What Is Our Overwhelm Trying to Tell Us?
Framing overwhelm as a signal to adjust rather than a sign we need to stop or look away
When we feel overwhelmed, it’s easy to believe we have only two choices: push through at all costs or give up entirely. Most of the readers of this substack are therapists, academics, and/or trans people - and overwhelm is a very common and understandable experience for all of us right now. It’s been 100 days since Trump was elected and 24 days since he took office. Three weeks (or fourteen, for those of us feeling this since Trump won) is a very long time to be trying to go about our lives - let alone fight back, support each other, etc. - while feeling overwhelmed. And a lot of us are headed toward burnout. Others (perhaps sensing the risk of burnout) have retreated, relying solely or mostly on avoidance to carry on. But we have more than these two choices - there are options beyond push through at all costs or give up entirely on paying attention and trying to make things better.
Fundamentally, overwhelm is the experience of facing something beyond what we believe we can handle in a given particular context. The overwhelm we are feeling is a physiological, emotional, and cognitive response to an ongoing and indefinite high-stakes reality that feels larger than what we have the capacity to manage. Rather than take our overwhelm as a sign that we are not up for this, however, we can instead treat this feeling as a cue to ask ourselves what needs to change about us or our context to increase our capacity to manage and respond to this reality. I am trying to encourage us to not think of it as whether or not we can handle responding to a fascist takeover of our government or an incredible increase in anti-trans hostility or the high distress and sense of lost-ness of your clients (et cetera) - but whether we have the resources we need in order to handle all this and how to access or build the resources we’re lacking.
Here are some contributing factors to resource depletion that I imagine might be going on right now and can leave us feeling overwhelmed, and how I think each can be responded to or prevented:
Chronic exposure to threat: The body and mind are not equipped to be in a constant state of fight-or-flight / survival mode. I saw a meme the other day that said, “my brain and body don’t know the difference between reading the news headlines and being tied to a cinder block on the the ocean floor.” I’ve described this to multiple clients this week because it resonates so much. These political attacks are relentless and our mind is getting stuck in a sustained sense of danger - and the bodily response is a kind of hypervigilance and survival mode that makes it difficult to rest, think clearly, and feel positive feelings.
To combat this, take breaks. We need nervous system resets. When the threat is systemic like it is right now, we need our bodies and minds to be calm and stable enough to process information thoughtfully, strategize, communicate effectively, etc. It is vital that you give yourself rest and time away from contexts and stimuli that trigger your sense of threat. This might be all the stuff you imagine a psychologist recommending like meditation and a hike in the woods, but it also might be rewatching a favorite TV show or playing a soothing video game for small chunks of time. Anything that helps you feel safe or feel less unsafe is a necessary form of rest. As well as anything that helps you feel playful and soft! And sleep of course is very helpful: If you can prioritize 7-9 hours of high quality sleep, you will be doing your nervous system and your wellbeing a huge favor.
Find ways to unwind that aren’t social media. Someone recently joked to me that we “relax” by getting on apps that are just filled with awful news and escalating expressions of horror, panic, and outrage. Might I suggest putting up a bird feeder in your yard and getting a pair of binoculars or a scope? I promise the interactions between the juncos and the sparrows are captivating. But yeah - when you have some time to kill, try replacing your social media habit with something less stimulating so that time can restore rather than deplete resources.
Resistance to and guilt over rest. If you squirmed at my suggestion to take a break, this bullet point is for you. Many of us have come to believe that it is a moral failing to rest or that it is dangerous to. The need to be doing something can create a real drive away from necessary rest and leave us depleted.
To combat this, study the activists and Black Feminist scholars who know the importance and power of rest. I have a whole post drafted about this, because there is so much to say. Tricia Hersey (of Nap Ministry and author of Rest is Resistance) and Adrienne Maree Brown are two thinkers/writers in particular who have been strong advocates for reclaiming rest as a birthright and a necessary component of effective action.
Also, practicing rest in moderation and reaping the benefits of this approach will reinforce more accurate beliefs about rest. Don’t take my word for it! If you can intentionally structure your day or week to balance action with rest, the sustaining power of this shift will consciously and subconsciously encourage you to keep it up.
Powerlessness and learned helplessness: Another meme going around describes our current political experience as “being stuck in a car with a belligerent drunk driver at the wheel.” I’ve heard similar statements from almost every client who discusses Trump or the sociopolitical landscape we are facing. The powerlessness in these metaphors is profound. It’s disempowering when you’ve tried to fight back but see little change or see things actively getting worse. And it can lead to a belief that nothing you do will make a difference. I included the term “learned helplessness” because I want to highlight that this is a belief and a set of feelings - not facts. And oppressive governments want people to give up their power by not believing in it.
