When Life Feels Too Much: Our Relationship to Stress

There are times when life genuinely is too much. Not because we have failed to organize ourselves properly, neglected our morning routine or forgotten some important principle about resilience, but because the amount being asked of us exceeds what we comfortably have available.

Most of us know these periods. Someone we love is ill just as work becomes unusually demanding. Money is tight, a relationship is in trouble, we are grieving or moving or waiting for news. Then there are the less dramatic stretches when no single thing explains why we feel overwhelmed. Too many smaller demands have accumulated without enough space between them, and something that would ordinarily be manageable becomes the thing that tips us over.

This is part of what makes stress so personal. We talk about it as though it can be calculated according to the number or severity of events in someone's life, but human beings are considerably less tidy than that. What one person finds exhilarating leaves another exhausted, and what we ourselves handled capably five years ago may feel impossible now. Even within the same week, our capacity can change enough that Tuesday's manageable problem has become strangely enormous by Friday afternoon.

Our experience of stress belongs to a whole person. Bodies, histories, relationships and expectations come into it, along with sleep, pain, hormones, illness, grief, money and whether there is anyone trustworthy to call when things go wrong. We don't encounter life's demands from some neutral position, responding objectively to the correct amount of difficulty.

We bring ourselves with us.

What are you actually being asked to carry?

An enormous amount of advice is devoted to helping people cope better with difficult circumstances. Some of it is excellent. Boundaries can change lives. So can better sleep, movement, therapy, asking for help, leaving a damaging relationship or learning that an email received at 8:47 p.m. does not constitute a summons.

What troubles me is how quickly overwhelm can be turned into a question of personal resilience.

If someone has been carrying an unreasonable workload for a year, the answer cannot rest entirely on becoming better at breathing through it. If a woman is responsible for paid work, children or ageing parents, a household and the largely invisible emotional administration of several relationships, perhaps her exhaustion isn't evidence that she needs to increase her capacity. Perhaps it is information about what is being required of it.

This is particularly complicated for people who are good at managing. Competence tends to attract responsibility. We cope, so more is entrusted to us. We become the reliable one, the person who can handle things, and after enough years there may be very little distinction between what we are genuinely responsible for and what has simply migrated in our direction because everyone assumes we will take care of it.

There is a peculiar danger in becoming exceptionally good at increasing our capacity without ever questioning what keeps filling it.

For this reason, I find What am I actually being asked to carry? more useful than Why am I finding this so difficult? The latter can turn surprisingly quickly into an investigation of our deficiencies. The former puts the circumstances back into the picture.

Sometimes what needs changing is how we are responding. Sometimes the situation itself is unreasonable. Usually the truth is somewhere in the untidy territory between the two.

There is another layer to stress that belongs less to circumstance than to our relationship with it. A Buddhist teaching I have long found useful describes the first and second arrows. The first is the pain life gives us; the second is what we add to that pain.

There is the deadline and our fury with ourselves for having left something until the deadline. There is the frightening medical appointment and then embarrassment about how frightened we are. Exhaustion arrives, followed closely by the conviction that we shouldn't be exhausted. By the time we have finished objecting to our own response, an already difficult experience has acquired considerable additional weight.

Acceptance can sound suspiciously passive in this context, as though the spiritually mature response to difficulty is to become serenely agreeable about it. I don't think it is. Some circumstances deserve anger, grief and objection, and some should be changed.

Acceptance can be much less impressive than that. I am tired. I don't know what will happen. I cannot do everything I thought I could do this week. I wish this were different and, at the moment, it isn't.

There can be relief in allowing a fact to be a fact before deciding what it says about us.

The body has its own opinion

One of the stranger experiences of stress is understanding perfectly well that we are safe while the body appears unconvinced.

We know the conversation isn't dangerous, that the person who hasn't replied is probably busy and that one mistake is unlikely to destroy our career. Meanwhile, the heart is racing, the stomach has tightened and sleep has apparently declined to participate in our rational assessment.

This gap makes more sense when we remember that stress isn't solely a thinking process. Our nervous systems are shaped by present circumstances but also by experience. Uncertainty, conflict, disapproval or unpredictability can carry associations that predate whatever is happening now. The conscious mind may know that this boss is not that parent, this partner is not the person who hurt us, this mistake does not have the consequences mistakes once had. The body can be slower to distinguish between familiar and current.

I don't think this means every uncomfortable reaction needs to be traced backwards until we find its childhood origin. Sometimes we are tense because the situation is tense. Sometimes we haven't eaten lunch. But history can help explain why certain kinds of stress find particular people so efficiently.

Someone who learned to monitor the emotional temperature of a room may become extraordinarily sensitive to tension between people. A person whose security became entangled with achievement may experience an ordinary professional setback as something much larger. Someone accustomed to being the reliable one can find asking for help more stressful than simply doing too much.

Our responses have biographies.

This is also where I find Internal Family Systems useful. Stress has a way of bringing familiar parts of us to the foreground. The controlling part becomes more controlling. The critic discovers fresh material. The person who has spent years trying not to over-function finds herself solving everybody's problems again, while simultaneously resenting them for having problems.

