OVERWHELM Explained - “My Emotions Overwhelm Me, So I Eat”

 Overwhelm can rapidly contribute to losing control of eating. So, here, I talk about what overwhelm really is, and how to take back control of feeling overwhelmed.

One listener says: 

“I want to learn how to recover for real, and for good. I can stay on a plan for a couple of months, and then my emotions overwhelm me and I cave to the comfort of overeating”

Can you relate to this? If so, you might need to understand more about overwhelm. 

Try this podcast next: 10 Ways to Overcome Anxiety

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Hi, this is Shelly Treacher from Underground Confidence. Today I'm going to carry on talking about how you can get control back of your eating. Today I'm going to talk about overwhelm because this is something that can make your eating go out of control really quickly. I have these words that have been sent to me. See if you can relate to this. She says, I want to learn how to recover for real and for good. I can stay on a plan for a couple of months and then my emotions overwhelm me, and I cave to the comfort of overeating. This is an extremely common reason for comfort eating. I think of overwhelm as having too many emotions and thoughts at once. Having too many emotions at once is the comfort eater's nightmare. Not knowing how to deal with one emotion is hard enough, but having more than one, having sadness or anger or frustration, irritation all at once, way too overwhelming. So eating is a much easier option, right? The Merriam-Webster definition of overwhelm is to have too many things to deal with. Once again, that is the comfort eaters' realm. The comfort eaters that I work with all have way too much to do. I'll talk a little bit more about what that actually is and what's underneath that, but for now let's carry on talking about what overwhelm is. There could be physical or emotional signs of overwhelm. I think of overwhelm as having a kind of a blank brain and not really having the capacity to do what we can normally do quite easily, finding it difficult to manage, or being unable to think straight, having an unclear brain. Of course, my experience is that this could be confused with menopause. But to be fair, overwhelm is quite common in menopause, so you could be experiencing both. But what overwhelm actually is, is the nervous system's response to there being too much. So it's its attempt to shut down and give you a break. It's the defense system kicking in. If we have a look at something that's been illustrated as the window of tolerance, it's quite easy to see how if we go out of our window of tolerance, we might become overwhelmed. Inside your window of tolerance, we all have a window, a limited window of tolerance. Some of us have a big level of tolerance, but we all have a limit. Anyway, inside that is your comfort zone where you feel okay, you can cope with life, you can do what you normally do and get on with what you normally get on with. You have the ability to self-soothe, you have the ability to just calmly, neutrally get on with the day. You might feel some kind of stress and pressure, but it doesn't really bother you so much. This is the ideal place for us to be, and a lot of the techniques that I talk about are designed to get you back into that window of tolerance. We can go out of our window of tolerance when something bothers us enough to push us out. This is usually caused by some kind of thought, something that happens in the world, or some kind of belief that you have. Or it could be caused by a body sensation. According to the illustration, there's typically two ways that we can go out of our window of tolerance. One of them is dissociation, blanking out, numbness. The other way is to feel a fight or flight response which might cause overwhelm. All of this can really shrink your tolerance level. I talked in a previous podcast about anxiety. This is, of course, another major contributor to overwhelm. It's important to note at this point that you can't really stop this from happening. This fight or flight response, this overwhelm, is something that your physiological system will just automatically choose when it feels threatened. But you can get a handle on it and work backwards to understand what's going on. I think of anxiety and overwhelm as future thinking rather than present thinking. Often what I see has happened is that clients have gone into their brains, especially in worrying about something in the future or about a belief stress system that they have that puts them down in some way. So they've gone into their minds to try and solve the problem. Another version of being overwhelmed is panic. Have you ever had that feeling of doom inside you and you're not even sure why? This might be the overwhelm or the worry or the panic setting in. And it may not even belong to the current situation, it might be a trigger from something else. Merriam Webster carries on to describe overwhelm as to defeat someone or something completely. Often in overwhelm, we might overreact. Which has left a lot of us feeling some kind of loneliness. And some people are experiencing more of a codependent experience with their relationships than they would have before. Where now they're relying on just one or two people for everything. Whereas before, they had a whole host of people to do lots of different things with. At first, I remember everybody was really relieved, or a lot of people were really relieved at the beginning of the pandemic, to scale back, to not have to do so many things, to claim back their energy and to put their energy into things that really mattered. I do think that was extremely important for us. And I do think it was a response to the threat and a way to survive, something extremely difficult for us to cope with. And it worked really well. But I'm now seeing the negative side of that, where people are in their comfort zones and not quite so prepared to go out of them and not really knowing how to anymore. Another thing that might tie in with this and is a huge contributor to overwhelm is just being a sensitive person. A lot of clients I see, a lot of comfort eaters, are very empathic people who feel what other people feel without trying to. They walk into a room and they can feel where the tension is. They walk to a meeting and they know where the conflict is and they feel it. This is an incredible gift if you happen to be able to use it in your job or in your life, in your relationships. It can be extremely useful to know what's going on with people. However, of course, it can be extremely debilitating as well if you don't know how to separate emotionally. That's another way that overwhelm can come. I personally know how this one feels. I don't think any therapist could do my job without knowing how to be empathic. I am someone who needs a lot of space and time to process things. I would argue that we all do, but maybe I'm just aware of it because of my job. But so I can feel overwhelmed quite easily. I can feel my brain go blank. It actually happens a lot while I'm trying to record this podcast. It's happening right now. But what happens to me is I suddenly start to get short of breath. I start to stumble on my words, see I'm stumbling on my words now, I start to stumble on my words, and I cannot get the right syllables out. So this is quite off like