To combat this, seek experiences of micro-empowerment. What you’re needing when you feel powerless or are in a deliberately disempowering political environment is to build up your sense of being able to have influence on the world around you. Make an impact where you can. This can start out really small, like over your space: organize your closet, clean up your office; or over your local eco-system: plant a garden! Volunteer with your local council on aging or food bank. Run for school committee or meet with your city councillors about a stop sign that is needed in your neighborhood. It’s amazing the halo effect this kind of small or local scale empowerment can have. Once you’re reminded experientially of the power you have and the power you can build with a collective, you might find yourself on signal threads organizing relocation support for trans families!
Lack of tangible wins or relief: It adds a layer of exhaustion to need to continue resisting oppression or showing up for folks with no end in sight. It can be demoralizing to experience repeated blows without a sense of progress or successful resistance.
To combat this, pay attention to resistance and victories. Erin Reed - one of the leading journalists focused on trans issues right now - posts positive news and stories of resistance in addition to all the concerning updates. Pay attention to the good headlines, too. You can actually filter the articles on LGBTQ Nation (a news site) with the tag “good news” (https://www.lgbtqnation.com/tag/good-news/), and trans writer Ben Greene has a substack actually titled Good Queer News. Celebrate the wins. And importantly, wins don’t need to be headline-worthy to have an important psychological impact here. Did your friend get their name changed? Did you witness a trans person connect with a community member and feel less alone this week? Did a colleague find a way to keep a graduate student funded? WINS. They’re happening and we need them.
See also: take a break.
Isolation and lack of community support: Oppression thrives on making people feel alone. Many people right now feel like they are in this fight alone, but we are not. This reminds me of the psychology experiments looking at expectancy effects - essentially how our perception of effort influences our actual endurance. If we believe something will be long and difficult, our body responds as if its energy is already being depleted, making us tire or lose internal resources faster. Essentially in these experiences, researchers ask people to hold a weighted object or to squeeze a handgrip exerciser. Some participants were told they would need to hold it for a short time, while others were told they’d need to hold it for a long time. The participants who believed they would have to hold it for longer actually tired and gave up sooner than the folks who believed they would need to hold it for a shorter period. Being and feeling alone in an effort is a sure fire way to believe that the task at hand is going to be particularly long and difficult. So feeling alone is likely to limit our endurance psychologically. And of course, being alone in an effort also usually does make it harder and longer and so will require more endurance of us. Isolation and lack of community become a sort of double whammy here in terms of setting us up for overwhelm.
To combat this, connect with others. Don’t call me captain obvious, but to combat isolation - go be with people. I am often reminded of the story of a trans woman who feeling emotional and alone the day after the election decided to see what events were happening in her community and went to a vigil at a local non-denominational faith space. She didn’t know anyone there and didn’t meet anyone, but there was a shared sense of being affected by the election, and that went a long way in helping her believe she could survive. And if you want a more robust sense of community support or connection, keep showing up. Building community doesn’t happen overnight, and I am not trying to present it as easy. But I also think it doesn’t need to be as hard as we often imagine it is. Dean Spade, Kai Cheng Thom, and Devon Price are some writers who come to mind that have tackled the topic of queer community-building. Read them. If you’re feeling intimidated by the how of it all, have a look at meetup.com and find a group of people that already gathers and is literally advertising for new folks to participate; you can also volunteer for an org/cause you care about.
And remember the mindset component of endurance. If you’re feeling alone and weary, remember that you’re almost always stronger than you think. I have long had dreams of developing a guided meditation where the meditator envisions a collective of trans people, including ancestors and trans people of the future, combining our energies and power into an incredible strength. Tapping into that (whether you believe this is a metaphysical sort of tapping into or a psychological mindset shift or both) can propel you forward and help you not feel alone.
Role strain: I’m thinking particularly of the therapists reading this - and the trans folks in caregiving roles, and the parent activists: many of us are feeling needed in multiple ways right now. We simply are being pulled in multiple directions and can have the experience of inadequately meeting our expectations across multiple spheres.
To combat this, re-prioritize if you can and practice compassion around imperfection. Role strain is often a sign that we’re overcommitted. Sometimes there’s not an alternative, but often there are ways to reduce our obligations that we have been resistant to considering. Which commitments are most important to you and also which need you the most? If re-prioritizing isn’t an option, a point of intervention here is on the shame, self-criticism, or guilt, that creeps up in response to this strain and can itself be source of further strain/over-commitment and overwhelm.
Constant information overload: As I mentioned in my substack post about mantras I’m holding onto, overwhelm and disorientation are a strategy in the Trump administration. There’s a recent interview with Steve Bannon in the Wall Street Journal where he specifically names that Trump is “dropping the hammer” in so many different areas that it is “flooding the zone” and “overwhelming the opposition.” These news cycles and then the way they are regurgitated in our fast-paced social media mean that we are inundated. It becomes literally too much cognitive and emotional data to process.
