A systems view of biological health

Section 3: Summarised version

3 : What is Overwhelm?

This work is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 : also see my full Copyright statement.

Overwhelm from a biological perspective is not so desperate as it is from a psychological perspective.

Overwhelm is a normal event in the life of any organism in the living world, and as such there are well developed metabolic, physiological adaptive pathways that detect a state of overwhelm, that come into effect when overwhelm occurs, and that detect when the overwhelming conditions have ended - and that re-adapt. Overwhelm in biological terms is a temporary, transitory state.

What should first be realised is that exactly the same physiological resources and mechanisms are used regardless of the stressor that might potentially cause overwhelm - whether that is emotional/social, threat, thermal (temperature too high or too low), chemical/toxicity, infection, immunological, or anything else.

Overwhelm responses were mapped for very simple organisms by Russian biologist AA Ukhtomsky, and his findings apply to life at all scales (see Figure below).

There are essentially three kinds of biological overwhelm:

1. acute overhwelm - an immediate situation that exceeds the adaptive capacity here and now (as mentioned perviously - this may be (external) physical threat/danger, but may also be (internal) infections, metabolic emergencies, etc. Here most of the bodymind adapts to surviving the situation. But a substantial proportion also carries on with its vital task of maintaining homeostasis within the adaptive milieu.
2. chronic overwhelm - where a manageable but significantly high stressor just doesn't go away. The body-mind adapts but then after a while (on a timescale from hours to weeks) recognises that the adaptation is not resolving the issue. A fragmentation then takes place where a small section of the whole body-mind complex is tasked with continuing the adaptation, while the rest gets back to getting on with the rest of life - which is to all intents and purposes the same as...
3. chronic retained overwhelm - where an acute relatively (short-lived) high-intensity overwhelm is retained as an adaptive fragment - because the information that it ended never reached deeply enough into the body-mind to de-adapt all of the consequent adaptations. So a fragmentation occurs in which some of the adaptive capacity continues like a Japanese coldier on a desert isand, still fighting, and the rest returns to normal business-as-usual life.

Retained overwhelm imprints

Overwhelm begins with Plan A+, which them collapses to Plan B+, and then most of the body reverts to the window of normal adaptation, leaving this pair of survival adaptations behind. All overwhelm imprints are of this form - there is a high-energy part and a low-energy part. Often people are aware of neither - they just have "personality quirks" and intolerances of people or situations. Some are aware of just one. But many people they are aware of both - some numbness, some hyperarousal.

These imprints remain active, trying to save your life, sometimes for decades, until the body-mind receives information in a form it recognises that the situation has ended. You could accurately think of these as being fragments of yourself, stuck in a time-warp, living a never-ending overwhelming moment.