The One Thing You’re Getting Wrong About “Overwhelm”
Overwhelm Isn't Going Anywhere — And Neither Are You
Here’s a controversial take: trying to fix your “overwhelm” might be making it worse.
I know. That sounds like the kind of thing someone says right before they try to sell you a meditation app. But stay with me.
I’ve been talking to a lot of people lately — in coaching sessions, over dinners, and casual conversations — and the common thread is striking. Almost everyone feels it.
The ground is shifting fast. AI is rewriting entire industries almost overnight. Politics is a stress machine that never turns off. And most of us end up walking around, asking ourselves: what is even happening, and how do I keep up?
The instinct — and I’ve done this a thousand times — is to solve the “overwhelm.” Clear the inbox. Finish the project. Hit the gym hard enough that your body forgets the panic. And it works… for a few minutes, maybe a few hours, or a few days. Then it’s back.
So what actually works?
First: Stop Fighting It
Here’s the philosophical turn I want to highlight, because I think it matters.
The Stoics had this idea — amor fati — love of fate. Not passive resignation, but a radical acceptance of what is.
Marcus Aurelius says in his Meditations, “the obstacle is the way.” The thing you’re resisting isn’t separate from your path. It often is the path.
Buddhist philosophy takes this even further.
Pema Chodron talks about “making friends with yourself.” This includes making friends with your fears, anxiety, and your “overwhelm.” Not because those feelings are pleasant, but because fighting them adds a second layer adds a second layer of suffering on top of the first. Tara Brach talks about this in her amazing book Radical Acceptance too.
This landed hard for me when I finally admitted: I am easily overwhelmed.
More than a lot of people around me. And accepting that — really accepting it, not as a flaw to be fixed but as a fact to be worked with — was one of the biggest shifts in my journey.
Because here’s what that acceptance unlocks: you stop spending energy on the war with yourself and start spending it on something more useful.
So try this. Next time you feel overwhelmed, instead of running it off or overworking past it, just sit with it. Even for two minutes. If not, then for one minute? 30 seconds? 15 seconds? You get the idea.
Don’t try to make it go away. Let it be there. Breathe with it. The Buddhists would call this “making friends with it,” “laying down the welcome carpet,” or a more sophisticated way of saying it: “having tea with it.” It sounds soft, but it is surprisingly hard. And it works in a way that nothing else does
Second: Have Anchors
During the second wave of COVID, my parents were hospitalized in India. Could not get oxygen tanks due to their scarcity at the time. It was a dire situation. I flew there and stayed in an adjacent house — close enough to help, not close enough to care for them the way you want to when your parents are sick. I felt terrified. Useless.
I remember the mornings vividly. I’d wake up at 5 AM. By 9 in the morning, I’d realize I essentially did nothing. Not because I was lazy, but because I had no structure to pour into. I was packing so much frantic mental energy — the “overwhelm” was running me.
What kept me sane were anchors.
One anchor was meditation. Another was a fixed ritual for tracking their medications. A timed walk — same amount, every day, a non-negotiable — that had nothing to do with how I was feeling. These weren’t glamorous. They weren’t transformational. They were just consistent. And that consistency became a tether.
Think about a buoy in a stormy ocean. It doesn’t fight the waves. It doesn’t try to calm the water around it. But it doesn’t get swept away either, because it’s anchored to something below the surface — something the storm can’t touch.
Overwhelm wants to turn you into a plastic bag in a hurricane. Anchors make you a buoy. They give you a few square inches of “I have control over this” — and that is often enough to keep you functional when everything else feels out of your hands.
Your anchors don’t need to be elaborate. A 10-minute walk. A journaling habit. A cup of tea you make the same way every morning. The simpler, the better. Because the simpler they are, the easier they are to hold onto when you most need them.
Third: An Overwhelming Protocol
An overwhelm protocol is a specific kind of anchor — your base anchor. The thing you always do when the wheels start falling off. No decision required, no energy required to figure out what to do next. You just run the protocol.
Mine looks like this:
Pause. Take 3 conscious breaths.
Read my declaration: “I am where I need to be.” Not ahead, not behind. Here. And now.
Pull out a Post-it and write one thing I’m going to focus on for the next 10 minutes. One. Not five. If I can’t find the one thing, the default task is to dump everything in my head onto a single piece of paper. Every worry, every to-do, every “I should.” Get it out of the cognitive RAM.
Notice the simplicity of this. Three breaths. One task. If no task, then dump. That’s it. The clarity comes from the structure, not from having figured everything out.
You don’t need my protocol. You need a protocol. And the best time to design it is now, when you’re calm — not when you’re already spinning.
Overwhelm Isn’t Going Anywhere — But Neither Are You
So here’s the thing I said at the start: trying to fix your overwhelm might be making it worse.
Having sat with this for a while now — literally and figuratively — I don’t think that’s actually controversial. It’s just counterintuitive. We live in a world that rewards pushing through, optimizing, and solving. Overwhelm resists all of that. It responds to something older and quieter: acceptance, anchors, and a little bit of structure in the storm.
The world is changing faster than any of us imagined. If overwhelm is part of your life right now, don’t just keep pushing through. That has its place. But also spend some time working on the overwhelm itself — on your response to the world, on building a version of yourself that is more resilient, more anti-fragile.
That’s the work that actually moves the needle.
I’d love to hear what landed for you in this one. Hit reply and let me know — what was useful, what you’re going to try, or even what you’d push back on?
Thank you for reaching this far.
— Yogi
P.S. I have a full course on overcoming overwhelm inside my school group — you can join for free and access it there. Here is the link: https://www.skool.com/yogi-sharma-academy-2064