I’ve been there. Feeling so trapped in something that you crave a sweet escape. Wanting a little space for yourself, away from all the noise. Wanting to quiet everything down, including your mind. But why does it happen in the first place? How do we reach a point in our lives where we simply want to escape from everything and everyone?
Our minds are designed to process our environments. That not only includes what’s happening in your physical environment but also what’s happening in your mind and body. In that regard, our minds are a sort of interface between our external and internal realities. When the stimuli from our environments exceed what the mind can process, we get overwhelmed.
Mental/emotional overwhelm
This overwhelm can be mental and/or emotional, because our brains are largely comprised of two major processing systems- cognitive and emotional.
- Mental overwhelm is thinking too much and getting mentally exhausted as a result.
- Emotional overwhelm is feeling too much and getting emotionally exhausted as a result.
The worst-case scenario would be experiencing both mental and emotional overwhelm at the same time.
If you’re feeling overwhelmed, looking for a break right now, you’ve likely been processing too much information lately. Maybe you’ve been working a lot, experiencing relational or family stress, or maybe all you’ve been doing is having fun and procrastinating on important tasks for too long. That also exhausts mental energy. Everything we do takes up mental energy. Therefore, too much of anything, even a good thing, can be draining.
To figure out what’s specifically overwhelming you, ask yourself:
“What have I been thinking about the most lately?”
“What’s been taking too much of my time lately?”
Changing the valve
When you spend too much time on anything, you’re living an unbalanced life. An unbalanced outer world means an unbalanced inner world- a cognitively unbalanced life. You’re devoting too much of your limited mental resources to something. Since our mental resources are limited, we likely evolved a psychological mechanism that monitors how we allocate them.1Kok, A. (2022). Cognitive control, motivation and fatigue: A cognitive neuroscience perspective. Brain and Cognition, 160, 105880.
If we devote too many mental resources to a particular life area, the mechanism kicks in and urges us to invest them in other areas as well.
Water tank analogy
When you’re filling a water tank, and it overflows, an alarm goes off signaling you to change the valve and fill another tank. You can’t keep filling the same, overflowing tank. Similarly, you can’t keep investing your mental resources in one life area. That will not only waste your mental resources and drain you, but also deplete your other life areas.
So that feeling you get when you feel overwhelmed motivates you to stop doing what you’re doing (turn off the water pump) or invest in other life areas (change the valve). If you ignore that feeling, you’ll likely put yourself at risk for physical and mental health problems. While you can invest more in some life areas than others, each life area is important and requires a baseline level of investment.
Related: Overstimulated vs Overwhelmed: Key differences
Recovery
When you mentally exhaust yourself, for instance, with cognitively demanding work, you need time to recover. This allows your mind to replenish its resources. When you feel like taking a break, listen to that signal and take a break. When you do that and come back to your work later, you’ll feel re-energized.2Zoupanou, Z., Cropley, M., & Rydstedt, L. W. (2013). Recovery after work: The role of work beliefs in the unwinding process. PloS one, 8(12), e81381.
To recover, you could simply turn the water pump off and return to a ‘zero state’. A state some reach via meditation, where you’re thinking about nothing, processing nothing. Or you could change the valve and spend time talking to a friend or spouse. Or maybe get a workout done.
The key is resting the system that has been exhausted, not a different one. If your thinking system is exhausted, you can’t solve hard puzzles as part of your ‘break’ because you’d be exhausting your thinking system more, thereby feeling worse.3Kim, S., Park, Y., & Niu, Q. (2017). Micro‐break activities at work to recover from daily work demands. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 38(1), 28-44. You’re not changing the valve; you’re overflowing the tank more.
Living a cognitively balanced life
What’s clear is that we need to manage our mental resources just as we manage our other resources, such as time and money. If we don’t consciously do it, our minds will do it for us, but it might be too late. Ideally, you don’t want to get to a point where you’re mentally exhausted. You invest your mental resources so carefully that your mind doesn’t need to send you the ‘STOP, you’re doing that too much!’ signal.
Of course, this is an ideal, not a requirement. You can aim for it, but it's fine if you succeed 80% of the time.
To live a mentally balanced life, look at what’s on your calendar, your daily routine, or your to-do list. Don’t just see those items as tasks or blocks of time. Instead, think about how much mental energy they take. Then, design your schedule in a way that respects your mental energy. That means doing the most cognitively demanding tasks when you have the most mental energy, usually that’s morning for most people. That also means having the discipline to shut down work when you’re beginning to get exhausted and turning off the pump or changing the valve.
The role of core values
Living a balanced life doesn’t mean that you have to invest equally in all areas of life. I doubt that’s even possible. It’s not as if you have 100 units of mental resources and you put 25 in Work, 25 in Relationships, 25 in Health, and 25 in Fun/Hobbies. People don’t normally do that because they have certain core values.
Having core values means you value certain areas of life more than others, and that’s fine. Instead of investing in all the life areas equally, however you categorize them, you invest more in some areas and less in others. That’s what having values means. If people invested in all the life areas equally, they’d have no values.
The key is knowing what your Core Value Ratio (CVR) is. Your CVR tells you how much you should invest in each life area. You have to experiment with varying the ratio of your mental investment in different life areas to arrive at your personal CVR. When you live your life in accordance with your CVR, you’ll feel aligned and fulfilled. You’ll feel like you’re living a cognitively balanced life.
An example
Jim knew he had ‘ambition’ and ‘achievement’ as his top values. He had been designing his life around those values for a long time, working hard and crushing his goals. He barely invested in other life areas. At some point, he got exhausted. He rightly took that as a signal to relax more and have more fun. But we went too far to the other side. He relaxed too much and had too much fun.
Initially, when he worked all the time, he was investing 80% in work, 10% in health, 10% in relationships, and 0% in fun. His mind told him, “Hey, you need to have more fun.”
His personal CVR required him to invest 10% in fun, but he went overboard and invested 30%. He disrespected his CVR again, so he again got mentally exhausted. When he kept experimenting, he finally arrived at the sweet spot of investing 10% in fun. He felt fulfilled, and his mind no longer sent him a warning signal.
Core values are everything
“I can’t devote my mental energy to that!”
“I can’t believe I devoted so many mental resources to that.”
When you say these things, you’re essentially saying that your mental resources are misaligned with your CVR. If your CVR tells you that going out once a week is okay, and you do that twice a week, you’ll hear your mind protesting:
“Hey! You’re doing that too much.”
Identify your top 1-5 core values. Devote most of your mental resources to your top 1-3 values, and you’d be living in alignment and experiencing fulfillment. Respect your individual CVR once you arrive at it via experimentation and self-reflection. Your daily routine ought to be a reflection of your CVR. If your top core value is ‘Freedom’, you can’t spend a huge portion of your day doing social activities. Someone whose top value is ‘Connection’ can.
Your CVR determines what your ideal day looks like. What your ideal day looks like is who you are or want to be. It’s a reflection of your ideal self. When we close the gap between our ideal and real selves, we feel happy, contented, and satisfied.
