What’s Your Default Overwhelm Mode?
I joined Jen Benford on the Divergent Talent Alchemist last week for a conversation I’ve been wanting to have for a while because overwhelm is something I hear about constantly, from clients, colleagues, and honestly, from myself.
We all experience overwhelm, but we don’t all experience it the same way. And when we start to understand how we respond — our default mode — we get a lot more traction on actually working with it.
I walked through five patterns I’ve observed (and lived):
Overdrive: You accelerate. Calendar fills up, you say yes to everything, you’re moving fast. There’s real strength here — high output, natural momentum. The blind spot? You can easily confuse motion with progress.
Controller: You plan, orchestrate, micromanage the details. It creates order, and that feels good. But the more you plan, the more your plans become expectations, and expectations set you up for disappointment when the inevitable happens and things don’t go accordingly.
Spiral: This one lives internally. Your mind loops, you replay conversations, you overthink. Thinking expands AND narrows at the same time. The trap is that it feels like you’re working on something when you’re actually just spinning.
Absorber: You become the container for everyone around you. High empathy is the strength — you tune in, you accommodate, you care. The cost is that by the end of the day, you’ve been attending to everyone else’s energy and completely lost track of your own.
Shutdown: The circuit breaker. Your system says enough and goes offline. Netflix, a walk, a glass of wine… whatever that looks like for you. This mode is doing an important job. The risk is staying there too long or cycling back into overdrive without addressing what brought you there.
The main thing I want people to take away: these aren’t problems. They’re your nervous system’s strategy for managing pressure. Awareness is the first step. When you can name what’s happening, you have a lot more choice about what comes next.
If you want to learn about how to work with these default modes, I’ve put together a short guide.
If you want to explore your own default pattern, I put together a short quiz — it takes about three minutes.
Lastly, if you’re interested in going a bit deeper, I’m running Clarity Under Pressure — a three-week small group experience (2–4 people) starting in May. It’s intimate coaching designed to help you move from overwhelm into clarity, so you can actually do your thing. Details at the link below.
Thanks to Jen Benford for the space — always a good conversation.
