Breaking things down into small chunks

When we’re feeling overwhelmed it’s really useful to be able to break the overwhelm down into small chunks. The smaller chunks are more manageable and allow us to approach our pain with less fear that it will completely swamp us.

The natural response to pain is to avoid and move away from it. But if we keep doing this, we end up with mountains of pain that can flood us just thinking about them. As the old saying goes, feeling is healing, so that’s what we need to do in small manageable doses. There is a sweet spot between too much, and too little activation. Too much, we get overwhelmed and too little, nothing changes.

An exercise that I have found really helpful for this is pendulation, which is taken from Peter Levine’s book, In an Unspoken Voice. Any exercise works better when you’re really tuned in or triggered, but first you need to have had some practice with any exercise to even think of doing it when you’re feeling upset.

Pendulation exercise:

1. Locate a sensation or emotion in your body that doesn’t feel good. 
2. Locate another place in your body that feels good, relaxed or neutral. This can be an elbow, a little toe etc.
3. Put your attention on the sensation/emotion that feels upsetting.
4. When it starts to get too much, switch your attention to the relaxed/neutral place and stay there for as long as you need to.
5. Go back to the difficult sensation/feeling when you’re ready and see how it feels.
6. Keep swinging your attention back and forth like this between the two places in your body.
7. Notice any signs of nervous system release like yawns, sighs, burps, stomach gurgling, slower breathing and so on.
8. Do this exercise for as long as feels comfortable, don’t push through it and if you find yourself feeling urgent or desperate, tap on it.

Peter Levine calls breaking things down into small chunks, titration. Smaller doses of pain are more manageable to process than big mountains that have accumulated throughout our lifetime.