What If Overwhelm Isn’t the Emotion? Why We Sometimes Feel Too Much, Yet Not Enough—and How the Body Can Help
You feel overwhelmed.
But if someone asked you why, or what exactly you’re feeling… you might not know. You just feel off. Foggy. Wound up. Flooded. Blank. Wired and tired at the same time.
It can feel like too much is happening inside you, without a clear signal or message to follow.
But what if overwhelm isn’t the emotion you really need to deal with?
What if it’s what shows up when you haven’t been able to feel what’s beneath it at all?
The Moment I Realised Overwhelm Was a Cover Story
For a long time, I treated overwhelm as a standalone state. A sign that life was “too busy,” my nervous system was overloaded, or I needed a break. Sometimes that was true.
But what I’ve come to realise—through training, through coaching, and through my own lived experience—is this:
> Overwhelm can also be a symptom of emotional disconnection, not emotional excess.
It’s what happens when we intellectualise our feelings, or try to manage them from a distance—without ever letting them land.
We might think:
“I know I’m feeling something, but I can’t get to it.”
“I can name the emotion, but it doesn’t feel real.”
“I should be able to cope with this, but I feel flooded anyway.”
Sound familiar?
This is a pattern that many people (especially high-functioning, thoughtful people) fall into: you process emotions with words, not with your body. You understand emotions cognitively, but don’t always experience them somatically.
And over time, all the un-felt, un-integrated emotion starts to pile up. It doesn’t go away—it just gets noisier. Messier. Louder.
Eventually, it spills over—not as anger, grief, fear, or sadness—but as overwhelm.
When the Body Tries to Speak and We Stay in Our Heads
From a neuroscience perspective, this makes perfect sense.
Emotions aren’t just thoughts. They’re bodily experiences—changes in breath, tension, heat, posture, heart rate.
When we ignore those signals—or lose access to them—we lose our in-built self-regulation system.
If you don’t feel the emotion as it comes, your body doesn’t know how to process or release it. It just keeps holding it.
Without that physical experience, your brain can’t fully complete the emotional loop. So it stays half-finished. Repeating. Piling on top of the next.
Eventually, all those unfelt emotions swirl together into a kind of emotional static—a sensory overload without clarity.
We call that overwhelm.
But maybe we’re naming the storm, not the weather patterns underneath it.
What to Do When You Don’t Know What You’re Feeling
So if overwhelm isn’t the emotion—what is?
It might be grief. Or fear. Or anger. Or a layered, messy mix of all three. But if you’re disconnected from your body’s signals, you can’t access them clearly.
Here’s how you can begin to shift that:
1. Start with the body, not the story
Don’t ask, “Why do I feel overwhelmed?”
Instead ask, “Where do I feel something in my body right now?”
You might notice:
A tightness in your chest
A fluttering in your stomach
A pressure behind your eyes
Let that be your starting point.
2. Give the emotion a safe place to land
The goal isn’t to solve or fix the feeling. It’s to feel it enough that your body recognises it, processes it, and releases what it can.
This might look like:
Breathing into the part of the body where you feel sensation
Moving (gently, freely, without agenda)
Letting sound, tears, or stillness come through
3. Use overwhelm as a cue, not a verdict
When overwhelm shows up, treat it as a signal, not an endpoint.
It might be saying:
“You’ve ignored this too long.”
“There’s something here that needs feeling.”
“You’re carrying more than you realise.”
What if overwhelm wasn’t the problem?
What if it was your body’s last attempt to get your attention?
So the next time you feel overwhelmed, pause.
Ask yourself: “What might I be feeling beneath this? What hasn’t had space yet?”
And instead of trying to “cope” better or “think” your way out—what if you tried simply feeling your way in?
You might find that you’re not feeling too much…
You’re just not yet feeling what’s really there.
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