What to do when you feel overwhelmed and can't switch off | Dr Julie Smith
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What does overwhelm feel like and how can we recognize its early warning signs?
I'm Dr. Rupee and on this show I help you feel more in control of your health through food and lifestyle medicine. Today, we're going to build an emotional toolkit together for a challenge that many people face overwhelm. The feeling of so many things coming at you at once, the immense pressure of responsibilities and expectations set by ourselves and perhaps other people that can manifest in our day to day as irritability or a sensation of just about keeping yourself above water. There's no one else I'd rather. Have a conversation with about this than Dr. Julie, a clinical psychologist, author of the million-copy best-selling Why Has Nobody Told Me This and Open When, who's devoted her career to learning everything possible about the intricacies of the human mind.
You'll learn today how to spot the signs when overwhelm shows up in your life, what creates overwhelm, and how to reframe. Frame it with simple daily practices to expand your capacity and deal with whatever life throws at you. And if you're more of a visual person, the analogy that Dr. Julie shows us on YouTube is one that I will never forget. Dr. Julie, how do you explain what's happening when people feel overwhelmed?
People are probably wondering why I've got a sponge here. Yeah. Um, so if anyone's not visually watching this, I've got a sponge in my hand. And if you imagine that you're the sponge and the water is all the demands that life throws at you. Um, and that comes thick and fast all the time, right? There's always things that I'm gonna try not to ruin in the studio. So if you imagine all those demands come at you, and most of the time you can just absorb that, right? You can just um
So I'm watching the sponge right now and it's absorbing a bunch of the water that Dr. Julie is
pouring over. But normally you're kind of you're absorbing it all the time.
Yeah.
But what happens is at some point is you start to get this overflow.
Yeah.
And and that overflow, when is the sponge? You fully accept that the sponge has some kind of limited capacity. There's only so much water it can absorb.
And
actually with other people, when they reach their capacity with stress, so all the demands that are sort of throwing life at them, imagine that water then is the signs that they've reached their capacity, that things start to kind of uh leak out and overflow. And when we see those signs in other people, when they say, Do you know what, I'm frazzled, I need a rest we just accept that. We accept that they have capacity in the same way that we accept it with this. But a lot of people don't have that same acceptance for themselves. You know, we have such higher expectations for ourselves than we do for other people. And And there's something quite it's quite sort of profound reframing. When When you accept that you only have so much capacity and instead of seeing the the impact of too much stress as an indication that you're getting something wrong or that you're inadequate in some way, or that it says something fundamental about who you are as a person or your worth.
When you turn that round and in you instead see all of those things as information, signals, you know, in the way that we do with physical he I'm constantly making these comparisons between mental health and physical health. You know, if um You know, I was talking to you earlier about kind of struggling with having a headache last night and I know it's because I haven't had enough sleep this week 'cause we've been really busy. And yeah, I s so I see that as a symptom, right? I see that as a sign that I know I haven't been meeting my own needs, so I need to get a good night's sleep tonight. But with with mental health, often we'll see those signs as, you know, all of the things that we judge ourselves for.
Yeah. instead of seeing it as information, that you know, if you if you're snapping at your partner more and arguing more, or if you're feeling anxious at the beginning of the day, or all of these things are information. And often when we stop judging ourselves for them and instead turn towards them with curiosity,
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What does overwhelm feel like and how can we recognize its early warning signs?
0:00–8:58
2
How does the sponge analogy illustrate the limits of our emotional capacity?
8:58–18:22
3
Why is curiosity more helpful than judgment when dealing with overwhelm?
18:22–28:11
4
What practical grounding techniques can we use in the moment?
28:11–39:16
5
How can simple daily habits like sleep, movement, and nutrition reduce overwhelm?
39:16–51:44
6
What is the “predator vs. prey” mindset and how can it reframe stressful situations?
51:44–1:04:41
7
How can we create intentional “quiet spaces” or digital breaks to reset our brain?
1:04:41–1:13:45
8
What single, actionable habit should listeners start with to combat overwhelm right now?
1:13:45–1:18:17
Speakers
1 identifiedMore from The Doctor's Kitchen Podcast
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