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Feeling overwhelmed is of course common in modern life.

This is a sense of being bombarded,

too much information to make sense of,

too many responsibilities, obligations, feeling swamped,

but most of all a sense of being unable to cope,

associated with an accumulation of stressors.

And when people talk about being overwhelmed,

they're generally pointing in two different directions of physiological states.

One would be when we're really anxious,

when we're flooded with intrusive, repetitive, fear-based thoughts,

where our heart rate soars, we can't sit still.

There's a sense of needing to act immediately. There's a sense of needing to act immediately.

There's a sense of ongoing threat detection.

Or the other state is collapse, shutdown, dissociation known in Polybago's the dorsal dive. That's not the

sympathetic nervous system, that's anxiety and high levels of stress. That's actually the state of switching off the ancient parasympathetic nervous system and in many ways the physiological state is the opposite.

It becomes very difficult to focus attention.

One's heart rate doesn't soar,

one feels disconnected, a state of brain fog,

a tiredness, a heaviness, a sluggishness, an inability to move a sense of just giving up

...