How to Not be Overwhelmed? Lessons from ‘Jane Eyre’

The Literature Lesson from Jane Eyre

There’s a scene early on in Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë where the eponymous character Jane has been humiliated by the head of the school in which she has been sent and he basically calls her a liar in front of all her classmates and her teachers, makes her stand on a stool so that she’s at face level with him and actually visible to all, and he says how she cheats and deceives and that the Devil has already made home inside of her. And this is a post on how to not be overwhelmed when you face the situation that Jane did, or worse.

Obviously that’s not the case but he says it with such conviction that apparently everyone believes him and she thinks now no one’s going to be her friend or show her affection, something which she had been denied since so long already.

Jane is discouraged and grief-stricken as she says, “…nothing sustained me; left to myself I abandoned myself…” and “…ardently I wished to die.”

It’s all very pitiful.

Helen Burns, the only students she’s had a conversation with until this moment in the book, in that instance comes up to her and offers her coffee and bread, and sits by her. This is the exchange that follows:

“Helen, why do you stay with a girl whom everybody believes to be a liar?”
“Everybody, Jane? Why, there are only eighty people who have heard you called so, and the world contains hundreds of millions.”
“But what have I to do with millions? The eighty, I know, despise me.”
“Jane, you are mistaken: probably not one in the school either despises or dislikes you: many, I am sure, pity you much.”

While Jane’s fears are valid and relatable, Helen’s advice is better for someone to take heed to.

Her words tell Jane how to stop being overwhelmed with everything that’s happening in her life.

When we are at a particular place, our perception is only limited to that space, or maybe farther, if we’re consciously doing so.

But how often in your regular life have you thought about the world at large and realized that what you’re facing might be a big scary situation for you but isn’t so in the grand scheme of things?

If someone stays within the four walls of their house for all their life, they’re bound to assume that here’s where the world begins and ends, and the people they live with are the only people in the world, for better or for worse, whatever it is.

That’s not objectively true after all.

That might be rendered true from time to time when that’s the way you want to look at things. When I’m with the people I love, they’re the only people that exist for me, and the same case is for you.

We simply don’t want to look farther than now and here when things are going perfectly. But what about when…you simply don’t want to think that? What about when things are not going your way and you’re overthinking and over-analysing and being overwhelmed by all the stuff that your brain’s throwing at you, like Jane’s is.

That’s where this helps.

How to Not Be Overwhelmed?

However far you look into the horizon, you are not at any point, truly perceiving things in all their grandness. You’re always falling short of it. The world is too multi-dimensional. Things are always expanding, changing, new ideas being developed, new people becoming influential enough to shape it.

The people in your workplace, school, society are not The World. They’re surely the world you have access to in the instant that you do, but they’re definitely not all there are. What’s the point in being overwhelmed by something they say? Think of all the people you haven’t met yet but whom you’ll come to form a bond with sometime in the future. Those people still exist, just aren’t a part of the world you’re perceiving personally.

So yeah, dozens of people could see you be humiliated, dozens could dislike you for whatever reason they all decided to, some person could even hate you, someone could have an unfavorable opinion about you.

But these people are not everybody.

These people don’t define you. They can’t judge you, at least not in a way that truly matters. Who’re you worrying about?

There are millions of people out there, they’re all worrying about their own stuff, anxious, investing energy in things and people they don’t want to indulge with. And you could become one of them too.

But life is not to be lived that way. The world is always bigger than whatever is troubling you. And so is your own life.

What do moments matter in a span of years? So many people, so many dreams, so many things to do, so much to look forward to that’s better than whatever it is that’s overwhelming your mind.

Jane’s counter to Helen’s advice is also valid. You might ask, “Why should I care about the world when I haven’t even, and won’t ever meet all those hundreds of million people that you’re talking about, Tanu?”

Huh, you caught me. Surely, you’re right in raising the doubt that maybe all the people who know you don’t like you.

And that’s going to bring us to the next kind of anxiety that normally gnaws at the minds of overthinkers: what do they think of us? What? Okay, ask yourself, what exactly do you think they think about you? Why exactly do they hate you? Did you do something to make them hate you? Did you do it knowingly or without being aware of it? Did you bully them? Okay, you deserve to be hated in that case. Let’s assume you’re not a bully, though. Let’s assume you’re a very good person, or even an ordinary person, like Jane herself, and that you haven’t done anything bad to anyone, and in this scenario, why do people hate you? Or do they? Why do they dislike you? Okay, wait, have you ever tried thinking, well, what if they don’t?

The conviction with which Helen makes Jane believe that none of the people present in that hall despised her now—why can’t you try convincing yourself with that very belief that maybe no one really hates you, or finds you pathetic, or no ones actually thinking about you at all? Maybe no one is.

It can be quite possible that everything is in your own head.

Like you can’t see the whole world, can’t look beyond what’s immediately visible to you and in your immediate surroundings, maybe it’s the same case with everything in your life.

Maybe you don’t know stuff, you can’t tell what someone else thinks, and even if you can, if supposing they’ve made it quiet clear, you still can’t do anything about it, can’t pinpoint the reason why something is such and such, can’t really do anything, virtually, except turn your attention away, withdraw your energy, calm your mind down and focus on the world of your choosing.

Because there’s a world that you can see in front of you, and then there’s that very world but not really comprehensible by you at the same time.

You can detach from your surroundings for the time being, momentarily, to restore your mental peace. You can come back to it when you’re equipped to handle it.

But more importantly, and this always holds, you can always choose which world you want to put your energy in.