How do you feel when you are overwhelmed?

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If anybody can describe what they feel like when overwhelmed, or having a meltdown, can you please offer some insight?

I'm having difficulties at the moment expressing myself and explaining what it feels like... how bad it actually is... to my boyfriend. He wound up the victim of me lashing out after being bombarded socially for quite a while when I just wanted to become a recluse for a little bit.

He did not do anything to deserve it, intentionally... but I'm now having problems expressing how horrible it can feel, or finding a way to explain how frustrating and confusing it is. Any help in this would be greatly appreciated.

Well. Well I explode, my logic disappears and I just want to break furniture/scream profanities. I feel like I'm stuck in an angry cloud.

Am I the only one here who doesn't get pain from a melt down? Sure, I get a killer headache, but thats it. Everything that happens is mostly in my head (eg; Everything is too loud, The lights are too bright, etc).

I made a blog entry about it. http://oddsendsandautism.blogspot.com/2008/09/meltdown.html It's not really all that detailed, but it offers some insight on how I personally felt during a meltdown that resulted from being in a crowded place.

the physical things that happen during sensory overload are pretty painful in my case.

I'm not sure what happens first. I think I pressure in my head behind my ears and eyes that turns into pain.
my heart spasms, painfully.
nausea.
then an ache creeps through all my muscles and joints and into my skin so that I can't let anything touch me. the most painful touch is when my own skin makes contact with itself. it's almost like it intensifies the pain and the spot where I'm touching myself ends up feeling bruised.

I can keep a lid on it even with all that going on, or at the most get really irritable.

before meltdown point I feel like a I'm wearing a really tight corset, and it's being tightened around my middle, painfully tight, until I can't breathe and I want to scream.

I've had many of them over my lifetime. I used to hyperventilate and cry until I went to sleep practically every evening. Nowadays I am lucky I just rant some and obsess on a fixed idea, one subject, when stressed. People around me know about it and they don't respond to them. It's something that can't be helped, in my case, when I am stressed out. Usually it happens with certain people in certain places.

I wonder if this is a common "overwhelmed" trait:

When I feel overwhelmed, I get really depressed. I start ranting at no one in particular. Then, all of a sudden, my body feels like it's moving at like 10x the speed it actually is. My motions become choppy. Or at least, that's what happens when I am alone and I get overwhelmed. Does anyone else get like that?

This is interesting. My son is AS, and I see that a lot of times when he is overwhelmed he gets a stomach ache.

I'm not diagnosed with AS, but I've got enough AS characteristics to feel more at home on WP than in real life. When I get overwhelmed, my natural response is to retreat inside myself. If possible, I'll cover myself with a blanket or hide somehow. I go very quiet and still. In some cases, if I'm pushed, I'll go into a yelling/crying kind of meltdown, but that's extremely rare. In fact, I suspect that this happens to NTs as well, if the stress gets high enough. I wouldn't go so far as to say I become non-verbal. I think if I were to say that, it would be me placing an autistic characteristic on myself which I don't really have. But in a way, I suppose I do. If I'm very overwhelmed, I can't bear the thought of talking, and can't think of words to say, and want to be closed off from having to communicate with people. So perhaps that's a little bit nonverbal. It's not very common for me to get that overwhelmed, though, unless I am deep in a depression (which is something I'm susceptible to).


For those of you who feel a lot of physical pain and discomfort---I'd be interested to know if you've had any success with things like yoga or meditation, or other relaxation techniques. I see how anxiety and upsetting situations eat away at my son, physically, and I think if there were only some way for him to learn to relax his body, he'd feel better. I know it's not as easy as all that, and I suppose if you are really prone to having meltdowns, it might be especially difficult to learn relaxation techniques, but I'm betting it can be done, especially if the technique is tailored to the individual.

i get easily irritated and after certain point i just want to hit that wall

I just have to get out of there.

At work my boss started screaming at me on Friday, calling me names, threatening to smash the furniture, etc. I didn't melt down (she did though! I don't think she's auty, I think she's something else.) But I could feel myself building up to one. After she left I got a lot of sympathetic colleagues coming to ask me if I was alright, (everybody could hear it right down the corridor) and I held it together, but I felt like everything was much louder, I couldn't breathe properly, my heart was tripping up, and beating too fast, my skin hurt... like an above poster, my skin touching itself seemed to be nearly unbearable, as though the nerve endings were being electrocuted. My intestines started churning, and I could feel my stomach burning.

But the main thing is that everything was far too loud, and too bright.

I went home early, there was no way I could work in that state.

I couldn't leave the house yesterday. Today may be a bit better.

Luckily it takes a lot more than it once did to trigger a meltdown, especially since I have no contact with my parents anymore.

I go into flight mode...I just need to go away from whatever I feel is causing those feelings and disappear/sleep/hibernate.

If I'm not allowed or able to leave I usually get a tight, pinched feeling in the roof of my mouth (almost as if I want to swallow something large, but can't). Then I start getting palpitations and feeling dizzy and both of my hands start tingling painfully (like I'm having circulation problems).

If things get really bad I can start hyperventilating and my body temperature seems to suddenly drop. Then I crash and get incredibly bone weary/tired. Often, I can't bring myself to eat until the next day.

If the meltdown was caused by something someone said, often I won't be able to remember much of what the person said to me (or I said) during the arguement...only that they wounded me and that I shouldn't trust them.

My parents kept a tight rein on me and always belittled any emotions I had (positive or negative) so instead of defending myself, my body starts shutting down on me.

First of all, my stress goes thru the roof, and I can often get a very sharp pain in my spine from it.

Next, I get a numb "bloated" feeling--a massive tension--in the temples of my head.

