  of norepinephrine and adrenaline that provides us with the energy we need to take action. But in the event that your body perceives that you don’t have the capacity to meet the demands, then you move to step three of the trauma response, which is the sensation of hitting a wall.

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And all of this is happening below consciousness. Your body operates much faster than your conscious mind. Just like you don’t have to make a decision to take your hand off of a hot stove. You don’t decide to feel overwhelmed. Overwhelm is triggered in the same way that the smart braking system in your car senses decides that you’re too close or you’re moving too fast and it acts before you do. The brakes pump on their own.

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It’s a lot like a circuit breaker blowing when you try to use the vacuum and the hairdryer at the same time. You can’t negotiate with the circuit and say, I’m just going to turn the vacuum on for a second. It’s going to be fine. When the load exceeds the capacity, the decision is made for you. Your body  switches survival strategies. It moves from a stress response to a trauma response,  which means that instead of having the energy to solve the problem,

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in fight or flight or figure it out or fix it or fuck it, you experience the freeze response which triggers dissociation, immobilization and energy conservation, which physiologically prevents you from taking any actions that would further deplete your limited capacity. And what you have to realize is that it’s not the external demands that you are perceiving that are so unmanageable.

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Usually overwhelm is triggered with the proverbial straw that breaks the camel’s back. I can remember times when I’m  so at my max capacity and then I stub my toe or something with a lot of pain and all of a sudden I’m in overwhelm. I can’t do one more fucking thing because my toe hurts.  In this program, the straw that breaks the camel’s back might just be the idea that you have to listen to one more damn podcast on your way home from work.

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or read a few pages in the workbook, or schedule your onboarding call, or sign up for an accountability group.  Like, none of those things are inherently excessively stressful. It’s just that your capacity to do anything new and different towards some goal,  especially a big goal that you have been unsuccessful with, like changing your drinking on your own, your capacity to take those tiny little simple actions has been severely compromised.

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by the chronic stress you’ve been living in. And that stress is  multifactorial. It includes  just a general lack of self-care and quality sleep. It includes a lack of emotional hygiene. You haven’t been processing all the little shit that’s been bothering you.  And it’s built up. Like I often say, you’re emotionally constipated. You’re living in this high cortisol.

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low serotonin, your blood sugar might be dysregulated from too much alcohol on a regular basis, your  gut  microbiome might be off balance, and you may also be dealing with a lot of other issues like grief or anger  or marital issues, conflict with your kids  or your aging parents, or maybe you hate your job or you’re trying to start or grow a business. And again,

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deeper, it’s not even any one of those things that you can’t handle. The majority of your stress is coming from your internal narratives of worry and self-doubt, shame, guilt, fear and anxiety and perfectionism and people pleasing.  All of this combines to make your internal environment  so toxic. You’re in a hostile environment.  The living conditions within your mind and your body

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have become unbearable. That’s why you’re hitting the wall. That’s what is putting you into the fourth step of the trauma response, which is the freeze. Because you don’t believe that you have the capacity to handle everything. And this is a perception.  And it comes from a myriad of places. It could be childhood conditioning, that  anger isn’t safe. And that then blocks your ability to speak up. Or it could be your deeply held beliefs that

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you’re not good enough. And so instead of putting one foot in front of the other with baby steps to move forward, you don’t even try. You give up before you start. It could also be triggered by helplessness of watching a loved one suffer because there’s nothing you can do. There’s an unlimited variety of experience that can cause this freeze, but they all share one common internal experience and that’s the shock.

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to the body when you realize that you’re trapped or powerless and alone. And your body can’t remain  in this state of shock indefinitely. And it’s the intense internal pressure of this freeze. You are locked in place. All that trapped energy leads your body to then progress to the final protective stage of the trauma response, which is shut down.

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So just to reiterate the five steps, number one, there’s a startle. Number two, there’s a stress response. Let’s move into action. Then in between the stress response and the wall, your body has perceived that this ain’t going to happen. I am not going to make the jump here. Then you hit the wall. And then the wall leads to the freeze response. And then extended periods of freeze puts you into shutdown. And while you think you’ve joined this program,

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to  reduce your drinking  and get your shit together so you can be more productive. What you’re really here to do is to learn how to get unstuck from overwhelm, how to move forward. This program is designed to help you reduce the self-imposed stress, all of those internal narratives  and shitty core limiting beliefs and past trauma wounds that are making

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life so difficult so that you can begin to experience the simple joys of daily life that right now seems so far out of reach. It’s critical that you become aware of your own wall, that feeling of overwhelm in your body. And understand that that wall can happen at different points. It’s not like a fixed point.

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You already know that some days and in some contexts, you are far more resilient than in others. But the bottom line is there is no  right amount of resilience. What you’re here to learn is how to expand your resilience by learning how to deal with your overwhelm. And instead of pushing through it, you have to stop and feel it and deal with it. It doesn’t matter if you should be feeling overwhelmed.

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you are feeling overwhelmed. It’s the first fact that you have to learn how to respond to. I love saying, and I live by this mantra, the first step to being okay is to acknowledge that you’re not okay and to be okay with the fact that you’re not okay. That is always step one. That  idea is the portal towards your growth edge to moving forward, to expanding your resilience  until you can accept

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that overwhelm  is a feeling and a fact, you’re going to continue to dig yourself deeper in a hole and experience setbacks. So like I began with, the first and only habit change that you need to focus on is to stop pushing when you feel overwhelmed. Stop pressuring yourself to take on more than you can process out of the imagined perception that you’re behind schedule.  Or that if you don’t get

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all of this done on a certain time frame, you’re wasting your money. And if you don’t listen and read and attend everything right now, before you feel ready that you’re never going to change, it’s never going to work. That thought process  is pushing you deeper into overwhelm. Even diving too deeply into emotional work before you’re ready. Listen carefully.

