From Overwhelm to Calm Waters… How to Stop Struggling and Find Your Way Back Home
Narrative Essay by Brenda Littleton
There’s a moment in life, sometimes it sneaks up, other times it barrels in like a freight train, when we realize that overwhelm isn’t just visiting. It’s taken up residence.
Original photo by B. Littleton
If I’ve learned anything over thirty years of coaching, teaching, and walking this path myself, it’s this: most of us don’t recognize overwhelm at first. We absorb it. We stack it like bricks. We accommodate, normalize, and adapt, until one day our body starts sending messages we can’t ignore. Tightness in the jaw, headaches that linger behind the eyes, that constant, low-grade hum of anxiety running through the chest, wired but exhausted at the same time.
I see it all the time with my clients. Successful people, responsible people, folks who’ve built lives that look solid from the outside, but inside? There’s often a quiet ache, a sense of always being “on,” even when the body is pleading for rest.
Overwhelm, if we’re honest, has become the water we swim in. And when it’s everywhere, our warning signs, those old boundaries and limits that used to flash red, go silent. We stop noticing the tension. We stop hearing the whispers. Instead, we push through with thought, strategy, and sheer will. Feelings? Those get set aside, dismissed as impractical or inconvenient.
But the body keeps score, as Dr. Gabor Maté reminds us. His work, especially in When the Body Says No, speaks so clearly to this moment so many of us face, the moment when our biology steps in to grab our attention because we’ve tuned out everything else. Chronic stress, repressed emotions, environments that feel unsafe or relentlessly demanding, these don’t just pass through us, they shape us. They trigger our nervous system into overdrive, often without our consent, and the body carries that imprint.
And the truth is, much of our overwhelm is not personal, it’s systemic. We are living in an age where the pace of information, productivity, and global unrest stacks additional layers of stress onto already stretched nervous systems. Social media, the constant flood of bad news, the expectation to always be “on,” it all accumulates beneath the surface. Over time, that accumulation shapes how we feel, how we breathe, and how we relate to the world around us.
It’s like being dropped into fast-moving water, only we’ve been in it so long, we forget how it feels to stand on solid ground. We adapt to the currents, but the body still remembers stillness, even if the mind forgets.
I see overwhelm show up in all kinds of ways that don’t get talked about enough.
Picking at skin or cuticles, often absent-mindedly
TMJ, jaw tension, or headaches that pulse behind the eyes
That "tired but wired" feeling, exhausted but unable to settle
Blurry vision, as though the world itself is fogged over
Chewing the inside of the cheeks
Brain fog, where thoughts feel slippery
Road rage, disproportionate to what’s happening around us
Tightness, a clamping down in the shoulders, belly, chest, or hips
A reliance on overthinking as a survival tool while emotions are stuffed down
These are not character flaws. They’re survival signals. They are the body’s way of managing a nervous system stuck in a loop of overwhelm.
Dr. Stephen Porges, the primary researcher behind Polyvagal Theory, has done extraordinary work helping us understand this state. According to Porges, when we experience real or perceived threats, whether it’s an argument, a work deadline, the news cycle, or unresolved trauma, the vagus nerve, our body’s internal communication highway, kicks into gear. It determines whether we feel safe, whether we fight, flee, freeze, or collapse. And here’s the part that matters. Our body can react even when our mind tells us everything’s fine. That disconnect is the hallmark of modern overwhelm.
Dr. Arielle Schwartz, who integrates trauma therapy with therapeutic yoga and polyvagal-informed practices, expands on this beautifully. She teaches that regulating the nervous system isn’t about powering through, but about returning home to the body. Breath, gentle movement, grounding in sensation, these practices give us a foothold when overwhelm has swept the ground out from beneath us. Her work offers daily tools to help reset the body’s alarms, not by suppressing them, but by listening to what they’re asking for.
Deb Dana builds on this understanding with her work in applied Polyvagal Theory. She often reminds us that “safety isn’t a place, it’s a state,” and in that state, the body can begin to settle. Her approach invites us to recognize that regulation happens gradually, in micro-moments of reconnection, not in forcing ourselves to feel calm when we are overwhelmed.
I’ve also leaned on the work of Peter Levine, the founder of Somatic Experiencing. His research shows how unresolved stress and trauma live in the body as tension, energy, and incomplete survival responses. In Waking the Tiger, Levine speaks to the instinctual side of healing, reminding us that the body holds onto overwhelm until we gently and consciously release it.
Bessel van der Kolk’s work echoes this, particularly in The Body Keeps the Score, which has become a cornerstone in understanding how deeply our experiences are imprinted into the body. His research validates what so many people feel but struggle to explain, that mental health is inseparable from how the body carries the past.
But I’ve also learned something else, something I lean on both personally and with the people I coach. You can’t think your way out of overwhelm. You have to relate to it. You have to meet it where it lives, which, more often than not, is deep within the unconscious.
This is where Jungian Active Imagination has been my most trusted companion. Carl Jung taught that the unconscious isn’t just a storage closet of forgotten fears, it’s alive. It holds wisdom. It carries fragments of the self that have been exiled by stress, performance, and survival. When we engage with the unconscious through Active Imagination, we aren’t trying to annihilate overwhelm, we’re building a relationship with it.
Instead of asking, How do I get rid of this, we learn to ask, What do you want me to know.
That shift changes everything.
I’ve guided hundreds of clients and students through this process, closing their eyes, slowing the breath, gently stepping into the inner landscape, and meeting the part of themselves that holds the overwhelm. Sometimes it shows up as an image, a tangled knot, a storm cloud, a clenched animal. Other times it’s a sensation, tightness in the chest, pressure behind the eyes, buzzing in the skin. Whatever form it takes, the practice remains the same. Locate it, listen to it, lean in.
Here’s the surprising truth. Overwhelm isn’t here to sabotage us. It’s here to redirect us. To alert us to the ways we’ve abandoned our own needs, silenced our instincts, or dismissed the quiet call for rest, connection, or boundaries.
When we stop treating overwhelm as the enemy, it softens. It becomes a collaborator, even a guide. It helps us reclaim what’s essential, the clarity that gets buried beneath the noise of performance, expectation, and fear.
I say this not as someone who’s mastered it, but as someone who’s still learning to listen. There are days I still override the signs. I feel the tension in my jaw, I catch myself scrolling past the ache in my body, I lean into thinking because feelings feel messy. But the body is patient. It waits for us to return. And when we do, with compassion, the conversation begins again.
If you see yourself in any of this, if your body has been whispering or screaming for your attention, you’re not broken. You’re responding to a world that asks too much, too fast, with too little space to simply be.
But there is another way.
Through the work of people like Dr. Maté, Dr. Schwartz, Dr. Porges, Deb Dana, Peter Levine, and Bessel van der Kolk, and through practices like Jungian Active Imagination, we can learn to slow down. We can repair the fractured relationship between body and mind. We can welcome overwhelm, not as an adversary, but as the signal it was always meant to be, a call back to ourselves.
It’s a slow remembering, like stepping out of turbulent waters onto steady ground. The currents may still swirl around us, but we no longer mistake them for the only way to exist.
And from there, relief begins. Not all at once, not perfectly. But gently, steadily, like a body remembering what safety feels like.
If you feel called to begin, you can start now. Even placing your hand on your chest and pausing for one slow, steady breath is enough. Your body has been waiting for you to listen.
If you’re curious about exploring this more deeply, whether through working with me, through these teachers I’ve mentioned, or both, I would invite you to begin. Your overwhelm isn’t the end of the story. It’s the doorway to a conversation your body has been longing to have.
Original photo by B. Littleton
Tin Flea Press, c. 2025