The Story of Overwhelm: When Perfectionism Puts You in the Victim Chair

What If “I’m So Overwhelmed” Is Doing Two Jobs at Once?

Here’s something worth sitting with: when you say “I’m so overwhelmed” — and you mean it, you really mean it — you might not just be stating facts. Underneath that proclamation, something else could be happening. That story of overwhelm might be doing double duty: naming a feeling and, at the very same time, shielding you from having to look any deeper.

Stay with me.

This isn’t about gaslighting your nervous system. Overwhelm is real,  it lives in the body in ways that are physiologically, measurably uncomfortable. You know the cocktail: racing thoughts, a jaw that won’t unclench, the compulsive need to send one more email, mixed with that dorsal vagal shutdown flavor: the fog, the blankness, the bone-deep fatigue. Your gas pedal and your brake, both slammed to the floor at the same time.

That is a real physiological state, and it deserves real care.

But (and this is a big, loving, gentle but) for a lot of people, the story of overwhelm is doing a second job. A hidden job. One that has nothing to do with your actual nervous system state and everything to do with staying safe inside a framework that has never once given you permission to just be a regular human with regular human limits.

Watch the full episode on YouTube

What Perfectionism Is Actually About

Perfectionism isn’t really about high standards. From the outside, it looks like you just care a lot, like you’re thorough, conscientious, deeply committed. And maybe you tell yourself that, too.

But underneath all of that is something older and considerably more scared.

Perfectionism is about safety. It’s the deeply held belief, usually one you didn’t consciously choose, one that was handed to you early by people who were doing their best but were also kind of a mess, that you are only acceptable, only lovable, only not-the-problem if you are excellent. If you are doing it right. If you are never the one causing harm or taking up too much space or being, god forbid, inconvenient.

That belief creates a very particular and very brutal binary:

You are either excellent, or you are the problem.

There is no comfortable middle ground. No “I am doing my best and today my best looks like canceling plans and eating cereal for dinner and that is fine.” No “I am human and humans have limits and limits are just biology.” There is excellent, or there is bad. Excellent, or you need to explain yourself.

Which, if you think about it, is an absolutely exhausting way to live.

Why the Overwhelm Story Is So Seductive

Life doesn’t care about your perfectionist binary. Things pile up. Your kid gets sick the morning of your biggest presentation. Your partner picks a feelings conversation for the one night you had nothing left. Your inbox becomes sentient and starts breeding.

And your nervous system, which has actual biological limits that are not negotiable no matter how much your to-do list disagrees, eventually hits a wall.

When that happens, your perfectionist parts don’t sit down quietly and accept the situation. They get creative.

Here’s what they come up with: if I cannot be perfect, maybe I can be innocent.

Blameless. Someone who can’t be held accountable because she was never really choosing, she was simply being acted upon by a life that was just too much. Not an agent who made decisions and now has to stand behind them — just a person suffering under the weight of too much. A victim of circumstance rather than a person making choices.

This is what the overwhelm story does at its root: it temporarily allows you to shed moral agency.

The overwhelmed woman is morally safe in a way the woman who says “I’m choosing not to” simply is not. She was drowning. And you cannot fault someone for what they couldn’t do. You can only feel sorry for them, offer to help, definitely not hold them accountable for the limits they never actually claimed.

“I’m Overwhelmed” vs. “I’m Choosing Not To”

“I’m overwhelmed” gets you sympathy.

“I’m choosing not to” might get you called selfish.

For those of us raised to treat other people’s comfort as more important than our own truth, that distinction is everything.

This is one of the sneakiest forms of Emotional Outsourcing — a term I coined to describe the thought habits that develop when we’ve been taught, explicitly and implicitly, to look outside ourselves for safety, worth, and identity. When we scan the room instead of checking in with our bodies. When we manage how we’re perceived rather than honoring what we actually need. When we perform our limitations rather than claim them, because claiming them feels too dangerous, too selfish, too much like admitting that we’re a person with a self that has actual, non-negotiable, inconvenient needs.

In that system (and it is a system), one most of us were handed before we were old enough to have an opinion about it, owning your limits out loud feels like an act of aggression.

So the overwhelm story becomes the workaround. You’re not refusing. You’re drowning. You’re not choosing rest. You’re collapsing. You’re not setting a limit. You’re just… so swamped right now, you’re so sorry, you’ll get to it soon, you promise.

It sounds like vulnerability. It often feels exactly like vulnerability. But it’s a performance (a brilliant, completely understandable, nervous-system-protective performance) and it quietly costs you.

What Chronic Overwhelm Actually Does to Your Nervous System

When you keep reinforcing the story that you’re always on the verge of collapse, regardless of what is actually happening, you lose the ability to accurately read your own capacity. The felt sense of what’s actually available in your body gets overwritten by the story.

You stop being able to choose intentionally and start operating from default.

You swing from sympathetic overdrive — doing doing doing, emailing at midnight, saying yes before the sentence is finished — to dorsal shutdown — staring at your phone for forty minutes without absorbing a single thing — and back again, with very little actual regulation happening in between.

You become:

– More reactive

– More likely to say yes when your whole body is screaming no

– More likely to ghost, check out, or quietly seethe with a resentment you can’t fully justify

– More likely to lie awake at 2am running the highlight reel of everything you didn’t get to

Which makes the story louder. Which makes the overwhelm more total. Which makes it harder to ever tell the difference between what you actually cannot do and what you are simply afraid to claim that you will not do.

The Deeper Truth Underneath the Overwhelm

The deeper truth — the one your nervous system is waving its tiny arms trying to get you to look at — is not about your schedule.

It’s about alignment. It’s about what it costs, at the cellular level, to keep living in a way that requires you to betray yourself daily. To perform your humanity rather than live it. To wait for permission to have needs instead of just, you know, having them.

Which you are allowed to do.

That is a thing you are allowed to do.

This isn’t a time management problem. It’s an Emotional Outsourcing problem. And it deserves a whole lot more than a better productivity app.

One Question to Sit With This Week

Not a five-step fix. Just one question to bring to your body, to let rattle around in you this week:

When you say you’re overwhelmed — what are you hoping that story will give you? And what would it feel like in your body to ask for that thing directly instead?

That’s where it starts.