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You put yourself into this program because you need guidance. So accept it. This program is a year long for a reason. And ironically, the slower you go, the farther you’re going to get. Give yourself permission right now to just trust the process. Trust what I’m telling you. There is nowhere to get. You have to learn how to be here now.

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even when you’re overwhelmed and even when it sucks, your ability to stop trying to get there and to learn how to be here in whatever conditions you’re dealing with, accept it as it is instead of how you think it should be, that  is your portal to transformation. And I want to leave you with a very simple instruction. And I call it the litmus test so that moving forward, this litmus test, it’s a yes or no question.

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Okay.  And it will help you determine what you need in any given moment. You have to learn how to listen to your body, not your brain.  And good news, your body speaks energy, not English.  Overwhelm is a feeling. It feels like you’ve hit a wall. In a split second, you can go from feeling motivated and excited to demotivated and drained. That’s the lismas test. That feeling

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is your stop sign. When you feel it, I want you to give yourself a five minute timeout. Just make that as a rule to follow for the rest of your life.  Whether you’re at work or at home  or driving or whatever,  stop  all incoming stimuli. Unplug, take your foot off the gas, turn off the podcast, put down the book, leave the call, go to the bathroom or your bedroom, walk to the mailbox or the corner.

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in silence, alone, no talking, just breathe, be with yourself, feel that wall that has been triggered, feel the freeze response in your body and attend to it because  she’s scared, she’s feeling powerless or trapped or alone and you’re the keeper of your body. One of the biggest shifts of perspective

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that will move you forward, they moved me forward, is to think of my body as a person and talk about her in the third person. Use your name, use second person. I say Colleen is upset. She needs my attention and it’s my job to give it to her. She feels pissed. She’s anxious. She’s sad. We need to let her be. I need to make it safe for her. Put your hand on your heart and tell her your body.

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that it’s going to be OK. You’re going to stop brow-beating her, and you’re going to just let her relax. Tell her that you’re on her team. You’re done ignoring her. You’re listening, and it’s going to be OK. Do that for five minutes. And then reassess, because sometimes that’s enough to bring you back into a state of calm. Big picture thinking returns. You’re out of the stress response. You can do one thing at a time.

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Sometimes it’s not enough. Sometimes you need more time to recover. So after five minutes, you’re going to reassess what happens next. And the answer to that question, the only answer, will feel like a relief. So if that doesn’t include some baby step to move you forward, maybe it includes taking the night off and drinking wine and watching Netflix.  So be it. It’s OK. You’re OK.

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give yourself the break that you need in the best way you know how to give yourself a break  and trust that  as you build the habit of responding to your overwhelm with compassion and self-care, your definition of self-care will expand. It will no longer include,  you know, drinking and watching TV, but until then it is what it is and it’s okay. And what I want you to notice is that even when

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drinking is your go-to break. When you do it from a place of compassion and okayness, you no longer have so much pressure to escape and your desire to continue drinking  as much as you have in the past will go down because the story you’re telling yourself is changing. You’re not giving up because  you can’t do this. You’re just taking a break and you can pick up where you left off tomorrow.

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Your motivation to keep going will continue to get stronger because when you respond to your overwhelm with compassion and taking your foot off the gas, what you’re learning is that you can trust yourself not to be perfect in your behaviors, but you can trust yourself to fucking pay attention to yourself. Your need to check out  or go numb or just push through going through all of the motions. Your need to do that.

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is going to go away because you no longer interpret overwhelm as a personal failure. It’s a physiological state. And the more you lean into it, the faster you move through it.  Our bodies  have an incredible innate resilience to survive, to accomplish big things,  even when they have to shut down to do so. Your body knows what she’s doing, even if your conscious mind is struggling to make sense of the experience.

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And while what I’m talking about in this episode is how to change your response to overwhelm when you experience it, this program will be designed for you to avoid overwhelm, to learn how to catch it earlier and earlier and intervene so that you don’t have to go into freeze and shut down. But before you can do that, you have to understand the difference between stress and overwhelm. You can’t push through overwhelm. You have to stop.

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Stop trying to make sense of it. Stop trying to argue or rationalize or justify it. Stop trying to maneuver around it. Stop trying to work through it. Just allow it. The litmus test is simple. Do you feel like you’ve hit the wall? Do you feel like you’re going into shutdown mode? If the answer is yes, then stop. Do a five minute reassess. Unplug, take a walk, take a breath, go lay down for five minutes. After five minutes, reassess.

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Are you ready to move forward or do you need to give yourself a break? And if the answer is you need to give yourself a break, give yourself a goddamn break. Again, the sooner you lean into your overwhelm, the sooner you’ll move through it.

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All right, thanks for listening. And if you’re a high achieving, coachable woman who is ready to commit to manifesting your best life, and you’re going to need to reduce your alcohol consumption by about 80%, so that alcohol goes back to being a pleasure instead of a soul sucking problem, get in the show notes and click the link and schedule a discovery call with me or my team.