By Annie Wright, LMFT · Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist (#95719)Clinically reviewed May 2026

EXECUTIVE COACHING

LAST UPDATED: APRIL 2026

Overwhelm: The Three-Ingredient Cure.

EMOTIONAL REGULATION & NERVOUS SYSTEM • September 6, 2015

SUMMARY

If you’re reading this, your nervous system already knows what overwhelm feels like. This post walks you through the three-part approach I use with clients — and myself — when the demands of life genuinely exceed what you have left to give.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1. Discernment.
2. That’s overwhelm in a nutshell.
3. Pruning.
4. References
5. Both/And: High Performance and Honest Feeling Can Coexist
6. The Systemic Lens: Why Wellness Culture Fails Driven Women
7. Frequently Asked Questions

Overwhelm.

SUMMARY

Definition: Overwhelm (Nervous System Perspective)

I’ve yet to meet a person in my therapy practice (or in any other sphere of my life), who didn’t struggle with the modern malady of overwhelm in some way.

Much has been written about the seemingly impossible standards and relentlessly full plates most of us have across all areas of our lives — and I probably don’t need to tell you how much stress, anxiety, and depression it causes when we judge ourselves constantly falling short of “expectations” and the side effects or overscheduling Every. Minute. of our day.

But what’s there to do about it?

What’s to be done when you find yourself in a full-fledged meltdown because you’re JUST TOO OVERWHELMED and you have no idea how to make things feel more manageable in your day-to-day?

It’s a tough place to be in, so in today’s post I want to walk you through a three-ingredient “cure” I often use with my therapy and coaching clients (not to mention with myself) when life gets to be overwhelming.

Read on and see if this recipe for overwhelm “cure” can be applied anywhere in your own life….

Discernment.

DEFINITION THERAPY

Psychotherapy is a collaborative process between a trained clinician and a client aimed at understanding and transforming the patterns of thought, emotion, and behavior that cause suffering. Effective therapy provides not just insight but a corrective relational experience, a new template for what it feels like to be truly seen, heard, and held.

Definition

Overwhelm: Overwhelm is a state in which the nervous system becomes flooded — when the demands placed on us exceed our current capacity to cope. It is not a character flaw or weakness; it is a physiological response that signals a need for regulation, support, or a recalibration of expectations.

So what exactly *is* overwhelm and how do you know when you’re in it and what you need? 

Overwhelm, according to Webster’s Dictionary can be defined as:

“: to affect (someone) very strongly

: cause (someone) to have too many things to deal with

: to defeat (someone or something) completely”

Sound familiar?

Strongly affected, too many things to deal with, feeling defeated? Yep.

That’s overwhelm in a nutshell.

“The only way out is through.”

ROBERT FROST

And I think that by understanding the literal definition of overwhelm we can use the definition to recognize when and where in our lives we’re experiencing it. For instance:

• Where are you feeling defeated in your life right now?
• In what area(s) do you simply have too much to deal with?
• Which life areas feel particularly emotional or challenging? Where are you strongly affected?

Also, I invite my clients to pay attention to their fantasies, day-time reveries and mind-wanderings that can often alert them not only to overwhelm but also clue them into the life areas that they might most need to tend to and what they most need and want.

For instance, are they daydreaming about ending up in the hospital so that they can actually get taken care of?

Daydreaming about running away to a cottage in the Scottish Highlands to get some space?

Fantasizing about deleting their social media profiles so they can feel a little less exposed?

Each of these reveries (a state in which you are thinking about pleasant things) contains important clues about what you might most need. So let me ask you:

• In times of overwhelm and overcommitment, what do you fantasize about?
• What’s at the essence of that fantasy? (hint: rest, space, support, connection, and security are usually at the core for most of us.)
• What would it look like to start to address the essence of that fantasy in your real, waking life?

This last question is key, because, let’s face it, most of us can’t drop everything and run away to a cottage in the Scottish Highlands, but we *can* start to identify the fact that we need space and less social contact in our daily lives, which can inform how we apply the second ingredient of the overwhelm cure…

Pruning.

So in my yard, I have these gorgeous, abundant fruit trees: figs, Meyer lemons, apples, and persimmons.

