3 Loving Reminders for When the World is Overwhelming
🎙️ This is a transcript of Episode 11 of the Nervous System Care & Healing Podcast with Liz Zhou, a neurodivergent therapist of color. Subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or YouTube to receive notice when future episodes come out.
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When the world feels like it’s on fire, it’s natural to become overwhelmed, dysregulated, and overstimulated. (In fact, that’s a sign that our nervous systems are working as designed, alerting us to threats to safety).
But no one wants to feel STUCK in overwhelm.
In this short & sweet episode, I share 3 reminders to help you tend to your nervous system and navigate the state of the world with agency & awareness – without bypassing painful emotions or pretending that everything is okay (when it’s not).
We’ll cover these topics:
00:23 Acknowledging a world in polycrisis
02:14 Be compassionate with yourself
04:04 Allow space to feel & process
07:46 Explore aligned action, in community
If this episode resonates with you & you want to explore related topics, check out these episodes:
>> Episode 1 | Nervous System Regulation: Why Self-Care & Community Care Matter
>> Episode 4 | Building Community: How We Disrupt Systems of Oppression
Intro: acknowledging a world in polycrisis
Hey everyone. I wanted to record today's episode to share some reminders for all of our nervous systems for when the world feels really overwhelming
One term that I want to share as an important part of the context here is the term polycrisis. And this term refers to the multiple distinct crises that are happening all at once in conjunction with each other, in connection with each other.
And these are crises of an ecological nature, sociopolitical, social, technological, etc. And so as I'm recording this in April of 2026, I would guess that wherever you're listening from, wherever you are, and whatever circumstances you find yourself in, that pretty much all of us can agree that the world is experiencing a polycrisis.
It's really natural to feel overwhelmed as we pay attention to what's happening in the world. And so that's where I come back to these three reminders and I'll share them with you. And whether one or two or all three reminders resonate with you, my hope is that you'll take what you need from this, share whatever is helpful to the people in your world, and anything that doesn't resonate can set that aside as well.
#1: Be compassionate to yourself
So the first reminder for our nervous systems is to be compassionate to yourself.
One way to show compassion is to really accept and understand that our nervous systems are doing the best that they can. However your nervous system is responding to the state of the world or any combination of personal or collective overwhelm that you're experiencing… know that your reaction makes sense in the context of your whole life, in the context of the experiences that you've had, conscious and subconscious memories, as well as ancestral and intergenerational experiences that are held and remembered in the nervous system. Within that whole context, every reaction and response that we have makes sense.
So instead of blaming or shaming ourselves or criticizing and judging ourselves for feeling flooded or feeling frozen or for experiencing shutdowns or burnout or meltdowns, we can instead offer that grace and understanding and kindness toward ourselves. And it can be as simple as saying, my experience makes sense.
#2: Allow space to feel & process
The second reminder that I find helpful in times of overwhelm is to actually allow ourselves space and time to feel and process and to not bottle it all up forever.
I think that when life and the world feel overwhelming or overstimulating, it's really natural to want to suppress our feelings, to sweep it under the rug. And that can offer a temporary form of relief.
But if we're always bottling things up, pushing things down instead of letting feelings come to surface or letting ourselves grieve or cry or have a cathartic scream or whatever it is we need to do, if we don't allow space for that, then things can get stuck in the nervous system.
Feelings that aren't felt or experiences that aren't digested and metabolized, they create a backlog in the nervous system and then they can start to pop up in different and seemingly random ways, like lashing out for seemingly no reason, or experiencing physical symptoms of stress in the body. Because of course the mind and the body and the emotions and our physical state, they're also interconnected.
Even though there may be social scripts or cultural scripts that are telling us to just power through everything, put on a happy face, just tough it out… the reality is that we all need space to have our process.
And our process can look a lot of different ways. For some people, it can look like having a really deep cry. For others, it is having a heart-to-heart and being in conversation with people, verbally processing. For others, they might dance or sing or make art or music as a way of processing. And others might go to a therapeutic space, a group healing space.
There are lots of ways that we can find or make space to really feel and process in real time so that we don't experience this backlog of emotions.
With our emotions, the point isn't to fix them or to make them go the point is just to be with the emotion. So think about the characters from Inside Out and how those are examples of how every part of us has a place in our system, joy and sadness and anger and disappointment.
Life is just a matter of being in relationship with each part of us. There's nothing to fix. Grief doesn't need to be fixed. It simply needs to be witnessed.
#3: Explore aligned action, in community
The third reminder for taking care of our nervous systems when the world is overwhelming is to explore aligned action.
There is a balance between being with the experience, bearing witness to our experiences, and then also taking action in whatever way is available and accessible, based on your capacity and your available resources.
And in community, everybody has a role, everybody has gifts to share and we all have something to learn from each other. And so in terms of aligned action, I would be so curious about what skills, gifts, energy or resources each individual feels that they have to contribute and how we can all come together in so many different ways, across the fabric of society to help put a stop to these systems that cause so much overwhelm and crisis in the first place.
So wherever you are in the world, whatever in here resonates with you, I hope you'll carry it with you and carry it into the places and communities that are beloved to you.
If you need help taking care of your nervous system, I’d love to support you.
Online Therapy in Colorado | Coaching Worldwide
Helping highly sensitive, neurodivergent adults heal their nervous systems & connect with their authentic selves.
About the Author
Liz Zhou (she/her) is a neurodivergent therapist, coach, and speaker. She helps highly sensitive, neurodivergent adults & couples heal their nervous systems and connect with their authentic selves, using brain-body modalities (Brainspotting, EMDR, IFS, psychedelic integration) that are quicker & more effective than traditional talk therapy. Liz offers Nervous System Healing Intensives online worldwide.
