Self-Care for Overwhelm: 15 Practices When Everything Feels Like Too Much
When life piles up and everything feels impossible, you need practices that actually work in the moment. These 15 strategies will help you navigate overwhelm, reclaim your calm, and find your way back to manageable—one small step at a time.
Introduction: When Too Much Becomes Everything
You know the feeling.
The to-do list that keeps growing no matter how much you cross off. The responsibilities pulling you in twelve directions at once. The sense that you are perpetually behind, always dropping balls, never quite catching up. The tightness in your chest that appears each morning before you even get out of bed.
This is overwhelm—and in our modern world, it has become almost universal.
Overwhelm is not just being busy. Plenty of people are busy without being overwhelmed. Overwhelm is the point where demands exceed capacity, where the weight of everything becomes crushing, where the normal coping mechanisms stop working and you feel like you are drowning in your own life.
It is the working parent juggling career, children, household, and relationships while running on insufficient sleep. It is the student facing exams, applications, social pressures, and an uncertain future simultaneously. It is the caregiver managing someone else’s needs while their own go unmet. It is anyone whose life has accumulated more than they can handle.
The cruel thing about overwhelm is that it attacks your ability to respond effectively. When you most need clarity, you get brain fog. When you most need energy, you feel paralyzed. When you most need to prioritize, everything screams with equal urgency. Overwhelm does not just add problems—it impairs your ability to solve them.
This article offers fifteen practices for when everything feels like too much. These are not productivity hacks or time management tips. They are survival strategies—ways to calm your nervous system, regain perspective, and take manageable steps when the whole feels impossible. They meet you in the overwhelm and help you find your way out.
You are not weak for feeling overwhelmed. You are human, facing more than humans are designed to handle. Let us find a way through.
Understanding Overwhelm
Before we explore the practices, let us understand what overwhelm actually is and why it hijacks us so effectively.
Overwhelm Is a Nervous System State
Overwhelm is not just a mental experience—it is a physiological state. When demands exceed perceived capacity, your nervous system activates its stress response. Cortisol floods your system. Your prefrontal cortex—the part of your brain responsible for planning and rational thought—goes partially offline. Your body prepares for threat, not for calm problem-solving.
This is why thinking your way out of overwhelm rarely works. The very tool you need for strategic thinking has been compromised by the overwhelm itself.
The Causes Are Often Multiple
Overwhelm usually results from accumulation, not a single cause:
- Too many commitments
- Too little support
- Insufficient rest and recovery
- Unrealistic expectations (your own or others’)
- Life transitions or crises
- Chronic stress without relief
- Poor boundaries
Addressing overwhelm often requires addressing multiple contributing factors, not finding the single culprit.
Overwhelm Distorts Perception
When overwhelmed, everything looks urgent. Everything looks important. Everything looks like it must be done immediately by you. This is the distortion—overwhelm removes the ability to see clearly, to prioritize accurately, to distinguish between essential and optional.
Some of the practices below specifically address this perceptual distortion.
Recovery Requires Both Immediate and Long-Term Strategies
Immediate strategies help you survive the acute overwhelm—calming your nervous system, clearing your head, taking manageable action. Long-term strategies address the conditions that created the overwhelm—boundaries, commitments, expectations, support systems.
Both matter. Immediate strategies without long-term change means recurring overwhelm. Long-term strategies are hard to implement while drowning in acute overwhelm. You need both.
The 15 Practices for Overwhelm
Practice 1: Stop and Breathe
When overwhelm hits, your first instinct may be to push harder, move faster, do more. This usually makes things worse. The first practice is counterintuitive: stop moving and breathe.
How to Practice:
Stop whatever you are doing. Literally pause.
Take five slow, deep breaths. Inhale for four counts, exhale for six counts. The extended exhale activates your parasympathetic nervous system.
Do not try to solve anything yet. Just breathe. Just interrupt the spiral.
Repeat until you feel even slightly calmer—then proceed to other practices.
Why It Matters:
You cannot think clearly from an activated stress state. Breathing is the fastest way to shift your nervous system toward calm. It does not solve the overwhelm, but it creates the conditions where solving becomes possible.
Sarah uses this whenever overwhelm peaks. “My instinct is to panic and speed up. Now I recognize that instinct as a sign to stop and breathe. Five breaths does not fix anything—but it lets me respond instead of react.”
Practice 2: Name What You Are Feeling
Overwhelm often feels like one massive, undifferentiated weight. Naming the specific emotions within it begins to break it into manageable pieces.
