Noticing early signs of overwhelm can help you restore healthy emotional flow in your life.
When you lose enough blood, as I did during a massive hemorrhage after my last child was born almost three years ago, your body goes into survival mode.
In hemorrhagic shock, a type of hypovolemic shock, the blood that typically flows throughout your whole system is redirected to your core. The idea is that your heart and brain are non-negotiable. But your arms and legs? Well, a person can get by without them. In an emergency, the wisdom of your body deprioritizes the periphery.
It’s a strategic move that can save your life during a short-term threat, but it’s not sustainable. If you don’t take action to address the cause, hemorrhagic shock is fatal.
I’ve noticed that when my mind encounters a big enough threat – even a too heavy load of daily stressors like those that accompany the start of summer – it shifts gears in a similar way.
Being Stuck in Stress Leads to Mental Constriction
When I’m feeling balanced and calm, my attention, compassion, and love flow freely outward to my family and friends. I am generally considerate, happy to hold a door or send a “this made me think of you” text. I have perspective, weathering the everyday insults of parenting with a bone-deep understanding that my three kids are each on their own developmentally-informed journeys.
But being stuck in a stress response staunches this positive mental circulation. Suddenly, I’ll notice that I am making fewer offers of help. Irritation comes more easily than affection, especially with my children. My focus becomes more immediate and shifts toward me me me. Everything peripheral begins to drop away.
Know the Signs You Need Emotional First Aid
That self-focused, constricted feeling is a signal I’m stuck in stress.
When my body went into hypovolemic shock, the doctors knew it was a medical emergency requiring surgery. There was no time to wait.
Emotional stress requires action too, but, without the made-for-TV drama of crash carts and surgeons racing into an operating room, it can be easier to brush off. During my postpartum hemorrhage, I had just minutes. Emotional stress might allow you to function for weeks or months. It might be easy to tell yourself it’s fine. You’ll be fine. This isn’t a big deal.
But there is more than one kind of big deal. When I don’t act to restore a healthier emotional flow, in time, I’ve learned that I will suffer. I’ll have less capacity. I’ll become less effective at home and work. Plus, it just feels bad to have a cramped mental world.
Research even suggests that greater self-focus and irritability, like the kind I noticed this month, are two leading indicators of a budding mental health problem.
In one study, researchers analyzed the language of posts in online discussion forums. They found that first-person singular pronouns (I, me, mine) were more common in forums for folks with psychiatric diagnoses than in a control community with a financial focus. These results suggest that self-focused speech is a sign things may be going downhill.
There is also growing agreement that irritability is a transdiagnostic feature of many types of mental illness, meaning being grumpy may kick off a variety of mental health disorders and keep them going, as researchers argued in this paper.
By keeping an eye out for the kinds of problems that, unchecked, can undercut your mental well-being, you can better monitor your own mental state and nip problems in the bud.
How to Restore Healthy Emotional Flow
My kids had their last day of school on a Monday in June. By that Friday, I noticed the tell-tale signs of being stuck in stress, ones I’ve learned the hard way are unwise to ignore. Namely, I started snapping at my kids on the regular and noticed my thoughts had become boringly egocentric.
Because I’ve been down this road before, I knew shouldn’t let this slide. Here’s what I’m doing to restore balance:
- Shore up physical health building blocks. A physically out-of-whack body tends to be tighter and more tense. Dialing in movement, sleep, and nutrition—in the ways you’ve learned support well-being for yourself—can help soothe stress. For me, that means keeping up with my planned runs, putting myself to bed on time, and feeding myself at regular intervals while I’m awake.
- Claim pockets of quiet. I can handle high gear, but I need downtime to regroup. While a whole afternoon to myself is dreamy, that’s just not doable every day. But a single-digit number of silent minutes can almost always fit. My go-to’s include a short walk around the block and setting a timer for five minutes in the hammock, both of which I’ve done this month. But sometimes adding one more thing isn’t possible either, so I also like to adjust what I’m already doing to reduce some sensory input, including by taking out my headphones during my run and pausing my audiobook while I drive. Consider this strategy mindfulness meditation-lite.
- Say yes to connection. When my heart feels constricted, one symptom is that I forget how good it feels to see friends. So during these times, I have to take it as an article of faith that connecting with people you like and who like you helps you come back to yourself. As a baseline, I try to have at least one social engagement on my calendar each week, including some I’ve set on social autopilot. The habit made it easier this month when I could tell I needed friends to help my system relax, and I already had plans on my calendar. My only job was to not cancel.
