On the critical importance of taking the time to do nothing
What are you feeling but not confronting?
As a computer, your brain is complicated and slow, a modern CPU is in the order of billions of times faster. (Based on recent research that puts the human neuron at a clock speed of 10 bits/second). That you are complicated is what makes you cleverer than the machines, able to simulate virtually any scenario that could possibly exist and a lot of fictional scenarios besides; but your slowness means that you often generate these possibilities at a faster rate than you can evaluate them!
When you have lots of ideas being generated in your brain faster than your ability to acknowledge those ideas, a steadily increasing proportion of your neural capital gets tied up in potentially unproductive or even harmful lines of thought, your behaviour is split between them and you cannot make sense of the new sensory experiences coming in. Eventually, your internal model cannot keep up with the ever changing present and you crash, overwhelmed.
Everyone can experience this to some degree, but those of us who are more neurotic or who have sensory and cognitive differences like Autism or ADHD experience them more frequently. In the former case we burnout because we are inclined to generate more possibilities to cover more of the potential scenarios that may affect us in the future. In the latter case because we have more complicated relationships between our sensory experiences and our internal understanding of them, our understanding of the situation is more likely to be more erratic and our internal model is likely to take up more neural capital. This means that we experience a mismatch between reality and our understanding more frequently and we hit our cognitive limits more quickly. On the flip side, this may be why it is precisely neurotic, autistic people who tend to be geniuses: they are generating a large variety of nuanced ideas and have a greater need to approach those with some degree of self criticism, given their higher tendency to get things confused.
We can all experience overwhelm but there are certain types of people who are especially vulnerable to it. So, particularly for those of us who are vulnerable, what should we do about it? Well, logically, if the problem is that we are producing more thoughts than we are processing and ‘deciding what to do with’ we have to either increase our decision making capacity or decrease the inflow of information until we finish processing the cognitive backlog. If you are overwhelmed, there is not really much you can do to increase your cognitive ability in the short term except rest. If you are overwhelmed, you won’t be in the mood for Dr Kawashima’s brain training. Likewise, rest also provides a way to limit the inflow of information, giving you the space to go through your thoughts and sort out which ones are relevant and which ones you can discard.
Thus, the cure to overwhelm is *rest*.
Specifically, rest in a low-information environment. Sensory deprivation tanks are ideal but expensive and you can get most of the benefits with an eye mask and some ear muffs. For overwhelmed people, watching the TV is not rest, listening to music is not rest, even reading books is not rest. So long as more content is entering your brain you are not resting. All forms of passive or active media consumption stand as an impairment to rest — even the network sitcoms and Netflix background shows which are designed for low attention spans. This is because any media for human consumption provides more varied information than would be in any ambient environment. If you decide to rest actively then go on a familiar walk without your headphones or take a gentle yoga class where they play ambient music. Ambient music is okay, precisely because, as Brian Eno said, it aims to be “as interesting as it is ignorable” - it is designed not to overpower the environment. Crafting or creating is also restful, unless you are still learning how to use that medium and have to read, watch or listen to something in order to get started. — overwhelm is not a good time for new hobbies, take them up when you feel better!
The simplest, purest and most reliable sort of rest is sleep. Albert Einstein slept 10 hours a day, taking frequent naps. His was a mind that could fathom extremely complex understandings of the universe, creating models which still inform a lot of our astronomical and cosmological knowledge 100 years later. There was a lot on his mind and he managed it using sleep.
This strategy should be familiar to anyone in an engineering or managerial profession who gets stuck on a problem, sleeps on it and miraculously knows the answer the next morning — your brain has probably already found the solution but your subconscious is yet to acknowledge it, the rest is precisely what unlocks the answer you “knew all along.”
Rest is not merely necessary for the economic reasons of energy consumption and homeostasis but for the informatic reason of needing to handle the imbalance between the human brain’s high capacity for idea generation and relatively slow executive processing to handle those ideas. It is a simple production bottleneck arising from the network dynamics of a highly parallel, complex mind.
The solution qua rest is straightforward but it leaves an obvious question which is particularly acute for the neuro-atypical:
“How do I know I am overwhelmed?”