How to Practice:
Ask yourself: What am I actually feeling right now? Anxious? Scared? Angry? Sad? Exhausted?
Get specific. “Overwhelmed” is a label for a state. What are the feelings inside that state?
Say them out loud or write them down: “I am feeling anxious about the deadline, frustrated that I have no help, and exhausted from poor sleep.”
Notice if naming creates even a small sense of relief. It often does.
Why It Matters:
Neuroscience research shows that naming emotions reduces their intensity. The act of labeling activates prefrontal cortex and calms the amygdala. Naming does not solve the problems, but it reduces their emotional charge.
Practice 3: Brain Dump Everything
When everything is swirling in your head, it is impossible to assess accurately. Getting it all out of your head and onto paper makes the overwhelm visible—and often smaller than it felt.
How to Practice:
Get paper and pen (physical writing is often more effective than typing for this).
Write down everything on your mind: tasks, worries, obligations, fears, ideas, anything taking up mental space.
Do not organize or prioritize yet. Just dump. The goal is emptying, not sorting.
Keep going until your mind feels emptier. Often this takes longer than expected.
Why It Matters:
Your brain is not designed to hold and manage dozens of open loops. When you try, it creates the sense of overwhelm. Externalizing onto paper frees cognitive resources and shows you what you are actually dealing with.
Practice 4: Identify the One Next Thing
When everything demands attention, trying to address everything at once paralyzes. Instead, identify just one next thing—the single smallest step you could take.
How to Practice:
Look at everything demanding your attention. Ask: What is one small thing I could do right now?
Make it small—not “clean the house” but “put away five items.” Not “finish the project” but “write one paragraph.”
Do just that one thing. When it is done, identify the next one thing.
This is not about solving everything—it is about forward movement that breaks paralysis.
Why It Matters:
Overwhelm creates paralysis because everything seems too big and too urgent. One small step is always possible. Taking it builds momentum and proves you can act. Action, even tiny action, counters the helplessness of overwhelm.
Marcus uses this when projects overwhelm him. “Instead of looking at the whole mountain, I ask what’s literally the smallest next step. It’s always something simple. And somehow, tiny step after tiny step, things get done.”
Practice 5: Cancel or Postpone Something
Overwhelm often comes from having too much on your plate. Removing something—canceling a commitment, postponing an obligation—provides immediate relief.
How to Practice:
Look at your upcoming commitments. What could you cancel or postpone without catastrophe?
Give yourself permission to remove it. The world will not end. Most things are less mandatory than they feel.
Send the message, make the call, update the calendar. Make the removal real.
Notice the relief. Let it teach you that you have more control over your commitments than overwhelm suggests.
Why It Matters:
Overwhelm tells you everything is essential and mandatory. This is rarely true. Removing even one thing proves that you can reduce the load—and often that thing was less critical than it seemed.
Practice 6: Ask for Help
Overwhelm often comes with the belief that you have to handle everything alone. You do not. Asking for help—even small help—reduces the load and reminds you that support exists.
How to Practice:
Identify something on your plate that someone else could help with.
Ask specifically: “Could you pick up the kids on Thursday?” is more effective than “I need help.”
Let go of how they do it. Help executed imperfectly is still help.
Practice asking before you are desperate. People are often willing to help—they just need to be asked.
Why It Matters:
Isolation compounds overwhelm. Connection and support counter it. Asking for help is not weakness—it is wisdom about human limitations and the value of community.
Practice 7: Ruthlessly Prioritize
Not everything on your plate is equally important. Overwhelm makes everything seem urgent, but that is a distortion. Ruthless prioritization cuts through this distortion.
How to Practice:
Look at your brain dump or to-do list. Ask of each item: What actually happens if this does not get done? The honest answer is often “not much.”
Identify the vital few—the items with real consequences that only you can do.
Give yourself permission to let the rest wait, be done imperfectly, or not happen at all.
Apply the 80/20 rule: What 20% of tasks would produce 80% of the important results?
Why It Matters:
Treating everything as equally important guarantees overwhelm because you cannot do everything. Prioritization accepts this reality and focuses limited resources on what matters most.
Practice 8: Set a Time Boundary
When overwhelm extends indefinitely, it becomes unbearable. Setting a time boundary contains it, making it survivable.
How to Practice:
Choose a time when you will stop working on the overwhelming situation for today. “I will work on this until 6pm, then stop.”