One of the things I’ve learned in the last few years of living here and enjoying their delicious fruit each season is this: pruning back the branches and blossoms, while seemingly ruthless to this newbie gardener, is critical if I want to enjoy fully-matured growth of some of the fruit.

Related Reading

• What does it mean to be an ambitious, upwardly mobile woman from a relational trauma background?
• Attachment Trauma: How Early Relationships Shape Your Adult Connections
• Trauma and Relationships: When Your Professional Strengths Become Your Relationship Blindspots

This principle — of cutting back or getting rid of the excess so that I can ensure some areas reach full bloom — I believe applies to our everyday lives, too, particularly in times of overwhelm.

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I invite my clients in times of overwhelm and overcommitment to reflect not only on what their reveries and daydreams are telling them about what they most need and what that might look like in everyday life but also the big question of:

The reality is, each of us has a finite amount of physical and emotional energy.

Yes, proper diet, sleep, moderate exercise, and other self-care routines can boost our energy levels to a certain extent, but the reality is we’re only human and we all only have 24 hours in a day.

So given that your energy is finite, and given that you might want some of the proverbial fruit on your tree of life goals to mature, what needs to be pruned back in order to make sure enough energy gets to the key areas?

Here are some inquiries to support you in thinking about this:

• What’s a key, underlying goal for your life right now? (hint: is it at the essence of your daytime reveries and fantasies?)
• What, if it “bloomed” would help you achieve a lot of your other goals? For instance, rest, financial security, home organization?
• What are one or two key things that you *know* really have to be prioritized right now? (hint: maybe these things are externally imposed: a big tax bill to pay, a job search that needs to happen…)
• What are five or more examples of things you can ruthlessly prune that are stealing energy away from those key areas?

Boundaries.

Once you’ve identified that you’re in overwhelm, once you’ve become clear on what you most need and want, and clarified what’s possible in terms of pruning, it’s time to take some action to trim back the excess via boundaries.

I’m not going to lie: this may be the hardest part of the three-ingredient overwhelm “cure” for most of us (myself included).

It’s challenging to set boundaries and potentially say no.

To activities, people, and commitments that relentlessly pull for our attention. But learning to do so is critical if we want to reduce our feelings of overwhelm and help those few, key areas of our life blossom. So let me ask you:

• Where, how, and with whom do you need to hold boundaries in your life right now?
• What does it bring up for you to think about tightening boundaries and saying no to people, behaviors, and commitments?
• What did you learn about saying no when you were growing up? Was this supported?
• Who in your life feels safe to practice saying no to? (if the answer is no one, get support with this)

If any of this feels particularly challenging, you’re not alone.

Many of us come from childhoods where we weren’t supported in identifying, stating, and holding our physical, emotional, mental, and behavioral boundaries.

If this was the case for you, the good news is that with skilled support, you can absolutely learn how to do this – no matter where you’re starting from.

And when you learn to hold and state boundaries, you will take great strides towards reducing overwhelm in your life.

Stephen Porges, PhD, the developmental psychophysiologist who developed Polyvagal Theory, describes neuroception as the way the autonomic nervous system continuously evaluates safety beneath conscious awareness. For driven, ambitious women raised in environments where attunement was inconsistent, that internal safety detector tends to run on a hair-trigger setting. The room may be objectively calm, but the nervous system isn’t. Healing isn’t about overriding that signal — it’s about slowly teaching the body that the rules of the present are different from the rules of the past.

The Three-Ingredient Cure for Overwhelm – Moving Forward.

Throughout this post, I’ve used the term “cure” in quotations.

That’s because, realistically, we’re probably never going to cure overwhelm entirely for the rest of our lives.

Unless you’re a monk living in a cave in the Himalayas with your every waking need provided for, you’re probably going to be tested on an ongoing basis with all the many demands modern life holds: work, relationships, commutes, finances, school, friends, family, and more…

But that’s okay because, this practice of discernment, pruning, and holding boundaries is not static: it’s dynamic, ongoing, ever-evolving and something we can learn to help us feel more empowered to deal with the overwhelm that we inevitably encounter as we move through our lives.