To combat this, curate the demands on your attention. I will say this over and over again: turn off news alerts. Ideally, set aside certain times in your day to read the news and/or use your social media apps. Also, reading the articles and not just spinning through the headlines or flipping through memes will help slow the pace of information. Consider muting or unfollowing social media accounts that post a lot of meme-ified news.
And yes, meditate. Meditation and similar practices of intentional direction of attention and quieting of the mind help build our capacity to engage purposefully with thoughts and information/stimuli.
Lack of nourishment: Our bodies have physical needs required to operate well, and this is true of our brains - and thus our minds, as well. If we are not tending to our nourishment or physical health, we’re going to deplete the energy we need to regulate our emotions and engage cognitively effectively.
To combat this, eat some food! Move your body. Drink water. Emphasize opportunities for high quality sleep. Take your meds! If you’re struggling to take care of yourself at this base physical-need level and this is outside of your normal set of challenges, this is a sign you’ve reached burnout. You need to really rest to recover, and might need to seek explicit outside help to get back on track. Prioritize caring for your body.
Disrupted sense of the future and purpose: When the future feels uncertain or bleak, it can be disorienting and make long-term planning feel impossible. This can lead to existential dread or an inability to take meaningful action today because it feels like, “what’s the point?”
To combat this, consider the practices of radical hope and extending your vision of the future to a more expansive timeline. I’ve written about radical hope: digging into the reality of our challenging contexts and the suffering of ancestors to connect with our ancestral capacity for collective survival. It’s been helpful for me to respond to my own internal “what’s the point?” by shifting my frame so that I’m not just working toward a future next year or five years from now, but five hundred years from now. Here’s an excerpt from my previous substack post that gets at this:
“According to the Radical Healing Collective, envisioning possibilities of far-reaching change is one of the necessary pathways to radical hope. At the TRANSA celebration at Performance Space New York in September, I was struck by something Massima Bell said, which I will paraphrase to the best of my memory: ‘We know that one day, the earth will reclaim this city, and forests will return across what was once known as Manhatta. This may be millenia in the future. And in this green world of the future, it is our hope that the songs of TRANSA will exist, or perhaps something that they inspired or made possible will be heard.’ I had never thought about hope for the future being so long. The idea that what we were co-creating in that space would make ripples that extend so far into the future was both calming and invigorating.”
Urgency and pressure to respond immediately: The sense that we have to act NOW can create a cycle where people don’t have time to reflect on what’s actually sustainable for them. There have been situations and there will be times in this political reality when urgent action is needed, but that is not true for what is needed from most of right now. We certainly need to not dillydally or you know, get burned out and end up burying our head in the sand for weeks at a time, but for the most part what is needed from us is responding at a level that we can sustain.
To combat this, remember the deleterious impacts of crisis-mode thinking. Try to notice and catch yourself if you’re feeling a lot of pressure to act fast and then gently push back on that with yourself - or with people you are organizing with. See if there is room to slow down.
[Editing to add] You might also consider the OODA Loop: On a call with the Working Families Party, Adrienne Maree Brown shared a response strategy she learned from a group called Queer Nature. OODA stands for Observe, Orient, Decide, Act, and is a model for making good decisions during high-pressure situations. If you are tasked with a more urgent decision and feel yourself growing overwhelmed under the pressure, walk yourself through this model:
Observe: gather key information - including your own internal and bodily state. What’s happening? What’s the threat? What is urgent?
Orient: assess the situation based on your knowledge, instincts, and past experiences. What do your observations mean and what matters most right now?
Decide: Choose a course of action quickly, prioritizing what will have the biggest impact and/or what will buy you time to continue working on a solution and moving forward.
Act: Execute decisively, then immediately restart the loop, adjusting as needed.
The OODA Loop can help us avoid the freezing response that can come with overwhelm by emphasizing action over perfection: you don’t need to make the best decision, just a workable one that keeps you moving forward. It also provides scaffolding which can help you feel like you’re not alone in the decision: imagine a trusted teacher or mentor (or another part of you) guiding you through each step.
In summary, feeling overwhelmed in oppressive contexts isn’t just about too great of a workload or some fundamental lack of capacity - it’s about chronic stress, disempowerment, and resource depletion. The solution is neither to push through overwhelm nor is it to give up and decide you’re not cut out for this set of tasks. The solution to overwhelm is to ask, What external or internal resources do I need to build or access to continue engaging without burning out? Recognizing the contributing factors to depletion and overwhelm can help us name what is happening and shift from self-blame and/or fatalistic defeatism to resourcing ourselves for the long haul.
(As a concluding note, I move in and out of “we” and “you” in this post, which is telling. As much as I feel well positioned to offer this advice, I also find that I am in need of receiving it as well.)
This is an absolutely great write-up. Thank you for taking the time to put this together.
Thank you. This is what I needed today!