When the time comes, actually stop. Do not let “just one more thing” extend indefinitely.
Trust that tomorrow exists. What does not get done today can be addressed later.
Protect evening and morning transition times. Overwhelm that has no boundaries consumes everything.
Why It Matters:
Unbounded overwhelm is crushing. Bounded overwhelm is manageable. Knowing there is an end point—even a temporary one—makes the period until then survivable.
Jennifer was working on overwhelming projects late into every night. “When I started setting a hard stop at 8pm, I thought everything would fall apart. It didn’t. I was more focused during work hours, and I actually recovered in the evenings.”
Practice 9: Move Your Body
Overwhelm lives in your body as much as your mind. Physical movement discharges stress hormones and changes your physiological state.
How to Practice:
When overwhelm peaks, move. Walk around the block. Do jumping jacks. Stretch. Climb stairs.
The movement does not need to be exercise. It just needs to be movement.
Notice how you feel after moving. Usually different—often better.
Build movement breaks into overwhelming days. They prevent stress accumulation.
Why It Matters:
Stress hormones are designed to fuel physical action. When you do not move, they circulate without discharge, maintaining the stress state. Movement completes the stress cycle and shifts your physiology.
Practice 10: Reduce Stimulation
Overwhelm is often compounded by overstimulation: constant notifications, noise, visual clutter, information bombardment. Reducing stimulation creates mental space.
How to Practice:
Turn off notifications—email, social media, news alerts. You can check things intentionally rather than being interrupted constantly.
Create a quieter environment: close tabs, reduce noise, clear visual clutter from your immediate space.
Take a break from information intake. You do not need to know everything happening in the world right now.
Give your senses a rest. The nervous system needs low-stimulation periods to recover.
Why It Matters:
Every notification, every piece of information, every sensory input requires processing. When you are already overwhelmed, additional stimulation pushes you further into overload. Reducing inputs allows recovery.
Practice 11: Do Something Comforting
When everything is too much, you need comfort—physical and emotional comfort that soothes your nervous system.
How to Practice:
Identify what genuinely comforts you: warm tea, a blanket, a favorite song, a pet, a bath, comfort food, a hug.
Give yourself that comfort without guilt. This is not indulgence—it is care during a hard time.
Let the comfort be what it is. You do not need to earn it or justify it.
Keep comfort options accessible for overwhelming moments.
Why It Matters:
Comfort activates the soothing system of your nervous system, counteracting the stress activation of overwhelm. It is not weakness or avoidance—it is meeting a genuine need.
Practice 12: Talk to Someone
Overwhelm in isolation amplifies. Sharing what you are experiencing with another person often reduces it.
How to Practice:
Reach out to someone you trust: a friend, family member, partner, therapist.
You do not need them to fix anything. Sometimes just saying “I’m overwhelmed” to a sympathetic ear helps.
Let them witness your struggle. Being seen in difficulty provides comfort.
If you do want help or advice, ask for it specifically. If you just want to vent, say that.
Why It Matters:
Humans are social creatures. We regulate emotionally through connection. Sharing overwhelm with another person literally calms the nervous system in ways solitary coping cannot.
Practice 13: Challenge the Story
Overwhelm often comes with a story: “I’ll never catch up.” “I’m failing at everything.” “It will always be this way.” These stories are usually distortions that make overwhelm worse.
How to Practice:
Notice the story you are telling yourself about the overwhelm. What are you saying to yourself?
Ask: Is this story completely true? Is it helpful? Is there another way to see this?
Challenge catastrophic thinking: Will this matter in a year? Have I handled hard things before? Is this really permanent?
Replace the unhelpful story with something more accurate and more helpful.
Why It Matters:
Cognitive distortions amplify overwhelm. The story that things are hopeless, permanent, and catastrophic makes the experience worse than reality warrants. Challenging the story reduces suffering.
Practice 14: Lower Your Standards
Perfectionism intensifies overwhelm. When you are drowning, good enough is not just acceptable—it is wisdom. Lowering standards creates space to survive.
How to Practice:
Identify where you are holding yourself to high standards. Ask: What would “good enough” look like here?
Give yourself permission to do things imperfectly. A C+ on something is better than paralysis or collapse.
Let some things be mediocre so that other things can be adequate. This is triage.
Recognize that perfectionism during overwhelm is self-harm, not helpfulness.
Why It Matters:
High standards require resources you do not have during overwhelm. Maintaining them ensures failure and deepens overwhelm. Lowering standards is not lowering your worth—it is adapting to circumstances.
