The Overwhelm Protocol.

One of the words I hear most often when I am working with clients and groups is overwhelmed.

I think a lot about our human systems. I divide them into three, which are easily understandable to me - the intellectual and mental, the physiological and physical, and the emotional. All three are closely connected and feed endless information back and forth between each other.

In my experience, when all those systems get stretched to the breaking point there is a sense of overwhelm, and this can lead to a feeling of hopelessness or collapse. Fear comes in. This is all too much. There can be a kind of panic, a feeling of not knowing what to do next.

When you are in a state of overwhelm, even helpful ideas can feel as if they are too demanding. Your raging, frightened, exhausted mind is in a tornado of fury. All those people out there, telling us we must get up at 4am and do our cold plunges and meditate for an hour and drink protein drinks and stand on the grass and entirely reconfigure our nervous systems and, oh, I don’t know, save the world for democracy at the same time. When it may seem like climbing Mount Everest to make a simple cup of tea.

(I do wonder, about the morning routine people. Do they have jobs and friends and children and animals and general responsibilities? Because I really don’t understand how they can take three hours at dawn to do all their breath work and yoga and whey shakes. But that’s a whole other hill of beans.)

Even the simple stuff that I write about here - changing your story, for instance, or building a few useful habits and practices - can feel too demanding when the overwhelm hits.

Look. I do think that building new habits and practices and - my latest thing - protocols is incredibly useful and will actually change your life. The reason I started all this is that I changed my entire self for the sake of a horse and it was so lovely and such a relief that I thought it would be rude to keep it to myself. Every single thing I learned on the Red Mare Self-Improvement Plan was predicated on the creation of new habits, and the letting go of old habits. Mostly habits of mind, of emotional responses, of clinging on to ancient survival mechanisms. What this did for me is give me choice, and that is such a precious thing. I am no longer at the mercy of what I once thought of as a mess of personality, genes, cultural influences and childhood wounds. I have agency! Watch me go!

However, when you are in the overwhelm stage, all of this feels a bit meaningless.

So, bit by bit, I have built an Overwhelm Protocol. A Protocol, named by me in honour of Robert Ludlum, whose novels were all the rage when I was a girl, is simply a ready-to-go box of tools which you can get down off the shelf the moment you need them. I have a No Sleep Protocol and a Difficult Person Protocol and I’m inventing new ones all the time. (I’m a bit like those fancy-pants influencers on the socials who are always doing incredibly solemn videos about their new products. It makes me laugh quite a lot when they present a hoodie or a jacket as if it’s the cure for all human problems. They have new items of clothing; I have new protocols. I try not to be too grave about them. They are just ideas, after all.)

You’ll adjust this for your own needs, but at the moment my version looks like this:

1. Make a list of the things which absolutely have to be done. These will involve things like animals, family, work. Write down your list so it is out of your tired head. The page can always take the weight.

2. Cancel everything else. Seriously. Pointless meetings, going to the pub with someone you’ve been half-avoiding for the last six months, school reunions. Chuck all of it. Concentrate simply on your core responsibilities.

3. Slow down. Imagine you are a young person, burning out, and you came to you for advice. You would tell that young person that racing around at a hundred miles an hour is only going to trash the engine and make her cry. The vital things will not get done any quicker or better. You’d tell her to take a breath, write her list, and go steadily.

4. Look reality in the whites of its eyes. Sometimes, overwhelm is the correct response. Your other half left, your mum is ill, your children are having trouble at school. Yes, that is overwhelming. A kind of survival mode is a logical reaction. However, sometimes you are overwhelming yourself with drama-stories and doom-stories and the unhealed child in you is wailing for attention. Make sure you can gently and with love get rid of the non-necessary stories. Make the inner child soup and give her an early night and tell her you are never going to leave her. Sorting out the real from the imagined is a huge part of dealing with overwhelm.

5. Do good, helpful physical things. Water, sleep, protein, movement. Don’t do wild exercising. Walk in the woods, if you can find woods. Take yourself into nature.

6. Consult wise and loving friends. I say consult because feeling overwhelmed is often a result of, say, worrying about your business or feeling out of your depth in a job. You’ve got brilliant friends, with skills. Ask them what they would do. Mostly, people love to help.

7. Read the books which make you feel better. Step away from social media. I’ll do total news blackouts when my systems get too stretched.

8. Focus on the people, animals and things you love. Fit as much love into your life as you can. Love of your dog, or of a mountain, or of your best friend. Love of poetry or music or pictures.

9. Watch something that makes you laugh for ten minutes a day. Seriously. Find a comedy programme which makes you shout with laughter and prescribe yourself that like you would prescribe medicine.

10. Find a sentence you can say out loud which will help reset your nervous system. When I feel myself approaching overwhelm, I’ll say things like, ‘We’ll be all right.’ I’ll tell myself, ‘We’ll get through this.’ Sometimes I’ll ask, out loud, on a walk, ‘What is really going on?’ Very useful to get down in the depths of the thing. But just something kind and reassuring works wonders. ‘We’ve got this. We’ll keep going. One small step after another.’

Yes, we will. We’ll keep going. This too shall pass.