About a year ago, I wrote down this phrase on an idea list I keep on my phone: “How to get out from under the overwhelm.” Then those words sat there gathering digital dust. I had zero ideas on how to do that. All I knew for sure was that feeling overwhelmed is becoming way too familiar.
If wisdom comes with age, why aren’t I getting the benefits? If I’m entering the wise old owl phase of life, why do I still feel like a crazy chicken?
I asked my doctor about this once during an annual checkup, and he said to imagine my brain as a computer, and that every single thing I’ve done up to this point in my life has opened a new tab on that computer screen. It’s no wonder the thing is running a little slower or feeling a bit more chaotic, right?
I accepted that logic but couldn’t figure out how to close the open tabs. As a mom, my mission has always been not only to take care of myself but also to be ready at a moment’s notice to jump in and help family, friends, co-workers, and pets, and tackle anything else that might need doing. It can be stressful, sure, but stress comes with the territory for all of us. Feeling overwhelmed is different.
Author and researcher Brené Brown describes the difference between the two with this perfect illustration: “For me, stress is barely managing the Whac-A-Mole game at the carnival, and overwhelm is leaving the carnival in tears. And not being able to find my car.”
So that turned my question into this: How do I leave the carnival before it all becomes too much? The question lingered for months before I found what might be an answer in an article published by UCHealth, Colorado’s non-profit academic health system. It said: “Exercise — especially intense exercise — creates tiny tears in the muscles. Over time, as muscles heal, they eventually grow bigger and stronger. It’s important to remember that this process occurs during rest and recovery, not during the exercise session itself.”
Could a similar thing happen inside the brain? Would that explain why our nervous systems sometimes feel shredded and overwhelmed?
Just like a muscle, the human brain responds and adapts based on how it’s used. Quality sleep is a must-have, of course, but something called “wakeful rest” is also important. Wakeful rest is what we’re doing when we’re awake but not working on a task or taking in new information. We’re just letting our minds drift.
Researchers, including psychology professor Erin Wamsley, are currently studying how wakeful rest might help the brain organize and consolidate what we’ve learned. “Rest is not a waste of time,” she said in an article published by Furman University News. “Instead, that’s an important time when our recent memories are processed by being replayed and strengthened in the brain.”
We live in a time when consuming truckloads of new information is easy. We’re deluged daily by videos, articles, podcasts, newscasts, texts, emails, and social media feeds that are more than happy to overload our brain with more, more, more.
We instinctively know it wouldn’t be smart to sprint on a treadmill for hours because we’d quickly become exhausted, yet we expect our brain to do just that all day every day. We’ve convinced ourselves that mentally buckling down and pushing through is the noble thing to do in almost every situation. But our biology disagrees.
Rest is not only just as important as effort, it’s also what helps maximize the impact of our efforts.
If you’d like to try some wakeful rest, carve out as little as 5 to 20 minutes during the day. You’ll want a quiet place where your mind can peacefully idle. No phones, no noise, no tasks. Just a healthy chunk of nothingness. Sounds pretty nice, right?
Here’s some homework you might like. At least once a day every day this week, let your brain rest for 5 to 20 minutes. Bonus points if you do it in nature or right after you’ve done something difficult. “Watch paint dry,” or “watch the grass grow,” just as our great-grandparents did long before there were so many screens to get in the way.
Maybe a daily dose of zero input will help us all crawl out from under the overwhelm.
Gwen Rockwood is a syndicated freelance columnist. Email her at gwenrockwood5@gmail.com. Her books are available on Amazon.