I also feel almost trapped; as though if I weren't in whatever situation I'm in at that moment, tending to what I'm tending to, I could do something about the issue that's on my mind, but I'm being held back from it.

I also can get very tired, and feel like I'm being stretched too thin from all sides.

I'll also want to hit something...really, really hard, as a massive release.

I'll want to scream profanities up and down the fall; regrettably, I'm usually at work when most of this happens.

The funny thing is I'm kind of in that type of a situation at the immediate moment...at least I've been so this past week.

This past week was a disaster of epic proportions. First off, my girlfriend, and friends and I were going to head to a nearby amusement park this past Friday; bear in mind I really had no desire to go there...just goin' there to be with my gal.

On Tuesday, her grandmother died of a blood clot after an operation. Now, you know how hard of a time we have reciprocating emotions. Care to guess how easy it was for me to help her thru this difficult time? She was utterly devastated by the situation.

Unfortunately, the burial was yesterday, and I had to work; that's right, I couldn't be there for her when she could've really found me useful in such a time.

Why was work so painfully important? I'm broke, and I need the money bad; I gotta get my bills paid thru Jan/Feb before the season ends...in like 2 weeks, and have had to strategize like crazy.

I've had things I've wanted to buy for ages, and have barely been able to afford anything as far back as since the year began.

I want to do nice things for my gal, and take her places. Alas, can't afford to. I want to propose to her, can't afford to. I want to go on a friggin' vacation...can't afford to.

My business is still in its early years, and I'm not a patient man when it comes to getting people familiar with my store. In fact, I'm just not a patient guy; never have been.

And to top all that off, up until recently an ex-friend wouldn't stop pestering me after she ended our friendship, and we're still in the busy season so I haven't been able to get anything done as of recent at work.

Why did I tell you all this? Show the list to your boyfriend....this is the kind of stuff that apparently overwhelms us on a daily basis, and then some; tell him to imagine having all this on his mind at once, trying to find a solution, and keeping focused on his job, and other responsibilities.......and maintaining a straight face. That, my friend, is the life of an Autistic person

The cause of the issue and sometimes the way I want to react to it often fills my head to the point where I cannot think about anything else for hours and in extreme cases days or weeks on end - it almost becomes a mantra to me - reduced to a single repeating phrase or noise.

The best way I can describe it is that it becomes like the static on a dead TV channel and I effectively become utterly useless to whatever I was trying to achieve at the time, even focusing on a cartoon show or a game becomes too much effort for me.

When it is really bad, I become extremely tense (painfully so) and withdrawn, all I want to do is lock myself away in a dark room and either sleep or put some really sparse, soft music on my PC, run the "milkdrop" visualisations and loose myself in it - (I don't drink or take drugs) and I find that both are wonderful way of blotting out the problems for a few hours.

Strangely, at the same time I wish that I could express to people how I am feeling but

a) I can never find either the courage or the words

b) I'm pretty certain they would neither understand nor care and that I would just be compounding the problem and

c) I'm not so certain I could maintain control of my emotions & I'd probably go into full meltdown there and then - not pretty.

I rarely, if ever, loose the plot in front of people anymore, but I'm not always able to walk away from situations that can set off the meltdown (work etc) so the symptoms do often have a visibly negative impact and the "trapped" feeling can really magnify the problem.

I do find, as well, that this can be self-perpetuating in that I'm often having to walk back into a situation that caused the problem before I have managed to fully clear my head and so it just gets worse and worse - thank god for weekends.

As a result, I'm most often pretty unpleasant to be around when I am in this state of mind, never physically violent, just very emotionally fragile and defensive - the most innocent of questions / comments can set off a verbal assassination.

I have to say as well that even once a meltdown has passed, it can often take a week or two before my head is entirely clear and I can say that I am back in "that happy place" again.

When I'm overwhelmed, things get choppy. Common sense of any form escapes me. My anxiety level approaches a higher and higher level. Anything anyone says doesn't make a lot of sense to me... and can certainly aggrivate me further toward meltdown. Noise makes me wanna explode, even one of my cat's meowing might get them a firm "SHUT THE BLEEP UP!" And it keeps building into the meltdown. Meltdown is obvious because I seem mad and agressively agitated with anything in my path. I try to avoid meltdowns, by seperating myself from everything, to be able to calm down BEFORE I get into meltdown mode. (Usually, I go upstairs, slam my bedroom door, and sit there and stew for a while until things begin making some sort of sense) ...I know I'm good to come out of my cocoon once I can begin trying to see things from another persons' point of view. Like when I can conceptualize how mean I've sounded.

Just remember, your boyfriend needs to be able to read you, and to understand your position, but you've also got to be willing to accept responsibility for how your actions in one of these situations would have made him feel, which obviously you're doing right now. Remind him that you love him, and remind him that your reaction is not his fault, even if something 'stupid' he did helped contribute to the meltdown. Best wishes, my spouse of 13 years is STILL trying to understand me, maybe that's due to his ADD-innattentive, but we work through stuff, over and over again. And he's always willing to listen to my reasoning when all is said and done, and I emerge from our bedroom.

I go really stiff, then there's a pressure building up in my head and I get really emotional. I get dizzy and more clumsy. I can't stand any noise, and usually have to leave a crowded area. I stim more to try and not meltdown. I'll look down or try to distract myself. I'll either shutdown or meltdown. I've never really had a meltdown around people because I'm afraid of what will happen.

For some reason, there was once something that worked really well for me, and I kept forgetting to do it afterwards:

reciting Vincent Price's lines from "Thriller" somehow kept me "at bay" shall we say when business at work tended to get out of control. I don't know why it did, but it helped. Too bad I only remembered to do it once...