Overwhelm doesn’t always look like panic. Sometimes it looks like silence.

A business owner I knew went quiet on me. First a couple of missed replies, which is normal enough. Then just ghosting. I assumed they were busy, because that’s the polite assumption. But the reality, as it turned out, was very different.  They’d stopped coping and had shut down.

The business was still there, technically. But they weren’t. The inbox, the quotes, the calls, all of it had stopped.

They weren’t lazy or disorganised. Here was a person who’d built something from nothing and was holding the whole thing together and not letting anything go. Which, as it turns out, is exactly the kind of person this happens to.

I’ve been listening to Brené Brown’s Atlas of the Heart, and she draws a distinction that made me think. Stress, she says, is when the demands on you are outpacing what you feel able to handle, but you’re still in the game, you’re still just about coping. Crucially, you can still think. You can still function. Overwhelm is the next thing along. It’s the point where you’re not managing anymore, clear thinking goes, and the usual ways of coping stop working altogether.

I’d never really thought about that distinction before. And I’m sure I’m not alone in thinking that stress and overwhelm are the same thing. This distinction is important because it dictates how you deal with it.

Overwhelm is quiet and insidious. It doesn’t tend to be a meltdown. More often it translates into avoidance.

You might find yourself reading an email a few times but not answering it.

Or you might just avoid the inbox altogether.

There might be invoices you need to send but something stops you.

You let the phone ring out because you can’t face what’s on the other end of it.

Your suppliers suddenly get very loud!

And on it goes.

You want to deal with all these things, but it feels like there are invisible arms holding you back.

For this person, it translated as ghosting (and it wasn’t just me, everything I described above was happening). To everyone on the outside, including me, it just looked like they were busy or just couldn’t be bothered. But from the inside, it was someone who’d hit a wall and didn’t have the words to explain it.

If you’re the capable one, the person everyone relies on, this can be the trap. You keep going because stopping feels downright wrong and you just think you’re stressed because of the workload. Going quiet is often the first sign anyone else gets that something’s wrong.

This is where understanding what is happening is important and it’s the part that often catches us out. When we’re genuinely overwhelmed, the answer isn’t to do more. It isn’t finding a better system, a longer day, or getting a grip on the to-do list.

It’s to stop.  But it feels counterintuitive.

Brené Brown points to research suggesting that real overwhelm needs an actual pause, literally doing nothing for a while, before anything useful can happen. Which is the exact opposite of what most business owners, me included, want to do. We push harder and tell ourselves we’ll rest when it’s done. We keep going. Meanwhile, the walls slowly close in.

This is when we need to recognise that stopping isn’t giving up. We can’t think our way out of a state where thinking is the one thing we can’t do effectively. It can result in us making catastrophic decisions. Rest first. Decisions second.

Last week, due to yet another heat wave, I felt totally overwhelmed. Like (and because of) the heat, it had been building for a while and the ‘straw that broke the camel’s back’ for me was Thursday 13^th August. I’d had enough and I could not function. Luckily, thanks to Brené’s book, I understood what was going on so I packed a bag and drove to Wales to be with friends, to be in cooler weather and to have nothing to think about. It worked. I returned to my desk on Monday feeling much better and ready to face the world again. But it could have been very different if I hadn’t taken that time to do nothing.

There’s a practical side to this too, which needs to be considered. When overwhelm kicks in, the work doesn’t simply wait. Quotes don’t go out. Jobs don’t get booked. The revenue that would have come in doesn’t. The longer nothing is said, the more it adds up and the bigger the problem gets.

This can so easily happen when everything sits on one set of shoulders and those shoulders give way. Which is a fair argument for not being the only person who knows how your business runs or for delegating.

If you’ve recognised yourself somewhere in this, take note. Overwhelm is a signal that something isn’t right, it’s not a character flaw. And if stopping and stepping away for a while doesn’t help, then it’s worth taking seriously and talking to someone about, whether that’s someone close to you or your GP.

I try to take regular breaks when I start to feel overwhelmed. Sometimes, just a walk with my headphones on will do the trick. But recognising the symptoms didn’t happen overnight. Asking for help didn’t come easy and learning to say ‘no’ to things had to be learned.

Part of what we do at S.A.M is  take some of the weight off before it gets to this point: the inbox, the admin, the things that build up in the background. But that isn’t really the point of this piece. The point is simple. If you feel that you’ve hit the wall, know that it’s ok to stop. It’s usually the only thing that works.