If You’re Feeling Overwhelmed, You Need to Hear This

There is a major difference between moments where you feel stressed versus when you feel overwhelmed, and our two medical experts are gonna explain this to you. Dr. K is a Harvard-trained psychiatrist who specializes in modern mental health. Dr. Addidi is a Harvard-trained physician with an expertise in stress, burnout, and mental health.

There actually isn't just one kind of stress, but two kinds of stress. There is good, healthy stress, and bad, unhealthy stress.

Stress is just pressure that you feel. Overwhelm is something different.

You don't feel overwhelmed from dealing with too much. You get overwhelmed when many of the things that you're dealing with are out of your control.

When you feel that sense of overwhelm, what's happening to you scientifically, we call it psychological flooding, when you are flooded with these big negative emotions.

You're not crazy. You're not lazy. Stress and overwhelm, these are biological responses.

The human brain is expertly designed to handle short bursts of stress. It's actually really good at that. The goal of life is not zero stress. It's actually biologically impossible to do that.

So we have a really interesting technique that we use in psychiatry, and there's tons of research to support this.

You're gonna use these research-backed tools to be able to reset yourself. That's what we're gonna do. Hey, it's your friend Mel, and welcome to the Mel Robbins Podcast. (upbeat music) Hey, it's Mel, and I cannot wait to dig into the game-changing difference between stress and moments of overwhelm and the four steps that you can take, and before we do, with world-renowned medical experts, I just gotta say, my team just showed me this. Do you know 54% of you that watch here on YouTube are not subscribers? Holy cow. Can we change that together? Could you hit subscribe? It's free. It is the fastest way for you to make sure you don't miss a thing that we're doing here on the Mel Robbins Podcast. It's also the best way for you to show support to our team 'cause we're always showing up here supporting you. I know you love these episodes. I know you love these world-renowned experts, and I would love for you to give the Mel Robbins Podcast team a little love. My goal is to get that to 50% and we're almost there. So thank you, thank you, thank you for hitting subscribe. All right. Let's jump in to this extraordinary episode. Hey, it's your friend Mel, and welcome to the Mel Robbins Podcast. I am thrilled that you're here. I'm so excited for the topic today. It's always an honor to be together and to spend this time with you. If you're a new listener or you're here because somebody shared this episode with you, I just wanted to take a moment and personally welcome you to the Mel Robbins Podcast family. You've picked a life-changing episode to listen to. This is a really good one, because today, you and I are gonna go step by step through the four things you're gonna do to get out of overwhelm when life feels like it's just too much, and doesn't life feel like it's too much right now? I know, I know. That's why I wanted to talk about this. I wanted to talk about this topic because so many of you are writing in from around the world, and you're using the words, "I feel so overwhelmed," or you're saying, "I'm so stressed out." And so here's what I did. I reached out to two of your favorite and my favorite medical experts who have appeared on the Mel Robbins Podcast. They are also medical experts that I quoted extensively in the Let Them Theory book, and what I wanted to figure out was, what do we need to do in moments of stress and overwhelm? And that's when I learned the very first mistake I was making. I was using the words stressed and overwhelmed interchangeably, and medically speaking, they're very different states that your brain or body are in. And if you're gonna take control in moments where you're stressed or overwhelmed, first of all, you gotta know the difference. That's the first step. You gotta know the difference between when you're experiencing stress versus you getting to this moment where you're so flooded and beyond your capacity to deal with it that you're actually overwhelmed. Here's how I think about it now that I have spent hours and hours researching this topic so you and I could have this conversation today. Stress is just pressure that you feel, and stress sometimes can be a really good thing. You know what I mean? Like, 'cause when you feel stressed about a deadline, you tend to get the work done. So it's pressure that you feel. In fact, the days that we tape this podcast for you, they're very stressful, and, uh, I don't mean bad. It's just that the days are like, go, go, go, go. You know, we got an early call time and then the guests are showing up or I'm showing up and then we're getting the cameras ready and it's like, go, go, go, go. You have days like that, right? Those days where you gotta get outta work or you gotta get outta school by 3:00 PM because you gotta get the kids to their doctor's appointment, or you gotta make that soccer game, or you gotta pick up your mom and go do something. Those days are stressful because you feel pressure. It's sort of like you're stepping on the gas, right? And you're go, go, go. Overwhelm? Now that's different. Overwhelm is way bigger than a stressful day. Overwhelm is what happens when that stress that you're feeling, that pressure, that go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go is building and building and building and building, and all of a sudden you've had too many days or too many weeks, too many months, too many years in a row, and now you can't go. You've hit this threshold. You, you've hit your capacity to handle the pressure. You can't keep up. When you're in a state of overwhelm, you can't think. You can't prioritize. Overwhelm means you just can't handle it anymore.Like, that's kinda how I know the difference. Stress, I keep powering through. Overwhelm, I've hit the wall. And I wanna unpack this so that you really understand why this difference matters. Let's talk about a work example. Stress is you're answering one email and all of a sudden, you know, three more come in and the stupid notifications like ding, ding, ding. And as the ding, ding, ding happens, you start to feel the pressure rising. That's stress. Overwhelm is when you open your inbox and you see there are 342 unanswered emails and you don't know where to start, so you just sit there and you stare at the screen and now you can't even remember why you logged on in the first place. And, oh my God, I have a meeting in seven minutes. That's overwhelm. Another example, you walk into the kitchen after work and driving your mom to a doctor's appointment this afternoon, you have all these emails that you need to answer because you're out of the office while you were doing the medical appointment. You realize there's no plan for dinner. There is nothing in the fridge. The dog is staring at you because it needs food and you don't have food because you forgot to buy it on the way home. And you just sit down on the couch and you start crying. Or maybe you don't even cry because you've reached this capacity where you can't even cry. You're not even sure what you'd order for dinner at this point. That's overwhelm. Overwhelm, it's a threshold, a capacity issue. Your brain just isn't working. You have no focus. Your emo- oh my God, emo- You either feel numb, I either feel numb or I just feel, I don't know, I always feel run over when I'm overwhelmed. Like, stress has this energy to it. Overwhelm's something else. I think this is personally super helpful to understand the difference and it makes me realize I've been using these words incorrectly my entire adult life, which is 57 years, for crying out loud. And none of us really understand this unless you're a medical doctor that studies it because medically speaking, they're very different states, which means they need different tools. If you use the wrong tools, you're gonna stay stuck. I want you to just stop and consider right now. Are you feeling stressed in life because you feel pressure? Or are you feeling what I'm describing to you, which is this I've reached the capacity that I have? I bet if you're not feeling overwhelmed, you know somebody who is. And everything you're about to hear is gonna be so eye-opening. And the first person I want you to hear from is the extraordinary Dr. K. Now, Dr. K is a Harvard-trained psychiatrist who specializes in modern mental health. He's appeared on the Mel Robbins podcast twice, and every time everybody just goes bananas over Dr. K. You may also know him as The Healthy Gamer online. He has millions of people that follow him on his YouTube channel. And so I reached out to Dr. K, he just has a way with words, and I said, "Hey, Dr. K, could you describe the difference between stress and overwhelm?" And I want you to check out what Dr. K said.