A short YouTube excerpt by Louis Massaro defining "overwhelm" with a traffic-jam metaphor: he describes overwhelm as mental congestion caused by a small set of recurring thoughts and information, and frames the solution as breaking up and rerouting that "traffic" so thoughts stop bumping into each other ("bumper cars in our head").
Overwhelm. To me, how I see it is I see it as just a big traffic jam. When there's so much information and there's a traffic jam, it's like, how do we wiggle our way out of it? How do we get out of that? But we just have to be able to first put it in perspective and realize what's going on. And there's only a handful of things that actually are on our mind at any given time. And this is what makes up the traffic jam. So when we talk about getting out of overwhelm, what we're talking about is we're talking about getting, you know, breaking up traffic and getting it rerouted and getting things moving along so that it's not just stuck and it's just bumper. It's like bumper cars in our head.
