What is emotional overwhelm?
Emotional overwhelm is a state of being beset by intense emotion that is difficult to manage. Emotions such as anger, shame, remorse, disgust can be very strong and affect the ability to think and act rationally. It could also prevent you from performing daily tasks. Check this NHS Depression and Anxiety Self-Assessment Tool.
Causes of emotional overwhelm
Emotional overwhelm may be caused by stress, traumatic life experiences, relationship issues, and much more. It’s all about that critical threshold - emotions build up over time, and at some point, your feelings get so intense and past your ability to manage them - this can be called the moment of emotional overwhelm. We all have experienced emotional overwhelm or emotional exhaustion at some point of time, but if you feel emotionally overwhelmed for an extended period, you may benefit from seeing a mental health professional.
Signs of emotional overwhelm
When a person is emotionally overwhelmed, they may be overreacting, feeling tired and unwell without a reason, feeling powerless, struggling to focus, and withdrawing from family and friends. Negative emotions will be prevailing, and positive emotions will be scarce. Emotional overwhelm can make it challenging to perform everyday activities, both personal and professional.
Effects of emotional overwhelm
Emotional overwhelm can affect your cognitive abilities, thinking, problem solving, reasoning your behaviour, and remembering things. It can make you unhappy person.
Ways to prevent emotional overwhelm
There are different ways to prevent emotional overwhelm, with the focus on good emotional regulation. It’s important to truly understand and pinpoint what you are feeling. Secondly, understanding as to why you are feeling this comes to play.
Pause when you feel it! Breathe deeply. Count. Counting in even/odd increments forces your brain to concentrate on the counts and takes you out of the mental space you are currently in. Withdrawing yourself from a stressful situation is a great way to avoid emotional overwhelm, yet it is not always possible. In the case, where a person needs to stay, it is recommended to go in the mind to somewhere peaceful. This disrupts the flow of negative emotions and brings positive emotions into your being.
Great way to avoid emotional overwhelming is to vent out or release your emotional baggage from time to time, as part of your emotional regulation. Releasing your emotions, give you better emotional balance and enhanced wellbeing.
You may also need therapy to identify what’s causing you to become emotionally overwhelmed and find the ways to work on it. Therapy is a place to vent and can offer care, advice, and support you need to reduce your emotional burden.
Emotional experiences help to overcome emotional overwhelm
Emotional experiences offered on emotions.market offer many ways to save your emotional state going into overwhelm. You may benefit from emotion-focused therapy, humour and companionship experiences. Our emotional experience creators can pass your message to someone on your behalf, offer you some animal cuddles or an art therapy for emotional release.
We are not therapists or psychologists - emotions.market is an online space created to help people find ways to improve emotional balance so a psychologist, hopefully, wouldn’t be needed. See there crisis helplines if you feel you need help.