Overwhelm: Permission to Control the Noise

In this 5th episode of Chocolate Psychology, Dr. Tricia describes her decision to adjust the volume during a period of life that was excessively overstimulating and overwhelming. She likens the process to adjusting the volume with an old fashion radio dial, giving herself permission to dial back the noise such that she only attended to critical items.

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Transcript

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Hello, this is Dr. Tricia, and this is the fifth episode of Chocolate Psychology, a place where I hope you find encouragement, information, and a little bit of energy or comfort to take you through your day. In 2024, I was completely overstimulated. I was dealing with some health issues and trying to figure out a diagnosis, and then when I got that to schedule surgery. At the same time, I had just moved into a new house and I was handling a lot of decision-making, logistics, and a learning curve. During that time, I was also trying to take care of my clients and my business to the best of my ability. And what I found was I just didn't have extra space. I didn't have extra room to have conversations that people wanted to have, or when a friend reached out and said, "Hey, do you want to catch up?" In my head, it was "no, please." Sometimes well-intended support just created more stress for me. A lot of people, when they try to offer support, they offer it from their own frame of reference and they project a lot from their own experiences. So I was tired of trying to explain over and over and over again what was going on. And so there was this moment I was standing in my kitchen and a thought struck me. I went over to the counter and I wrote down, "You control the noise, you can adjust the volume." And in my mind, I pictured an old-fashioned radio dial where you turn it, and when you turn it, you turn the volume up and down. And in that moment, it was permission for myself to not do anything extra. I am naturally wired to have high expectations of what I want to achieve in any given day. I want to help people to problem solve and to fix things, even those that aren't, to be honest, completely mine to own or fix. And then there was also things that were even as simple as stimulation in my physical environment. Turning down the TV, turning it off, allowing silence. And frankly, not in a meditative way– I wasn't trying to teach myself to sit in silence. It was more of just understanding that I was really over-stimulated and that I needed to dial back to what was critical. There is one thing here that I have an advantage on, and it's because over the years people have reached out to me in times of crisis. And so I do have an understanding of critical. And honestly, critical is usually when there's death involved. There's a lot of things that we think are urgent, we think are important, we think we should do, and it's truly not critical. And so for me, turning down the volume meant scaling back to what I absolutely had to achieve on any given day, and not taking on any extra requests, even if they sounded like fun in the moment, even if I deeply cared about the people making them. So I'm not sure what's happening with you today. I don't know if you are just stressed with life or possibly feeling overwhelmed, or if you've had recent bad news that feels insurmountable. And maybe you carry anxiety and it's just enough to cope with your own anxiety, let alone taking on everyone else's. But I hope that when you listen to this, you give yourself permission to tune into yourself and to adjust the volume on everything else. This is Dr. Tricia Groff, and that's your Chocolate psychology for the day.