From an IFS perspective, it becomes possible to approach these responses less as defects and more as strategies. Control may be attempting to make uncertainty tolerable. Anticipating every possible outcome can feel remarkably like safety if preparedness once mattered. Procrastination may have very little to do with laziness and quite a lot to do with what beginning the task seems to represent.

There is no need to psychoanalyse every bad mood. Some days we are irritable because we are tired and somebody is being annoying. But repetitive responses are worth knowing, particularly because the things we do to manage stress can quietly become sources of it. Perfectionism makes everything take longer. People-pleasing fills the calendar. Hyper-independence deprives us of help. Avoidance offers relief today and presents tomorrow with a larger problem.

A strategy can make perfect sense and still outlive its usefulness.

Waiting for everything to be finished

For a long time, I thought relaxation was something that happened after everything important had been dealt with.

This seems perfectly reasonable until you examine the terms of the agreement. Work should be under control. Nobody I love can be in crisis. There should be no pressing administrative tasks, unanswered messages, difficult decisions, unexplained bodily symptoms or significant uncertainty about the future. The house should preferably be clean.

Under these conditions, apparently, we may rest.

Adult life is not especially cooperative with this plan. One thing ends and another begins. Families change, bodies change, work expands and contracts, relationships require attention, something breaks and someone needs us. Occasionally we need ourselves, which can be inconvenient when the schedule is already full.

If ease is permitted only once nothing remains unresolved, we can spend an astonishing amount of life waiting for permission.

This doesn't mean abandoning responsibility or cultivating indifference to unfinished things. Some of them matter very much. What interests me is the point at which responsible attention becomes an internal state of permanent bracing, as though we cannot really settle while anything anywhere remains uncertain.

For people accustomed to vigilance, competence or over-functioning, rest can become conditional on achieving a level of control that life rarely maintains for long. We may not even experience it consciously as control. It feels more like needing to get a few things sorted first.

There are always a few things.

Perhaps part of living with stress is learning that uncertainty can remain in the room without requiring our constant supervision. Something can be unfinished while we eat dinner. Someone can be disappointed while we sleep. Tomorrow's problem does not necessarily benefit from being mentally rehearsed throughout this evening.

This is not a grand philosophy of letting go. I am not especially interested in pretending not to care about things I care about.

I am interested in the possibility that we can care without remaining braced.

When life needs to become smaller

When someone is already overwhelmed, giving her an elaborate programme of stress-management practices seems almost perverse. The person struggling to keep up with ordinary life probably doesn't need seven new wellness tasks and the opportunity to fail at meditation as well.

There are times when the kindest thing we can do is make life smaller for a while.

That might mean cancelling something, buying the easier food, allowing work to be adequate rather than exceptional, asking somebody else to take responsibility or acknowledging that a commitment made with one level of capacity no longer fits the capacity available now. These aren't dramatic interventions, but neither is most of what makes life bearable.

At other times, very little can be removed. Grief doesn't respond to calendar management. Illness may dictate the schedule. Financial pressures aren't resolved by protecting our peace, and there are periods of caregiving or crisis when the demands really are unavoidable.

Then making life smaller may have more to do with time.

The mind has an extraordinary capacity to take today's difficulty and live the next six months of it before breakfast. We imagine consequences, rehearse conversations and try to solve questions for which we don't yet have enough information. The impulse is understandable. Uncertainty makes us want to get ahead of ourselves.

But there are moments when the most useful question is simply: What actually needs to happen today?

Eat something. Make the necessary call. Go outside. Tell somebody the truth. Do what can be done with the information available and allow tomorrow to retain at least some of its own problems.

None of this is revolutionary, which may be precisely why we overlook it. When we are frightened or overwhelmed, the mind searches for resolution while the body is still trying to get through Wednesday.

How we treat ourselves when capacity disappears

I used to think coping well meant remaining relatively composed while difficult things happened.

I have become less convinced.

There are periods we navigate with remarkable steadiness and others in which we are distracted, emotional, impatient, forgetful and deeply uninterested in discovering what the experience is here to teach us. Being affected by a difficult life is not necessarily evidence that we are coping badly with it.

We can increase our capacity, certainly. We can understand our patterns, become more familiar with our nervous systems, learn to ask for help and develop a different relationship with the parts of us that become extreme under pressure. I believe deeply in that work.

I don't believe its purpose is to make us impervious.

What interests me more now is what happens in our relationship with ourselves when our usual capacity disappears. Whether vulnerability immediately frightens or embarrasses us. Whether we become punitive and begin trying to force ourselves back into the version who could handle more. Whether we can recognize that the person who needs something different today is not an inferior temporary edition of ourselves.

Practical reality remains. There may still be decisions we have avoided, responsibilities we cannot put down and circumstances that genuinely need to change. Compassion doesn't remove any of that.

It does mean we don't have to become another difficult thing we are dealing with.

There are seasons when life feels like too much because, for a while, it is. We may not be able to make the circumstances smaller or understand what they will eventually mean. We certainly don't need to regulate ourselves into finding them acceptable.

Perhaps coping has less to do with remaining untouched by difficult periods than I once thought.

Perhaps some of it is learning how to remain on our own side while we are being changed by them.