By Mark Travers Ph.D.
It’s Friday morning. Your inbox has 47 unread emails, you have three deliverables due by the end of today, and your calendar is back-to-back all day. Somewhere in the middle of it, you freeze. You open a browser tab, close it, and open it, accomplishing nothing for 20 minutes. That experience of paralysis in the face of too much is what most people call overwhelm. And the near-universal response is to try to make it stop.
But what if that instinct is leading you down the wrong path? A growing body of research in cognitive and performance psychology suggests that overwhelm, properly understood, is not a malfunction at all; it is a signal from your mind-body. The feeling itself is not the problem. It is that most people have never been taught to read it for what it’s trying to say.
Here are three evidence-based strategies for transforming overwhelm from a productivity killer into a more reliable tool in your cognitive arsenal.
1. Treat Overwhelm as an Attention Signal, Not a Warning Sign
One of the more counterintuitive findings in cognitive psychology is that the brain under pressure does not simply become less “functional.” What really happens is that distress forces the brain to become more selective.
When the demands placed on working memory exceed its capacity, the brain initiates a kind of forced triage, narrowing attention toward what it registers as highest priority and filtering out competing noise. This process, known as attentional narrowing under cognitive load, is well-documented in the psychological literature.
In practical terms, what this means is that the sensation of overwhelm often contains information about what actually matters. Think about the last time you felt genuinely overwhelmed at work. Chances are, there was one task — one particular email you didn’t want to reply to, one conversation you were avoiding, or one project you kept postponing — that sat at the center of the feeling. Everything else was peripheral noise. The overwhelm, if you think about it now, was not indiscriminate; it was pointing at something specific.
The common mistake people make is to respond to this signal by trying to zoom out: to make a new list, reorganize priorities, or achieve a bird’s-eye view of everything at once. This effort to regain a sense of control, while psychologically understandable, actively works against the brain’s attempt to direct your attention. A more effective approach is to ask a single question when overwhelm hits: What is this feeling pointing me toward? In most cases, the answer surfaces quickly, and it is usually the thing you have been avoiding precisely because it matters most.
2. Reappraise the Overwhelm, Don’t Suppress It
From a purely physiological standpoint, feeling overwhelmed and feeling excited are nearly identical experiences. Both states involve elevated cortisol, increased heart rate, heightened alertness, and sensory attention. The body does not meaningfully distinguish between the two. What differs is the interpretation the mind places on those physical sensations, and that interpretation, research suggests, is far more malleable than most people realize.
According to a series of studies published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology, individuals who reappraised their anxiety as excitement before high-stakes performances, such as public speaking, difficult negotiations, or standardized tests, significantly outperformed those who tried to calm themselves down.
The mechanism is important: telling yourself to calm down requires suppressing an arousal state, which is cognitively expensive and rarely fully successful. Reappraising arousal as excitement, by contrast, redirects existing energy without fighting it.
This principle maps directly onto the Yerkes-Dodson Law, one of the most replicated findings in performance psychology. The relationship between arousal and performance is not linear; it follows an inverted-U. In simple terms, too little arousal produces flat, disengaged work and too much produces panic and paralysis. But the peak of that curve, the zone of optimal performance, requires a level of activation that most people would describe as feeling pressed, alert, and slightly uncomfortable. It feels a great deal like being overwhelmed.
Think about all the scenarios this reappraisal could help land successfully: a software engineer preparing to present a technical architecture to senior leadership; a therapist about to deliver difficult feedback to a long-term client; or even a writer staring at a blank document with a deadline two hours away. In each case, the feeling of overwhelm carries within it exactly the arousal level that peak performance requires. The productive internal shift in those moments is not toward calm, it is toward direction. The activation is already present; the question is where to point it.
3. Use Overwhelm to Create the Conditions for Flow
Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi spent the better part of four decades studying what he called flow, which is the state of complete absorption in a challenging task, in which self-consciousness recedes, time distorts, and performance peaks.
His central finding was that flow does not emerge from ease. Instead, it emerges from a very specific tension: a task that is difficult enough to demand full engagement, but not so difficult as to trigger shutdown. The challenge must slightly exceed the individual’s current skill level. Too far below it, and the mind wanders. Too far above it, and anxiety takes over.
The conditions Csikszentmihalyi describes as prerequisites for flow are, by definition, also the conditions that produce the feeling of overwhelm. Feeling overwhelmed is often what it feels like to be standing at the threshold of flow: stretched to capacity, uncertain of the outcome, and in possession of exactly the kind of challenge that demands everything you have.
The reason most people never cross that threshold is behavioral, not cognitive. When overwhelmed, the default response is fragmentation: switching between tasks every few minutes, compulsively checking notifications, completing small, low-stakes tasks to manufacture a feeling of progress while avoiding the large, high-stakes task that actually requires concentration. This pattern, which psychologists sometimes describe as task-switching under stress, is precisely what prevents the sustained single-task focus that flow requires. It is the equivalent of standing at the edge of a diving board and repeatedly stepping back.
A version of this post also appears on Forbes.com