Now I’d love to hear from you:

What has supported you in managing and dealing with overwhelm in your own life? What are several areas of your life that might need to be pruned and boundaried right now? Do you have one or two tips, tricks or suggestions of your own that might help others deal with overwhelm?

You don’t have to be a monk in the Himalayas to feel less overwhelmed. You just have to be willing to make a few ruthless choices about what actually gets your energy. That’s harder than it sounds — AND it’s possible.

Warmly,

Annie

Frequently Asked Questions

This is part of our comprehensive guide on this topic. For the full picture, read: High-Functioning Anxiety: A Complete Guide.

You deserve a life that feels as good as it looks. Let’s work on that together.

References

• Porges, S. W. (2011). The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological Foundations of Emotions, Attachment, Communication, and Self-Regulation. Norton.
• Cloud, H., & Townsend, J. (1992). Boundaries: When to Say Yes, How to Say No to Take Control of Your Life. Zondervan.
• Siegel, D. J. (2012). The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are. Guilford Press.
• Brown, B. (2012). Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead. Penguin Random House.
• Maslach, C., Schaufeli, W. B., & Leiter, M. P. (2001). Job burnout. Annual Review of Psychology.
• Linehan, M. M. (1993). Cognitive-Behavioral Treatment of Borderline Personality Disorder. Guilford Press.
• Siegel, D. J., & Hartzell, M. (2003). Parenting from the Inside Out: How a Deeper Self-Understanding Can Help You Raise Children Who Thrive. TarcherPerigee.

Why Overwhelm Resists Quick Fixes

One of the most common patterns I see in driven women dealing with overwhelm is this: they’ve tried the productivity solutions. The time-blocking apps, the weekly reviews, the morning routines. And for a while, these work — until they don’t. The overwhelm returns, often worse than before, because the system couldn’t account for the most destabilizing variable: the emotional and psychological weight that doesn’t show up in a calendar.

Overwhelm that is rooted in relational trauma — in a nervous system that learned early that being needed was the price of being loved — doesn’t respond to efficiency tools. It requires a different kind of intervention: one that goes to the source of the belief that your worth is contingent on your output. In my work with clients, this is often the hidden layer beneath the overwhelm: not too much on the calendar, but too much riding on every item on the calendar. The Fixing the Foundations course is designed to address exactly this layer — the psychological foundations that productivity systems simply cannot reach.

Peter Levine, PhD, somatic therapist and creator of Somatic Experiencing, notes that chronic overwhelm produces a specific physiological signature: a nervous system caught between activation and shutdown, unable to complete the stress cycle. This is not a time management problem. This is a somatic one. And somatic problems require somatic solutions — not another app, but a practice of gentle, consistent engagement with what the body is carrying.

Yasmin is a 39-year-old chief of staff at a Series C startup in Austin. She came to therapy describing herself as “chronically overwhelmed but permanently functional” — a description she delivered with the same flat precision she used to run executive meetings. Every system she’d tried had worked for about six weeks before collapsing under the weight of what the system couldn’t measure: the emotional labor of being indispensable to eight people simultaneously. “I don’t have a time management problem,” she said in our second session. “I have a self-worth problem. I can’t stop because stopping feels like proof that I’m not enough.” That insight — from the second session — is how quickly driven women can locate the real issue when given the right container. (Name and details have been changed.)

Bessel van der Kolk, MD, psychiatrist and trauma researcher and author of The Body Keeps the Score, makes an argument that’s highly relevant here: the body is not separate from the mind’s experience of overwhelm. When stress is chronic, it becomes physiological — stored in the tension of the muscles, the rhythm of the breath, the reactivity of the startle response. A to-do list can’t fix a dysregulated nervous system. And a dysregulated nervous system is what overwhelm, in its persistent form, actually looks like.

Talia is a 40-year-old marketing executive in Chicago. She came to our sessions with a spreadsheet — a literal spreadsheet of everything she was managing. The number of items was genuinely alarming. But as we worked together, what became clear was that the spreadsheet wasn’t the problem. The problem was that Talia had no internal mechanism for deciding what shouldn’t be on the list. She’d never learned to feel her own limits. She’d grown up in a family where the limits of others — her parents’ needs, her siblings’ demands — took precedence over her own, and so she’d simply internalized the pattern. Everything got added. Nothing got pruned. And the overwhelm was the predictable result of a system operating without the one tool it most needed: the capacity to say, with some authority, that’s not mine to carry. (Name and details have been changed.)

