A (Counterintuitive) Strategy that Helps When You Feel Overwhelmed

Think of the difference between: walking on a tightrope vs. walking on a woven rope bridge.

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The next time you feel overwhelmed, I invite you to think of how pressure is distributed on a tightrope vs. a woven rope bridge.

Here’s the guiding principle:

The more parts of yourself you have access to, the less pressure any one part has to carry.

Psychological pressure builds when we collapse into a single identity. A single part of us. A single story. A single strategy. Think: Walking a tightrope. One wrong step. One wrong move. Tightrope walking is intense and pressure filled, by its very nature.

Popular single identities include whatever you do for work, parent, friend, artist. It is the part of you that you value the most, or spend the most time and attention occupying.

Walking a tightrope, or occupying a single identity, looks like:

• Spending our precious time, attention and energy “all-in” on one aspect of ourselves (the deal that’s closing, the security breach, the 1 year old birthday party, the opening show, caregiving for an elderly parent, etc.)

• Working harder, for longer hours, at higher levels of intensity on that one aspect of yourself

• Powering-through in your devotion to that single part, even as you start to feel more worn down, adrift, stressed, behind, hollow and crispy (perhaps even burned out)

Putting all of your weight, all of your heft and complexity, into one part of yourself is not only painful - it also ratchets up the intensity of the pressure we feel.

The way our bodies are wired doesn’t help.* There’s also a paradox at play,** where the ways we learn to manage pressure growing up (to overwork, be perfect, be right, and not ruffle any feathers) are often the very strategies that leave us leaning on one rope (one part of us) to begin with.

Let’s apply the guiding principle and answer the question: What offers relief?

Give Yourself Permission to Be Multidimensional

Distribute your weight over more ropes. Add a couple more underneath your feet. See how the pressure changes. How your experience, adjusts.

In other words: give yourself permission to access to more parts of yourself, to strengthen your resilience and bolster your capacity to navigate the aspects of life that are more threatening or fear-inducing.

Practically that means, first, having clarity about the different parts of you. Sometimes it’s easiest to lean into the roles you play: chief information security officer, dad, friend, son. Your choices from these different parts could include: attend to email, help with homework, go for a walk, or catch a round of golf.

It can also be helpful to look at what lights you up, as a way to identify parts: the part that loves being outside, the part that is athletic, the part that loves books or puzzles. Here you can see there is some overlap, with the roles you occupy. We are many things at one time, and the boundaries between all the different parts of us are beautifully blurry. Your choices from this articulation of your multidimensionality can be: a forest bath, attending a group fitness class, reading a mystery novel, or taking a puzzle off the shelf.

Once you have some clarity on your multidimensionality (your different parts), you can give yourself permission to add in extra rope. To occupy different parts of yourself, and embrace your multidimensionality.

A woven rope bridge: sturdy, strong, resilient. One rope falters, look at how the other rope parts can pick up the slack. It may be rickety for a while, but it wasn’t destroyed.

Objection Handling Time:

“But Kara, I don’t have time to occupy a different part of myself. Truly.”

I believe you. I also believe that you don’t know if you have time or not.

When we occupy different parts of ourselves, we unlock and allow all of our parts to perform differently. If you’ve ever finished a long run and then knocked out a week’s worth of to-dos in an afternoon, or spent a night enjoying cooking and then found clarity around a gnarly problem waiting for you the next morning, you know what I’m talking about.

I would also add that the challenge of always choosing to occupy one part of us is that, in doing so, it starts to feel less possible to occupy other parts. It feels more unfamiliar, more frightening or threatening, and less accessible. The idea that there isn’t time, might sometimes, be a bit of fear about what happens if you shift out of your more familiar part. It is real and a strong deterrent that is physiological as well as psychological, and worth examining with gentleness and discernment. Sometimes there is no time, really, and other times, there is. Do you know the difference?***

“I feel so guilty, and also like a failure”

You make sense, not because you are actually doing anything wrong or because you are a deficient failure of a human being.

We have been taught, from childhood, that success is hustling - that it is a narrowing, a focusing, a singular path and process.*** We are taught to see ourselves as a monolith, as having only a single tightrope to walk.

Did you ever hear that commitment means “giving it your all” growing up? Were you asked to compete at the most select levels in one sport or activity, as opposed to doing a wide variety of activities at varying levels of intensity? Was success modeled as a multiplicity, or as looking, walking, talking and behaving a particular, singular way?****

The feeling that you are doing something wrong by occupying your multidimensionality is programming - a belief you learned to stay secure, connected and safe while growing up and navigating the world. It’s not original to you, and upon examination, does not reflect what you actually believe about yourself and the world.

Programming is the idea that commitment requires singularity. When there is guilt, there is often programming. Programming is also most effective when it piggy-backs on a genuine value of yours.

That looks like: “I feel guilty for taking the night to work, like a failure as a parent.” The value is a deep, abiding love for your family. The programming is the idea that if you cared about your family you wouldn’t work, you would be wholly devoted in your time, attention, and energy.

It can go the other way: “I feel guilty for taking the night to enjoy my family, I should be working.” The value is contributing to your team and moving the ball forward, programming is that your contribution requires your singularity.

TL;DR: Sometimes, the most effective strategy to find relief in overwhelm is simply to add more of ourselves back into the world. To give ourselves permission, to be complex, multidimensional, and to matter.

As always, be gentle out there - on yourself and one another.

Shout out to the incomparable Becky McNattin for helping me talk through the idea of adding more, and in fact, introducing it to me in the first place. Becky co-hosts a weekly radio show that’s also a podcast, that I can’t reccomend enough.

*As we discussed last week, overwhelm changes blood flow to the brain, such that we focus on threat detection and elimination. In other words, when we are overwhelmed, our natural response is to narrow. Focus on what’s wrong. Double down. To dive deeper into the part of us that is under pressure.

**Yes, this is very meta: the bed of nails is about holding multiplicity and the essence of paradox is about holding the tension and interdependence between seemingly conflicting ideas (or parts).

***If this sounds like you: I invite you to start slowly, by picking a part with a high reward. For me that looked starting to take more walks on busy days. Practicing literally walking away as the emails would come in, developing discernment between when I was actually needing to be responsive and when it was just common practice and the norm.

****Anecdotally, even as an adult, the belief that commitment is singular still haunts me. For example, as an entrepreneur, I’ve lost count of the number of times people asked if I had “another job” when I started my company, as if it’s a dirty question. I wonder if the portfolio career approach is changing this, alongside economic uncertainty and the so-called “gig economy.”

*****An alternate analogy is also a bed of nails vs a single nail. This image makes me smile because it’s pencil crayons and how fun is that!

"bed of nails" with pencil crayons