About Feeling Overwhelm or Panic Panic is a form of overwhelm caused by feeling powerless to under-stand and manage too many major anxieties at once. Most kids and adults experience overwhelm and/or panic when our dynamic world causes too many simultaneous needs to fill. Premise - normal personalities are composed of a group of semi-inde-pendent "subselves" or "parts." Our subselves shift from "quiet" to "active" depending on their perception of local conditions. "Overwhelm" occurs when too many needy subselves generate thoughts, emotions, and bodily sensations at once. This is like a group of people all talking and yelling at once, with no one in charge. Local overwhelm can be amplified by being too physically tired, uncomfortable, and/or environmentally distracted. Implications: (a) feeling overwhelmed suggests that the person's expert inner leader, their true Self, is locally distrusted and disabled by other needy subselves. (b) A way of minimizing overwhelm is to patiently train reactive subselves to trust the true Self to focus, define, rank, and fill cur-rent primary needs effectively, one at a time. self-improvement Lesson 1 here offers an effective framework for doing this. Lesson 2 offers a powerful companion framework for communicating and problem-solving (need-filling) effectively. |