Stressed vs. overwhelmed: Which one are you?

Happy Thursday! Here is an anecdote, an exercise and an inspiration.

Anecdote: Naturally, I was interested when I saw that The Mel Robbins Podcast this week has an episode distinguishing stress from overwhelm. Stress can be good or bad. When we are stressed, we are in a heightened state of alertness. This can be beneficial in a variety of scenarios, from giving a presentation to interviewing for a job to lifting weights. Our bodies are meant to experience both stress and rest, not to be calm all the time but to be able to return to calm after exertion. We all know about bad stress. But what distinguishes overwhelm is the feeling that your bucket is completely full, that life is coming at you in a way that feels out of control.

I wish I could say I listened to the podcast and decided to change the title of my newsletter from The Overwhelmed Yogi to The Stressed Yogi. But overwhelmed is the word that best describes how I often feel as a mom and sandwich generation caregiver. Which one is more accurate for you?

The podcast gives some excellent strategies for calming overwhelm, including labeling your feelings, practicing a physiological sigh (two sharp inhales through the nose followed by an exhale — instructed in the episode as out the mouth, but you can exhale out the nose as well) for at least a minute, and spending 10 minutes writing a “brain dump,” basically emptying your mental chatter and to-do list onto a page. When done before bed, the brain dump is shown in a Baylor University study to help sleep.

Adding a suggestion of my own to the mix…

Exercise: Butterfly taps (shown in this video) help to activate the body’s parasympathetic nervous system, or relaxation response, through bilateral stimulation. This can temporarily calm anxiety and overwhelm. I’ve also heard the taps called a “butterfly hug.” Hooking the thumbs is optional. I like to tap around the collarbone area, but I’ve also seen this done by tapping the shoulders, which is more hug-like. Eyes can be open or closed.

Keep the taps gentle, breathe in and out slowly, and continue for a minute or two — as long as you need to feel calmer. Then thank yourself for taking these moments for you.

Inspiration: Speaking of sandwich generation overwhelm… A few years ago, I connected online with Jocelyn Jane Cox when we discovered we were both writing memoirs about losing our mothers as we became mothers ourselves. Mine is in the context of yoga; Jocelyn’s has a backdrop of figure skating.

You’ll have to wait awhile to read my book, but Jocelyn’s is now out in the world. It is a beautiful chronicle of the cycle of life and love. The first page of “Motion Dazzle: A Memoir of Motherhood, Loss, and Skating on Thin Ice” made me cry, and I had plenty more tears as well as laughs in the pages that followed, sometimes both at once.