Overwhelmed? When Everything's Big, Go Small. When Everything's Small, Go Big.

I hardly know where to look at the moment.

The world feels loud, heavy, and relentless, and even home, which is supposed to be the place you can stop and exhale, doesn't always feel like the sanctuary it should. The news has a way of finding you anyway. Never-ending shenanigans from overseas land in your pocket before you've even had a coffee and a breather, and your nervous system, bless its cotton socks, responds exactly the way it was designed to.

It pulls the fire alarm.

The problem is, it was designed for a very different kind of threat. Not a 24-hour news cycle on repeat. Not a global situation that is simultaneously everywhere and nowhere near you. And yet here we are, bodies braced, brains scanning, cortisol quietly simmering away in the background even on a perfectly ordinary Tuesday morning.

So - what do we do with all of that?

Here's one of my favourite resets, and - like many great ideas - it's deceptively simple.

When everything's big, go small. When everything's small, go big.

When It All Feels Too Big

When the weight of the world is sitting on your chest like a cinder brick, the instinct is often to keep scrolling, keep listening, keep trying desperately to make sense of it all. But unfortunately, that's your nervous system trying to solve an unsolvable problem - the world’s biggest Rubik’s cube - and it will only exhaust itself trying.

Instead, go small.

Find something absorbing, a hobby, a project, even a chore that needs your full attention. Something with a clear path and an endpoint. Cook a meal from scratch. Pull the weeds. Do a puzzle. Build something. Write something. Fix something.

It doesn't have to be meaningful. It just has to be engaging enough that your brain has somewhere specific to go.

🔬 Science Spot

When stress levels spike, the part of your brain that's good at problem-solving and rational thought, the prefrontal cortex, literally goes offline. Giving yourself something absorbing and finite to focus on helps to gently coax it back. It also helps to quieten the default mode network, your brain’s screensaver mode, which is the part of your brain that ruminating, catastrophising, and doomscrolling call home.

When It All Feels Too Compressed

Sometimes overwhelm doesn't feel big and loud. Sometimes it feels tight and airless, like the walls are quietly closing in and you can't quite put your finger on why. The task in front of you feels like it’s sucked you into its vortex and, even though you’ve barely noticed it in the moment, you suddenly realise everything feels too tight. 

That's when you go big.

Raise your gaze. Quite literally. Find a horizon, a window, a view that stretches. Lift your head and take a slow, deep breath. Step outside if you can. Like a Kmart squishy couch that’s arrived in a vacuum pump box (IYKNK), you can feel your wings unfurl, and your brain and body truly breathe. 

And if you're looking for something more to do with that energy, find someone who needs a hand. Shifting from your own internal world into someone else's and being of assistance to them is a great way to let off the pressure of the compress, and in the meantime let the renewed perspective that your challenges are, in fact, not the only ones in the universe, do its quiet work.

🔬 Science Spot

When you widen your gaze and find a horizon, your brain reads it as a physical signal of safety and backs off the fire alarm. This is called panoramic vision, and it's linked to reduced activity in the amygdala, your brain's threat-detection centre. Helping someone else works through a different pathway, shifting you into what Polyvagal Theory calls the ventral vagal state, where connection and calm can become available again.

There's No Quick Fix. But There Is a Dial you can turn.

I'm not going to tell you that any of this solves the state of the world. Spoiler alert - it doesn't. But it does do something very important: it interrupts the cycle long enough for your nervous system to reset, your thinking brain to come back online, and your body to remember that right now, in this moment, you are actually okay.

We can't control what we wake up to. But we can choose, at least some of the time, what we do with the first few moments after, and many of the moments after that. 

Go small. Go big. Move the dial.

Aroha nui, my friend!

Julia Grace - Be Kind to Your Mind

References

The science in this article draws on the following research and resources, because if I'm going to tell you how your brain works, I should probably be able to back it up.

McEwen, B.S. (2007). Physiology and neurobiology of stress and adaptation. Physiological Reviews, 87(3), 873–904.

Huberman, A. (2021). Using focused and panoramic vision to regulate the nervous system. Huberman Lab Podcast, Episode 9.

Porges, S.W. (2011). The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological foundations of emotions, attachment, communication, and self-regulation. W.W. Norton & Company.