- Ask for help. Realistic and specific is the name of the game here. This time, when I told my husband something needed to come off my plate, one of the things we landed on was him taking over meal planning for the week. Maybe it’ll be for the entire season. But the whole summer isn’t here yet. One block of time can be enough to get going and create some ease.
Sometimes the Answer to Overwhelm Is To Let Yourself Feel Overwhelmed
Here’s the part where I backtrack. I do think the aforementioned strategies help bring back emotional balance. I can honestly say they helped me this month when life felt too busy. But not every stressful season is solvable with strategy. Sometimes things are just hard.
When there’s no real way out of overwhelm, I think there’s still something you can do: Feel your feelings. An unfelt feeling tends to kick around until you acknowledge it. Asking yourself how you feel — really — and letting yourself well up can do wonders in bringing you back to yourself.
Heart Flow is Vital
And you deserve to return to yourself.
Heart flow, like blood flow, is vital to well-being. Just because restoring it doesn’t require a fleet of physicians doesn’t make tending to it unimportant or the care required any less worthwhile.
My Latest Writing
Mood Changes After Giving Birth? Spotting the Signs of Postpartum Bipolar Disorder, for Everyday Health and bpHope
No one Googles “Do I have postpartum bipolar disorder?” on their best day ever. So I consider it a great privilege to be tapped to write one of the articles that may flash across your screen during such a tender time. There’s always an enormous responsibility that comes with covering mental health, and I never take it lightly. That duty felt doubled with writing about bipolar disorder with peripartum onset, a life-altering diagnosis during an already life-defining transition. As always, I aim to provide clear, correct, and compassionate information to whoever reads my stories and, dear readers, I hope I did right by you this time.
Book Recommendations
Ordinary Human Failings: A Novel, by Megan Nolan
I’ll preface this by saying that I know what I’m about to write slants pretentious, but I mean it with only earnest appreciation. Ok, so! With that out of the way: When I landed in London for spring break with my husband, kids, and parents, I was way too jet-lagged to do much, but like a moth to a flame, I could not resist stopping in our temporary neighborhood bookshop, Daunte Books, to do one of my favorite things. I asked the local booksellers for their favorite books to recommend. Specifically, I requested reads I may have missed in the U.S. Enter one of the gems the booksellers pointed me towards: Ordinary Human Failings. On one level, it’s a book about a child accused of a violent crime. But, really, it’s about big questions. What happens when we can’t face the truth about ourselves? How can we make amends for the harm we cause? How can we make room for complexity? Why do some people cope with setbacks while others collapse? A great book club pick.
Daunte Books | My Bookshop | Amazon
The Book of Goose: A Novel, by Yiyun Li
Another excellent selection from the brilliant book sellers at Apostle Island Booksellers, located at the tippy top of Wisconsin (Should you find yourself in the upper midwest, I highly recommend making a detour to this sweet shop). This book follows a young woman looking back at the literary hoax she and her best friend engineered as girls, and the intense friendship that undergirded it all. Explores themes of friendship, sexuality, class, truth, art, and families.
Apostle Island Booksellers | My Bookshop | Amazon
Social Skills Activity Deck for Kids: 30 Super Fun Ways to Make Friends, Listen Better, and Build Self-Confidence, by Betsy Petersen and Brad Petersen
A big part of growing up human is developing the skills to be in relationship with other humans. But I haven’t met an adult yet who has everything figured out. That’s where tools like this activity deck come in. It provides structured support for developing social skills in the elementary and middle school set. This deck is kid-friendly, but I have trouble picturing a child who needs the skill brush-up and also would be able to use it totally on their own with peers (most of the activities are designed for doing with others). Instead, I see it as ideal companion for an adult who wants to facilitate this skill building for small groups of kids — think parents, teachers, camp counselors, mental health therapists, and school psychologists. I tried it out with my 6-year-old and 9-year-old. They selected the “Be Flexible” card, which had them pretend to weather a storm as a bamboo stalk — dealing with big feelings while staying grounded. While my older son initially said it felt a little silly, he went with it. By the end, he was into it and said “I definitely think it mimicked the changing of emotions.” For his part, my younger son reported feeling calm after.
*Thank you to Gibbs Smith for the review copy. See my disclosure statement for my policy on accepting books for review.
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