What I’ve found in clinical practice is that sustainable relief from overwhelm requires working at three levels simultaneously. The cognitive level: examining the beliefs that make it feel dangerous to say no, to do less, to disappoint. The relational level: building the capacity to set limits in actual relationships with actual people, not just in principle. And the somatic level: working directly with the nervous system to teach the body that it’s safe to slow down. Trauma-informed therapy is often where this three-level work becomes possible in a supported container.

Both/And: High Performance and Honest Feeling Can Coexist

The driven women I work with often arrive in therapy with an unspoken fear: if they stop pushing, everything falls apart. If they let themselves feel what they’ve been outrunning, they’ll never get back up. So they frame the choice in binary terms — keep performing or collapse. In my clinical experience, neither option is necessary. (PMID: 36340842)

Gabriela is an executive at a major tech company who hadn’t taken a sick day in three years. When she finally came to therapy, it wasn’t because she decided to — it was because her body decided for her. Migraines, insomnia, a jaw so clenched her dentist flagged it. She told me, “I can’t afford to fall apart,” and I told her the truth: she was already falling apart. She just hadn’t given herself permission to notice. What Gabriela needed wasn’t to dismantle her drive. It was to stop treating her own pain as an inconvenience to her productivity.

Both/And means this: you can be the person who delivers exceptional results at work and the person who cries in the car afterward. You can be fiercely competent and quietly terrified. You can want more and still appreciate what you have. These aren’t contradictions — they’re the full truth of what it means to be a driven woman navigating a world that rewards your output but not your wholeness.

For driven, ambitious women, the permission to feel is often the hardest pill to swallow. The cultural message has been relentless: your value is in your output, your discipline, your ability to keep going when everyone else would stop. Feeling overwhelmed, in this framework, looks like weakness — evidence that you’re not up to the task. And so the overwhelm gets suppressed, managed, pushed down, performed past — until it arrives as a health crisis, a relationship implosion, or a depressive episode that surprises everyone except the nervous system, which has been communicating for years.

Both/And creates room for the full reality: you can be genuinely capable and genuinely at your limit. Both are true. Your capacity for extraordinary performance is not evidence that the overwhelm isn’t real. And the reality of the overwhelm is not evidence that you aren’t capable. When you can hold both of those truths simultaneously, you stop having to choose between showing up and falling apart — and you can begin, instead, to build a life that accommodates the actual dimensions of a human being.

The Systemic Lens: Why Wellness Culture Fails Driven Women

When a driven woman is struggling — with her mental health, her relationships, her sense of self — the cultural prescription is almost always individual: meditate, journal, set boundaries, practice self-care. These interventions aren’t wrong, but they’re radically incomplete. They place the burden of repair on the woman who was harmed, without ever naming the systems that created the conditions for harm.

The expectation that women — particularly ambitious, driven women — should manage careers, households, relationships, caregiving, and their own mental health without structural support isn’t a personal failure. It’s a systemic design flaw. When corporations demand 60-hour weeks and then offer “wellness programs” instead of workload reduction, when healthcare is tied to employment, when childcare costs more than college tuition in many states — the “wellness gap” driven women experience isn’t a gap in their self-care routines. It’s a gap in the social contract.

In my work with clients, I find it essential to name these forces explicitly. Your exhaustion is not a character deficit. Your difficulty “balancing” work and life isn’t a skills gap. You are attempting to meet inhuman expectations with human resources, and the system that set those expectations has no interest in adjusting them. Understanding this doesn’t solve the problem — but it stops you from internalizing it.

If what you’ve read here resonates, I want you to know that individual therapy and executive coaching are available for driven women ready to do this work. You can also explore my self-paced recovery courses or schedule a complimentary consultation to find the right fit.

