The Relationship Between Overwhelm and Passivity
How too much makes us feel like not enough.
(This is a long but important post and I’ll hope you’ll find some good in it.)
I’ve been a little quiet online lately. Partly for personal grace with a private struggle I’ve been managing, partly because (gestures broadly to the internet). Unless you’ve been living under a rock, the last 2.5 months have felt the deluge from all sides of the media landscape. Clients, students, and friends have consistently talked about the seemingly universal struggle between “staying informed” and feeling totally beset upon.
I’ve partly been quiet because I didn’t want to contribute to the noise of people telling you want to do with this moment (or, possibly worse, those continuing to pump out content as if it’s business as usual).
It is not business as usual.
For most of my life I have, even before I knew the term, been a pragmatic optimist.
I will be Super Real about the situation I find myself in and then take action on the most hopeful course possible. Often creating opportunities for myself along the way. It’s a skill that serves me well. But it requires a willingness to look at the big messes that threaten to overwhelm and being able to remain proactive.
Regardless of your political and social persuasions, we’re in a big mess right now.
An overwhelming scale of “mess”.
To be clear: I’m not trying to minimize by calling it a mess.
To call it a mess it to own one of the truths of really, really, really big messes:
You can’t clean them up without getting a bit dirty yourself.
True messes are visceral. Often disgusting. They require blood and sweat to be disassembled, cleaned, and those spaces to be reborn. That’s how this all feels to me.
But the thing about an overwhelming mess: It can put you into freeze.
And many, many, many people I’m talking to these days feel in freeze.
So today I want to share with you not only the link between overwhelm and freeze, but the essential tools to do something about it.
Learned Helplessness
In the late 1960s Martin Seligman and his colleague Steve Maier conducted their first experiments on helplessness. The short version: they discovered that when animals are put in an unsolvable situation or humans are given an unsolvable puzzle most of the subjects in the experiments give up. They become “helpless”. Once they feel helpless even if the problem becomes solvable, they wont immediately try. Some humans bounce back quickly - once they’re shown it’s solvable they’ll give it a go. Others continue to resist. Their helplessness has made them passive and they refuse to even try.
Seligman and Maier called this learned helplessness and found that the passivity and malaise they’d induced almost perfectly mirrored the criteria for episodic depression - minus the suicidal ideation. At the time Seligman and Maier thought action was the default setting and that people learned to be helpless.
50 years later advances in neuroscience showed that assumption was false.
Each of us is born with the switch for action set to “helplessness”. As we grow we learn that we can influence our environment. Children are naturally led by curiosity and the drive to explore. Those given enough agency will learn that they can influence their environment - they’re interested in something and they go do it. A belief begins to form that their actions affect the outcomes in their environment and life.
That belief is key. They have to believe their actions will shape reality to take action.
They have to believe that change is possible and worth it to do it.
When I was studying Positive Psychology I thought that was the key:
get people to experience their agency so they believe in change for good.
What I didn’t realize would become so jarringly relevant is that the equal and opposite are also true: if you show someone they’re in the unsolvable problem many and maybe most will give up. Once they give up that passivity can mirror depression.
If you wanted to make people passive, make them feel helpless.
It’s becoming a cliche to say that for those high-achieving Millennials and X-ennials among us: we grew up in a world that told us we could be anything. Perhaps you, like me, embraced that ethos. Went to college, spent our 20s and 30s hustling in a cultural-center city and dreaming about being able to someday afford the things our parents didn’t have because we were the ones finally breaking generational patterns. It was a lot to be on us while coming of age during an economic crisis, terrorist attacks, shootings, and the impending collapse of the climate - but it always felt like we were going to fix it! Right!?
Now: we are faced with the overwhelm.
All that hustling to discover how little control and agency we have at scale.
This has been the core of coaching conversations over the last 2 months.
Brilliant, beautiful people feeling like they’re drowning in it all.
What I’ve come to see plainly is how that is by design.
The design of taking a generation that was so empowered as to believe in a better world and overwhelm them to the point of compliance.
To doubt themselves so hard that the story of “not enough” makes them passive.
What I’ve come to believe fiercely is how we cannot allow that to happen.
To stop it is to understand helplessness… and what to do about it.
Wellbeing During Decline
I’ve wrestled with this concept over the past few months: what is the utility of wellbeing during a period of decline?
It is indulgent or classist or just plain poor taste to talk about wellbeing when we can point to so many systems beginning to sputter? To so many people suffering?
The answer I’ve stumbled on is: It’s essential learning.
"Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation,
and that is an act of political warfare."
~Audre Lorde
Before “self care” got absconded by influencer culture it lived in the spaces of social justice and chronic illness. The idea that we had to care for our foundational human needs so we could rise to the challenges ahead was so much more than beauty products and brand name leggings.
If their are forces in the world that want to make us feel helpless it’s time for us to learn how to become radically well, regardless of what’s happening at scale.
A tall order, no doubt.
You might be wondering… but how?
Your Brain on Helplessness
50 years after it’s discovery, Maier published the update to the Learned Helplessness literature identifying the structures in the brain that governed passivity and action. When induced to helplessness the dorsal raphe nucleus (DRN) located in the brainstem would activate passivity, and that was the default for us all. However, when primed with doable action the prefrontal cortex (PFC), home of self-control, planning, and decision-making, would inhibit the DRN.
Translation:
Focus on what you DO have control over and go do it and you’ll break the passivity.
Having control and influence isn’t just a mindset. You don’t “manifest” your way out of feeling helpless. Maier’s work showed that action is a set of skills and practices that keep you proactive even when things are going sideways.
We need that right now!
(This is, incidentally, why cleaning your space helps you get past mild depression.)
Many of the recommendations of “how” seem cliche; but there’s a reason those cliche things work right now:
Start small - identify small, manageable wins and then allow yourself to feel satisfied that you did something (without minimizing it)
Setup Stable Routines - the nervous system reacts well to stability and predictability and much of your body’s automatic functions are part of the circadian rhythm.
Prioritize the Foundation - building on #2, those stabile systems should be for your foundational needs. Sleep, movement, nutrition, time outside, and connecting with supportive people. In this moment those are core learning.
Focus on Process - there is so much we can’t control in this moment and if you stare too long at the sun your eyes burn. Keep your focus on your doable actions, your own consistency, and the journey along the way. There’s a lot we don’t have a say on and being outcome oriented just now is a trap.
To quote my favorite line from Hamilton: “I am the one thing in life I can control.”
When you keep your focus on your controllable, literally any doable action you can tangibly influence the outcome of, you’re feeding the PFC (that part of the brain that inhibits helplessness).
Need help figuring out how?
Some people are naturally going to need help, support, and community to see this type of mindset shift into life.
That’s why this year, for the first time ever, I am opening my retreat to the general public. For the first time I’m inviting anyone who’d like to join us to be in community together focusing on setting a stable foundation so we can be well in the world. Tickets as low as $550. I hope you’ll check it out and any questions please don’t hesitate to reach out.