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Overwhelm and overreaction to seemingly normal situations in the workplace are a daily occurrence these days. While they can be perplexing and challenging both for the individuals experiencing them and for those around them, they are here for good reason, and likely to remain for the long term without deliberate intervention.
Here's why...
These behaviours are often symptoms of stress-related trauma acquired through a combination of high-stress childhoods and ongoing high-stress careers that now have your physiology in a proverbial 'head lock'.
Stress-Related Trauma: High-Stress Childhoods
Stress-related trauma occurs when an individual has been exposed to prolonged or intense stress, particularly during critical developmental periods such as childhood. The timing of this stress is why we consistently hear about chilldhood related issues - from womb to aged 20ish, when the brain is considered fully formed, stress can cause the healthy development to deviate. For example.
Impact of High-Stress Childhoods
Brain Development: Chronic stress in childhood can alter brain development leaving the child with up to 30% less brain mass, affecting areas responsible for emotion regulation, stress response, and cognitive function.
Hyper-vigilance: Constant exposure to stress can lead to hyper-vigilance, where the individual is always on high alert for potential threats. In this state, their physiology will not permit them to be at ease (ever), never mind engage in play, as the body locks itself into DefCon level settings, using all 5 senses to read the environment, typically distorting what it reads as a threat.
Emotional Regulation: Difficulty in regulating emotions is common, as the brain's ability to manage stress and emotional responses can be compromised. When a person is unable to regulate emotions, they navigate day-to-day life through a dysregulated physiology, where all 11 major bodily systems shift out of healthy function and into stress enduring function. This person will struggle with reaching levels of Emotional Maturity, they will struggle to take Accountability for their actions on others, their degree of inner conflict and pain will make it hard for them to have and maintain empathy.
Symptoms:
1. Overwhelm
- Response to Triggers: Even minor stressors can trigger intense feelings of overwhelm, as the brain is conditioned to respond disproportionately to stress.
- Cognitive Overload: Everyday tasks can become overwhelming due to an overloaded cognitive system, making it hard to prioritize and manage tasks effectively.
2. Overreaction
- Emotional Outbursts: Normal situations can elicit extreme emotional reactions, such as anger, frustration, or sadness.
- Heightened Sensitivity: Individuals may be overly sensitive to criticism or perceived slights, reacting strongly to what others might consider minor issues.
Stress-Related Trauma: Ongoing High-Stress Careers
Ongoing high-stress careers are typical of individuals from High-Stress Childhoods. For example, 75% of High Achievers come from High-Stress Childhoods.
These careers involve continuous exposure to high levels of stress without adequate recovery time, leading to chronic stress. Chronic stress is a path that you will either proactively get off of, or a path that will bring you to your knees, forcing you off of it. So things like; autoimmune disease, or unfortunate mistakes that tend to occur publicly, or the inability to follow through or deliver what is meaningful to you as the (Central Nervous System) need(s) to withdraw and self isolate as an act of self preservation.
(Note: We tend to confuse respite for reset when it comes to the body, and often prefer respite down the pub, as opposed to a cold water swim, or yoga that would give the body the opportunity to reset)
Impact of Ongoing Stress:
Cumulative Effect: Stress accumulates! Ongoing stress will exacerbate the effects of any pre-existing trauma from: their last job, their divorce, the loss of a loved one, a toxic boss or from a high-stress childhood that could have resulted in up to 30% less brain volume.
Burnout: Prolonged stress without deliberate intervention can lead to burnout, characterised by emotional exhaustion, depersonalisation, withdrawal to self isolation, an ongoing track record of never being able to finish what gets started, resulting in reduced personal accomplishment.
Symptoms:
1. Overwhelm
- Declining resilience: The ability to cope with stress diminishes with time, the chronic nature of stress, and as we age, leading to frequent feelings of being overwhelmed.
- Physical Symptoms: Chronic stress can manifest physically, contributing to autoimmune disease, heart attacks, cancer, adrenal failure, Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS), extreme fatigue, depression, anxiety, and panic attacks.
2. Overreaction
- Fight or Flight lives right at the surface: The body remains in a heightened state of arousal, leading to disproportionate reactions to seemingly minor stressors.
- Stress Response Activation: It is the small triggers that tend to activate the stress response system, resulting in intense and immediate emotional reactions. Or it is the long-forgotten past experiences, haunting the present situation, that the person over reacts to, while the person, and those around the person are left wondering, “what is going on?”.
Understanding The Connection:
Neurological Basis:
- Amygdala: The amygdala, responsible for detecting threats, can become overactive due to chronic stress, leading to heightened emotional responses. If the amygdala becomes overreactive in childhood, it is not possible to turn it off without deliberate intervention.
- Prefrontal Cortex: Chronic stress can impair the prefrontal cortex, which helps regulate emotions and responses, resulting in decreased ability to control reactions, make sound decisions, or access imagination, clarity or focus.
Behavioural Patterns:
- Conditioned Responses: Individuals may develop conditioned responses where certain stimuli trigger overwhelming or overreactive behaviours. So a smell, sound, a saying, a texture experienced in the present moment, can spontaneously trigger a long forgotten past experience that was buried (not resolved) that gets injected into the current moment causing the person to have an over reaction to a seemingly normal situation. In other words, Their past is present. They are not present.
- Learned Behaviours: Coping mechanisms developed in response to childhood stress will almost always persist into adulthood, manifesting as overreaction to normal situations. In other words, what our 7 year old self used to cope with particularly stressful situations, is still what our 40 year old self uses to cope with stress.
Repair, Recovery and Regulation
Individuals tend to have the most success with the repair and recovery process, moving from dysregulated to self-regulated, when there is:
1. Belief in the direction
2. Tools and a daily practice
3. Guidance and support
No one can do this for them, but equally, they cannot do it alone.
For resources on Repair, Recovery and Regulation, go here >
Overwhelm and overreaction to normal situations are often the exact symptoms of stress-related trauma that are cause for action. If intervention happens here, years of despair, shame and hiding can be avoided, and the physical decline of the body diverted. Overwhelm and Overreactions are an intricate and complex Mind-Body experience. A cerebral-only approach to resolving these experiences does not, will not and cannot have any real effect or long term change.
Physiology is the greatest influence on the mind, and yet "Thoughts & Talk" alone, has no real effect on restoring our physiology.
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