Practice 15: Remember This Will Pass
Overwhelm feels permanent and endless. It is neither. Remembering that this state will pass provides hope that sustains you through it.
How to Practice:
Remind yourself: This is temporary. Circumstances change. Feelings shift. This exact experience will not last forever.
Look back at previous overwhelming times. You got through them. You will get through this.
Focus on getting through today—or this hour—rather than projecting the feeling into the indefinite future.
Let the knowledge that this passes give you patience with yourself in the meantime.
Why It Matters:
Hopelessness makes overwhelm unbearable. Hope makes it survivable. The knowledge that this state ends provides that hope.
Preventing Future Overwhelm
Once you are through the acute phase, consider what changes might prevent recurrence:
- Boundaries: Where do you need to say no?
- Commitments: What can be permanently removed from your plate?
- Support: What help do you need on an ongoing basis?
- Expectations: Whose standards are you trying to meet? Are they reasonable?
- Self-care: What maintenance practices would prevent reaching this point again?
Overwhelm is often a signal that something in your life needs to change.
20 Powerful Quotes for When Life Feels Like Too Much
- “You don’t have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step.” — Martin Luther King Jr.
- “Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes, including you.” — Anne Lamott
- “When you feel overwhelmed, remember: A little at a time. That’s how the whole thing gets done.” — Unknown
- “In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.” — Albert Camus
- “You are allowed to be both a masterpiece and a work in progress simultaneously.” — Sophia Bush
- “This too shall pass.” — Persian Proverb
- “Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can.” — Arthur Ashe
- “Sometimes the most important thing in a whole day is the rest we take between two deep breaths.” — Etty Hillesum
- “When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.” — Viktor Frankl
- “One of the most courageous things you can do is identify yourself, know who you are, what you believe in, and where you want to go.” — Sheila Murray Bethel
- “There is more to life than increasing its speed.” — Mahatma Gandhi
- “Sometimes letting things go is an act of far greater power than defending or hanging on.” — Eckhart Tolle
- “The secret of getting ahead is getting started.” — Mark Twain
- “You can’t pour from an empty cup. Take care of yourself first.” — Unknown
- “Be patient with yourself. Self-growth is tender; it’s holy ground.” — Stephen Covey
- “It’s okay to not be okay—as long as you are not giving up.” — Karen Salmansohn
- “When you can’t control what’s happening, challenge yourself to control how you respond.” — Unknown
- “It does not matter how slowly you go as long as you do not stop.” — Confucius
- “Breathe. Let go. And remind yourself that this very moment is the only one you know you have for sure.” — Oprah Winfrey
- “The only way through is through.” — Robert Frost
Picture This
Imagine yourself a month from now. The overwhelming period has passed—as they always do—and you are looking back at how you got through it.
You remember the moment you stopped pushing and just breathed. The five deep breaths that created just enough space to think. The pause that kept you from breaking down.
You remember the brain dump that took the swirling chaos from your head and put it on paper. How much smaller it looked when written down. How possible it seemed when you could see it clearly.
You remember the one next thing that broke the paralysis. The tiny step that led to another tiny step. The forward movement that proved you were not stuck.
You remember asking for help and receiving it. The commitment you canceled that the world survived without. The standards you lowered that let you survive.
You remember the comfort you allowed yourself—the warmth, the gentleness, the moments of being kind to yourself in the middle of something hard.
You got through it. Not elegantly, not perfectly, but you got through it. And you learned something about yourself: you are more resilient than overwhelm tells you. You have more resources than it feels like in the moment. The tools work when you use them.
The next time overwhelm comes—and it will come—you will remember this. You will know what to do. And you will get through that one too.
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Disclaimer
This article is for informational and supportive purposes only. It is not professional medical, psychological, or therapeutic advice.
If you are experiencing chronic or severe overwhelm, anxiety, or stress that significantly impairs your functioning, please seek support from a qualified mental health professional. These practices are supportive strategies, not treatments for clinical conditions.
If you are in crisis or having thoughts of self-harm, please reach out immediately:
- National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 988 (US)
- Crisis Text Line: Text HOME to 741741 (US)
Individual experiences vary. What helps one person may not help another.
The author and publisher make no representations or warranties regarding the accuracy, completeness, or applicability of the information contained herein. By reading this article, you agree that the author and publisher shall not be held liable for any damages, claims, or losses arising from your use of or reliance on this content.
You will get through this. One breath, one step at a time.