kicking in, and behind that is a voice that says, You're not doing good enough. Which is of course extremely familiar for the comfort eater. The comfort eater might have that as a belief, might have had that growing up from childhood, might have interpreted whatever their caregivers or parents uh did or said to them as them being not good enough if they didn't have enough attention, if they were criticized, if they were utterly neglected, they might have grown up feeling like they weren't good enough, and so probably try to do too much now. So overwhelm just comes with the territory of a comfort eater, unfortunately. So what we all have to learn to do is to slow down, to learn to ride the wave of what happens when something slows down. Maybe check what kind of a response you're having now that I've slowed down. Check your body, your physical response. Do you feel yourself calming down? Or are you getting slightly nervous? I know that's entirely possible, for the comfort eater to slow down is really frightening. Who knows what emotion you're gonna have, huh? As well as slowing down, what's gonna help is staying in the present instead of worrying about the future and trying to name what's going on for you. Trying to unpack what is involved in that overwhelm, because there's gonna be more than one thing. Allowing whatever comes up, even if it's tears, even if it's anger, and allowing yourself rest. That's something that the comfort eater, the overeater, the overscheduler doesn't really get much of, but is in desperate need of, and that may be why you're overwhelmed in the first place. I talked a little bit about this when I talked about binge eating in the evening. This is one of my first, like my third or fourth podcast, I think. This is something that happens, I think, particularly for people who do binge eat in the evening, and I've got to say most people I who come to me do binge eat in the evening. They often work really hard all day, starve themselves, feel good about starving themselves, and then scoff loads of food in the evening. I'm not averse to this myself. It's really easily done because uh with our culture, especially in England right now, things are really tough. Money is tight, people are working harder and harder than ever, so self-care is needed more than ever. But this is what's happening with binge eating in the evening. We go into the fight part of fight or flight in the daytime, we push through, we're motivated, we get all the work done, we please everybody. And then in the evening, there's nothing left for us. We're exhausted and fed up probably. So you start eating. Away from that binge eating though, and away from the overwhelm. See if you can slow down and start to trace back what all the different feelings were. Name them one by one. Name the feelings, name the thoughts, name the beliefs, and name the judgments. Have different columns on your worksheet for these. Anger, fear, hurt, they're all separate, and they come from a different belief, like I'm not good enough. Or from different judgments and self-criticisms, like I just didn't do very well today, I'm not happy with my performance. Or if you got criticized by a boss or felt criticized by a boss, you're going to be having some kind of thought and some kind of belief that makes that worse. Oh, I knew I was no good. It's just proof, and you can perpetuate that on and on, and then eating more will perpetuate that too. But here you're letting somebody else decide who you are and what your worth is. These sometimes fictitious people also get to decide whether you have any needs at all. I've known a lot of comfort eaters come and see me who don't even let themselves go to the toilet in between things. They hold on and hold on. So the solution is going to be learning to say yes and no differently and starting to allow you to be the one who decides when your needs get met, how to have needs even, and being less hard on yourself. This always comes back to the self-critic. Other things that can help with overwhelm, particularly in the moment, are physical activity or touch or soothing. Being creative is also quite a good outlet. You might need to go the opposite. You might need to just let yourself check out, particularly if you're in a meeting where you know you're gonna get triggered. Just let yourself check out a little bit. Maybe you'll you probably already do this, right? But just have be having the mild thoughts of your needs are important, nobody around me thinks they are, but I need to think that. This is new. I have to be looking after myself. None of these people are gonna do that for me. That's really all I want to talk about today. Next week leads on from this, I'm gonna start to talk about happiness. But what I've talked about today is overwhelm. How overwhelm is the fight or flight response and often comes from anxiety or having too many emotions and self-critical thoughts. The ways to deal with overwhelm are to start looking after yourself, both in the bigger picture, longer term, looking at your life, and also in the moment. You may need to check out, you may need physical touch, you may need something else that looks after you. And you may need to understand what the thought process is that leads you into this. I had a lovely example recently in one of my groups where we looked at the experience of shame and overwhelm. Somebody felt really ashamed and overwhelmed. You know that hot, awful heat that you feel inside your torso when you feel shame and in your face and your head, the red heat and the just the feeling of dread and downness. We were talking about how you can trace back how you feel. So she traced back from that dreadful feeling to what the thought was just before she started feeling that. And she traced back delicately, one by one, all these little self-critical fears. And we worked out that she went from I'm gonna be okay, oh god, there's too many people here, no, I'm gonna be okay, to I'm not okay. Everybody's looking at me, I'm not doing the right thing here, I feel too old. Lots and lots of self-criticisms that just crept in. Even though on one level she was thinking, no, I'm fine, I'm fine, I'm beautiful, I'm vibrant, I've got all these skills, I know what I'm doing. But on some level her child was just sinking lower and lower. These are the things you're gonna find behind any overwhelm, any feelings, any difficulty that you're having. And it's all gonna trace back to a belief. For her, the belief was that she wasn't good enough. And just talking that out loud to a group of six people who had a huge amount of love and compassion for her, she understood that she'd been doing this to herself and didn't need to. Because there's nothing wrong with her. She was lovely. This is the kind of thing that you can find in my groups. If you're looking for help with overwhelm or one of the many causes for overeating, I'd love to help. So please check out my program. But that's it for me today. I would really love to hear your comments and questions, so please, please, please keep sending them in. Every single thing that you say is useful, helpful, supportive to somebody else. Thank you. As I say, next week I'll be talking about happiness and how that's really important with comfort eating. But until then, have a lovely week. I'll see you on Wednesday. This is Underground Confidence with Shelly Treacher.