For driven, ambitious women — especially those navigating demanding careers while also managing relational or family responsibilities — the systemic barriers are compounded. The cultures that produced many of these women rewarded self-sufficiency and penalized need. Asking for help can feel like a professional liability. Acknowledging limits can feel like evidence of inadequacy. And therapy — the most direct route to working with the patterns underneath chronic overwhelm — carries stigma in many professional environments that makes accessing it feel like an additional risk in an already risky life.

None of this is your fault. But you are the one who has to decide whether you’re going to continue carrying it, or whether you’re going to invest in building the internal and external resources to put some of it down. That is, in the end, a question of priority — and of whether you’re willing to count yourself among the people and projects worthy of your best care. If you’re ready to begin that work, here’s where to start.

One of the most important things I tell clients in early sessions is this: the patterns we’re going to look at together aren’t character flaws. They’re the residue of strategies that once kept you safe. The over-functioning, the difficulty resting, the way you find yourself absorbing other people’s moods before you’ve registered your own — every one of these adaptations made sense in the original environment that shaped them. The work isn’t to shame the strategy. It’s to update the system that keeps generating it.

Related Reading

1. Nagoski, Emily, and Amelia Nagoski. Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle. New York: Ballantine Books, 2019.
2. van der Kolk, Bessel. The Body Keeps the Score. New York: Viking, 2014.
3. Brown, Brené. Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead. New York: Gotham Books, 2012.
4. Maté, Gabor. When the Body Says No. Toronto: Knopf Canada, 2003.
5. Herman, Judith. Trauma and Recovery. New York: Basic Books, 1992.

Overwhelm is not the price of ambition. It’s a signal — from your body, from your nervous system, from the part of you that knows you’ve been operating beyond your actual capacity for longer than is sustainable. Discernment, pruning, and boundaries aren’t a cure because they’re clever. They’re a cure because they restore your relationship with your own limits — which is, in the end, the only sustainable basis for a driven life. If you’re ready to explore what that restoration could look like with support, therapy or executive coaching with Annie may be where that work begins.

The cultural water that ambitious women swim in deserves naming explicitly. Joan C. Williams, JD, distinguished professor at UC Hastings College of Law, has documented extensively how women in high-status professions face what she calls the “double bind” — judged harshly when they’re warm (read as not competent enough) and judged harshly when they’re competent (read as not warm enough). Add a relational trauma history to that bind, and the inner monitoring becomes nearly continuous. Healing has to include a clear-eyed look at how much of the exhaustion isn’t yours alone — it’s a load you’ve been carrying for systems that were never designed to hold you.

References

Peer-Reviewed Research (Vancouver)

1. van der Kolk BA, Wang JB, Yehuda R, Bedrosian L, Coker AR, Harrison C, et al. Effects of MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD on self-experience. PLoS One. 2024;19(1):e0295926. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0295926. PMID: 38198456.
2. Payne P, Levine PA, Crane-Godreau MA. Somatic experiencing: using interoception and proprioception as core elements of trauma therapy. Front Psychol. 2015;6:93. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00093. PMID: 25699005.
3. Porges SW. Polyvagal Theory: Current Status, Clinical Applications, and Future Directions. Clin Neuropsychiatry. 2025;22(3):169-184. doi:10.36131/cnfioritieditore20250301. PMID: 40735382.

Books & Cultural Sources (Chicago Author-Date)

• Maté, Gabor. When the Body Says No. A.A. Knopf Canada, 2003.
• Oliver, Mary. Devotions. Little, Brown Book Group Limited, 2017.

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About the Author

Annie Wright, LMFT

LMFT · Relational Trauma Specialist · W.W. Norton Author

Helping ambitious women finally feel as good as their résumé looks.

Annie Wright is a licensed psychotherapist (LMFT #95719) and trauma-informed executive coach with over 15,000 clinical hours. She works with driven, ambitious women — including Silicon Valley leaders, physicians, and entrepreneurs — in repairing the psychological foundations beneath their impressive lives. Annie is the founder and former CEO of Evergreen Counseling, a multimillion-dollar trauma-informed therapy center she built, scaled, and successfully exited. A regular contributor to Psychology Today, her expert commentary has appeared in Forbes, Business Insider, Inc., NBC, and The Information. She is currently writing her first book with W.W. Norton.

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