Overwhelm Isn’t a Personal Failing
It’s rarely the big things that tip us over.
As working parents, it is often the permission slip that needs signing by tomorrow, the text you meant to reply to on Tuesday or realising there’s no milk, at exactly the moment you’ve run out of everything else.
And almost always, close behind the overwhelm, comes a quieter and more painful thought: what’s wrong with me? Everyone else seems to manage.
We’d like to offer a different way of seeing it.
The story we tell ourselves
When we feel overwhelmed, most of us assume the problem is us. If we were more organised, more disciplined, better at coping, we wouldn’t feel like this. So, we try harder, we make longer lists or we get up earlier. Making a promise to ourselves that we’ll be calmer tomorrow.
And when that doesn’t work, the self-criticism gets louder.
But there’s another explanation, and it’s one that sailors understood more than a hundred and fifty years ago.
The line on the side of the ship
In Victorian Britain, a ship was sometimes loaded with so much cargo that it sat dangerously low in the water. Overloading and poor repair made some vessels so unsafe that they became known as coffin ships.
Sailors knew it and some refused to go to sea in ships they believed weren’t fit to sail, and they were sent to prison for it. At one point, nine out of twelve prisoners in jails in the south-west of England were sailors serving twelve weeks for exactly that.
Notice where the blame landed: on the sailors. Not on the cargo.
Then an MP called Samuel Plimsoll began to campaign. He argued that the problem wasn’t weak or cowardly crews but rather the problem was the load. His campaign led to the Merchant Shipping Act of 1876, which made it compulsory to paint a load line on the side of a ship: a simple mark showing how low in the water it could safely sit. If the line disappeared beneath the waves, the ship was carrying too much.
Ships still carry that mark today and it’s called the Plimsoll line.
The answer was never braver sailors. What it required was a lighter load.
What we’re carrying now
Most of us don’t have a line painted on our side to tell us when we’ve taken on too much. But if we did, a lot of us would be sitting very low in the water. Here’s some of what we carry that our grandparents simply didn’t.
More information than ever. Back in 2009, researchers at the University of California estimated that the average American was taking in around 100,000 words of information a day from screens, radio, print and conversation. That was before most of us carried a smartphone. Every one of those words asks for a little of our attention.
A head full of open loops. Psychologists have found that goals we haven’t finished do tend to keep tugging at our thoughts, surfacing when we’re trying to focus on something else. In one study, simply making a specific plan for an unfinished task reduced how much it intruded. Our minds aren’t misbehaving when they won’t let go, instead they’re holding on to things they’re worried we’ll forget.
The invisible work. A sociologist at Harvard, Allison Daminger, studied what she called the cognitive side of running a household: anticipating what’s needed, working out the options, deciding, then keeping an eye on whether it did happen. She found this work is “taxing but often invisible”, both to the people doing it and to those they live with. Remembering the dentist, noticing the shoes are too small, knowing the bin goes out on Thursday. Generally none of it appears on a to-do list, but all of it is cargo.
Put all that together and overwhelm starts to look less like a character flaw and more like simple physics. A ship carrying too much sits low in the water and that isn’t a failing but a load.
Asking a different question
When overwhelm arrives, the question we usually ask is why can’t I cope? It’s an unkind question, and it doesn’t have a useful answer.
A gentler and more honest question is: what am I carrying?
That question changes things. It lets us look at the load instead of at ourselves. It makes room to notice which things are ours to carry and which we picked up out of habit or guilt, and what could be set down, shared or simply left until next week.
It also makes it easier to say the words out loud to someone else. “I’m not coping” feels like a confession. “I’m carrying too much at the moment” is just the truth, and the people who love us can usually help with a load more easily than with a failing.
This is really what we mean by Freedom to do Less. Not doing nothing, and not giving up on the things that matter, but giving ourselves permission to carry an amount we can actually sail with.
Riding a little higher
Nobody blamed the sea for being rough, and in the end, nobody blamed the sailors either. They simply drew a line and agreed that no ship should be asked to carry more than it safely could.
If you’re feeling overwhelmed this week, we hope you’ll offer yourself the same kindness. You’re not failing. You’re carrying a lot.
And you’re allowed to put some of it down.
When you’re ready for some small, practical ways to lighten the load, The Art of Doing Less has a gentle evening reset, two simple breathing exercises and quick fixes for the moments when everything feels like too much. Chris has also recorded it as an audiobook.
If overwhelm has settled in for a long while, or it’s affecting your sleep, appetite or mood, please talk to your GP or someone you trust. You don’t have to carry that on your own either.
— Tracy & Chris