If you cannot entirely trust your internal sensory systems to be accurate and functional then this becomes a challenging question which might take a while to feed through into any sort of intuition. In high functioning people, this could mean weeks or months or even years of silent suffering and elevated stress until it suddenly becomes overwhelming and often physically sickening.
Such people generally need a simplified protocol, a deliberate habit to tell them what their mind ought to make obvious. “Am I overwhelmed?”
As with many problems it is sometimes easier to pose an awkward question in terms of its contrapositive:
Am I in on top of everything?
This should do one of two things. In a person who is generally in control they should be able to issue at least a weak affirmative without too much effort: “I think so” or “just about”. A person who isn’t actually on top of things may try to mask by saying something similar, but the effort in doing so will only make them more stressed. If asked frequently, this will become increasingly untenable. A person who has a developed understanding of their limits will quickly admit that they are not in control and make plans to take rest, proper rest, until they have processed their many thoughts.
If you are yet to develop an accurate understanding of your cognitive limits, it is better to be triggered by seemingly impertinent questions and forced to admit that you may need to pull back, rather than try to soldier on for weeks or months at a time. Been there done that, it screws your physical and mental health in ways that take a while to recover from!
The key part here is accountability. People who know themselves keep themselves accountable; people who don’t generally need someone else to keep them accountable. Ideally you would have an authoritative loved one who is willing to bear that strain and ask you, repeatedly, perhaps daily, if you are on top of everything.* Whether or not you have anyone who will be able to deal with that, especially if you anticipate being tetchy, then you need to start taking accountability for your own energy levels.
* Long term, I can see this being a good use-case for generative AI: providing a personal counsellor agent that maybe phones or texts you daily to have a catch up, helping you take stock of your energy levels, for a fraction of the cost of a human therapist.
How do you do that? Well, if your mind is a black box, it is better to look for the environmental signs: dirty dishes, untidy rooms, unanswered messages. You may also notice physical signs of stress before the emotional: fingernail biting, compulsive itching, forgetting to shave or brush your teeth, various nervous tics and stims. I have known myself to have odd aches and pains and even rashes which miraculously go away when I finally conjure the will to handle something that I’ve been putting off for ages - as if my brain is sending the signal out any which way it can that this needs doing — although if these are serious, go and see a doctor as they could be real physical issues.
If you notice yourself or your environment becoming more dishevelled, it may be a sign that you are overwhelmed and need to rest. However, these are only the reactive signs. They only tell you need to rest when it is too late, when you may be already embroiled in matters that demand prolonged attention. This reactive stage is, at least for those who struggle with this sort of thing, a necessary but painful step on the way to the more proactive approach which requires self knowledge that takes time to accrue:
For those who know themselves well enough to recognise the emotional state of overwhelming – which are closely related to the physical signs mentioned above, there is a simpler question that covers most cases:
What am I feeling but not confronting?
This one question can do something quite magical if you are able to meditate or journal on it regularly. You can mostly avoid overwhelm and act with levels of energy for prolonged periods that seem almost superhuman. By taking the time to acknowledge thoughts and feelings without judgement, passing over the ones that are of little value and taking note of the good ones, you can accelerate your burn down of the cognitive backlog. Rest is still necessary, but you might find yourself needing less of it to stay on top of things.
There is only one catch, a growing sense of emotional intelligence makes it harder to pretend to be interested in things you don’t actually value. In becoming more effective you may lose superficial markers of social status such as that managerial promotion that doesn’t actually suit your passions or you may find yourself quitting the rat race to do something altogether different. Sometimes self-honesty leads to more hardship than what you leave behind, although Nietzsche pointed out, it is the sort of hardship that may make you feel better than a life of comfort because you know why you undertake it.
To get to this point takes time, and great effort, and many other things that cannot be kept in one blog post. Subscribe for more insights, I guess!
The important thing with all of these things is to reject the ego, such that you may be guided by another, or by the signs of your body and space, or by the actual processing of thoughts without judgment. You are an observer, study yourself as a specimen, see the signs. Learn to associate thoughts to feelings and feelings to habits. Remember that you may already have the answers to what ails you, you just need the rest to let them bloom into consciousness.