What Does “Overwhelmed” Even Mean?

Almost every enquiry for ADHD coaching that hits my inbox has the word overwhelmed somewhere. It’s so deeply baked into our vernacular, mine included.

Ask me how I am lately and “good, just sooo overwhelmed” rolls off my furry, dehydrated tongue without a thought. Honestly, I bore myself.

We all know the cloud of overwhelm. But I don’t think most of us actually know what we mean when we say it. Not in a way that would help us help ourselves.

If I was coaching myself (and yes I’m far worse at this than I am with my clients — plumber with the broken toilet etc), instead of boring my friends with middle-class woe, I might stop and ask:

What do I actually mean when I say I’m overwhelmed?

For me, overwhelm is an “I can’t” feeling.
Not “I won’t.”
Not even “I don’t want to.” (Well… maybe a little.)
But primarily: I can’t.

It’s tired, heavy, foggy. Different from stress, which can sometimes be energising. Stress is “there’s a specific problem standing in front of me, glaring at me, occasionally prodding me into action.”

Overwhelm is muddier and cloudier.

My Personal Overwhelm Equation

Today, my personal overwhelm equation looks something like:

The stuff I need to do +The stuff I’m worried about + Lack of clarity + Constant stimulation/input +The sinking “I don’t trust myself to actually do this” feeling

= Overwhelm.

And it is a feeling.

Yesterday I was out in Richmond at a horse show with my daughter. It was hot and grimy. Dirt flying in your eyes, the crunchy face-feel, the crusty boogers forming. Add to that the existential fear of watching your child fly around on a 600kg animal... arguably the most dangerous thing I could willingly let her do.

Hot, bothered, overstimulated, and nothing was actually wrong. It was a beautiful day.

But my god, I couldn’t wait to get home and shower it all off.

That’s how I feel about overwhelm. I want to scrub it off and look underneath it.

Stress vs overwhelm (and the missing middle child: busy)

We throw these words around like interchangeable cousins. They’re not.

Brené Brown — one of the patron saints of emotional vocabulary — makes this distinction in Atlas of the Heart:

Stress

“Stress is being in the weeds.” Busy, pressured, inconvenient, but you’re still functional. Stress asks for energy and attention, but you’re in it.

Overwhelm

“An extreme level of stress… to the point of feeling unable to function.”
This is when your cognitive bandwidth collapses. Your system floods. Everything becomes too much.

She even clarifies that busy ≠ overwhelmed. Busy is movement, while overwhelm is collapse.

And when we don’t distinguish between them, we give ourselves the wrong prescription:

• Busy → needs organisation
• Stress → needs coping strategies
• Overwhelm → needs a full stop

How these different states feel in our bodies

Busy is a volume problem

You’re full, maybe scattered, but your brain is still online. Or, as psychologist Daniel Kahneman would put it, overwhelm is what happens when the part of your brain responsible for deliberate thinking simply goes offline. The lights dim, the helpful thinking mode clocks out, and you’re left with whatever automatic survival patterns are still running.

Stress is an activation problem

Your nervous system flips into “do something” mode. In polyvagal theory, this is called sympathetic activation. You feel alert, mobilised, and with narrowed focus. You’re uncomfortable, but you’re still functioning.

Overwhelm is a capacity problem

This is the dropout, "I can't" zone. Your prefrontal cortex dims and there is no thinking or problem solving happening. You can't tease out or name the emotions, and your nervous system slams on the brakes.   Your body basically says: “Too much. I’m tapping out.”

This is why all three states feel gross but require completely different interventions.

But first, you have to notice

The annoying part is that you can’t name a state you haven’t actually noticed.  Most of us don’t pause long enough to check in.

There’s a tiny step we skip, which is just… noticing.
A two-second mindful pause.
A breath.
A “hang on, what’s happening here?”

Without that moment, everything defaults to “overwhelmed” because it’s the only word in the hopper.

Before we can apply any strategy, we need  five seconds to tune into the internal weather report so we can actually see what’s going on.

Why it matters to know your actual state

Each state requires a different approach. Importantly, when we don’t know which one we’re in, we usually self-blame:

• “Why can’t I get it together?”
• “Everyone else manages.”
• “I should be able to do this.”

Naming your state gives you an entry point:

• Busy → I need structure
• Stressed → I need down-regulation
• Overwhelmed → I need to stop

How ADHD blurs the lines

For ADHDers, this distinction is crucial. ADHD collapses categories:

• Stress feels like overwhelm
• Busy feels like chaos
• Overwhelm feels like personal failure

Naming the right state is choosing the right tool for the moment you’re in.

Neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett’s research on emotional granularity shows that the more precisely we can name what we’re feeling, the better we cope. (By the way, I highly recommend her book How Emotions are Made. She is so very clever).

When everything gets shoved into the bucket of overwhelmed, your brain responds as if every problem requires the same strategy.

Clarity creates capacity.

So what do we actually do with overwhelm?

I know what you’re thinking: “I can’t stop right now — there’s too much to do.”
We all believe in the mythical future version of ourselves who is calmer, organised, and capable. And we believe the future will magically be smoother too.

But if we're honest with ourselves, we know that when we feel overwhelmed, we stop anyway.

We just do it through procrastination, avoidance, scrolling, numbing, delaying, wine drinking… everything except the kind of stopping that helps.

Brene's advice is to start with the tiniest interruption possible:

• Turn off notifications
• Step outside for two minutes
• Put your phone in another room
• Breathe
• Close the seventeen browser tabs
• Do anything, anything, that creates a micro-reset

And if you have ADHD: don’t bring a task with you into the pause. Not a “quick email", or “I'll just plan this out.” A reset only works if you’re genuinely not doing.

This helps you restore cognitive capacity so you can re-engage.

Maybe Brené is offering the emotional equivalent of that post-show shower: pause, rinse, reset.

After the Reset Comes the Repair

Back to my overwhelm equation…

Brené would have me deal with the bottom of the equation first: notifications off → step away → take a break. Then address the busy with organisation, and the stress with coping strategies.

Coping Strategies

• Naming the feeling (out loud — “I'm overwhelmed” said to another human is weirdly powerful)
• Physiological resets (breathing, moving, napping)
• Connection — overwhelm is inherently isolating

Organisational Strategies

• Doing a brain dump — everything out of your head onto paper
• Picking the top three things (not five, not twelve)
• Handing some things over or accepting they won’t get done today

None of this magically fixes life. But sometimes you just need to wash the day off your nervous system before you can see clearly again.