Can you stop feeling overwhelmed? Why do we feel overwhelmed in our lives?
Almost all of us have varying levels of stress. Yet some of us are always in a fog, always struggling. Is there a fix? And is it a non-overwhelming one?
It's too tiring to give into a feeling of always being overwhelmed. You might as well do something about it. Here is what you can do.
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Re-release: Feeling Overwhelmed? How To Stop (And Why Some People Are Always Overwhelmed And Others Aren’t)
Original: How To Stop Feeling Overwhelmed (And Why Some People Are Always Overwhelmed And Others Aren’t)
What would you say if your physician asked you to rate pain on a scale from one to 10?
Pain has almost always been hard to measure. If your doctor asked you, “how much does it hurt?” you’re likely to give an answer that sounds like you’re describing the problem. You might say, “it feels like an 8/10 or a 9/10”.
In an article in the Scientific American magazine, Dr Daniel Barron explains the problem with a non-medical analogy. Here’s what he wrote: Driving down Highway 12, I noticed a whooping sound coming from my Subaru’s back left side.
Thinking a window or door was open, I pulled over and discovered that if I nudged the back left tyre with my toe, the entire wheel wobbled. That seemed bad. I looked closer and noticed all the lug nuts were loose and that one nut and the stud behind it were missing entirely.
So I jacked up the car, tightened the remaining four nuts and made my way to the repair place.
He then goes on to tell us what happened next.
The mechanic listened quite intently to what Dr Barron had to say. He didn’t interrupt as Barron talked about his nudge test on the tyre. However, the mechanic did ask some questions:
- When did the trouble start?
- Has it ever happened before?
- When was the last time the tyre was inspected?
- What would Dr Barron like to do next? Fix it or take a chance?
The point that got Dr Barron’s attention was that the mechanic ignored questions such as “how intense is the sound?” or “was the damaged tyre affecting Dr Barron’s life on a scale of zero to 10? Instead, the questions were almost geared towards the fix. Let’s play those questions again:
- When did the trouble start?
- Has it ever happened before?
- When was the last time the tyre was inspected?
- What would Dr Barron like to do next? Fix it or take a chance?
Overwhelm is pain. And admittedly, all pain is not quite as neat as fixing a tyre. However, there’s a difference between overwhelm that lasts for a week, a month, or even a year. And the overwhelm that never seems to go away. This point is more relevant because some people are constantly overwhelmed, and some aren’t.
Maybe let’s start with a concept that comes from an overwhelmed mother.
I have a client whose husband lost between 70-80% of her business overnight.
One moment their business had been ticking along as it always had, and one day everything changed. Their biggest client, who generated between 70-80% of their income, decided to choose another provider. That's a jaw dropping moment, isn't it?
This client also had a child who is on the autistic spectrum, had ageing parents over 10,000 miles away. And then, one parent passed away. On top of all of this, the garbage still had to be put out, dishes had to be washed, and everyday life wasn't giving her a break.
If you were to press the “panic button” would it be a good time to do so?
For years, this client had been waiting to start up her business. She read voraciously, asked a lot of questions, and engaged in a way that few people do. However, in her world there was already enough crisis without the stress of starting up something new. Yet, when the business opened up like a sinkhole, there was no choice. Despite all of the chaos, she had to do something.
Her something was to understand her situation. She even wrote a line that stood out for me, and for many who read the line. It went like this—and I'll split it up into several lines, because each line is important.
- Overwhelm and confusion are indulgences.
- Learn the mental prowess to tackle them
- Instead of trying to eliminate them.
1) Overwhelm and confusion are indulgences
Under what seems like an avalanche of trouble, she realised that many of us don't want to get out of their overwhelm situation. That as the inbox goes from five e-mails to fifty, and then five thousand, we sit there frozen, seemingly unable to do anything.
That, as the plates pile up in the sink, we promise we'll get to it in a few days. The reality is that in most cases—not all—but most, a state of overwhelm sets in because we want it to be that way. Or at least, let it be that way.
We let things pile up for many reasons.
Maybe we feel like procrastinating, or the intensity is too great. However, there's a great power that comes from feeling sorry for ourselves. We get the opportunity to talk about how “stressed” we are.
How only “we have the problem” and no one else does. Being overwhelmed is probably what we said when we were seventeen, twenty seven and continue to say as the decades roll along.
Which means we have no intention of getting rid of the state of overwhelm
It means that we can keep going for the rest of our lives using overwhelm and confusion as an indulgence. And it's at this point that many, if not all of us may get annoyed at the sanctimonious tone of this article.
“How dare you!” we may shout out in anger
Yet, even as we express our indignation, we know that there's someone else who has more troubles than we do. That those burdens are vastly greater than the ones we currently have. We also know there are others who never seem to complain. That their goal isn't about the indulgence of being overwhelmed, but instead, like Dr. Barron, heading towards the fix.
No one enjoys being overwhelmed
There are big, ongoing problems like having to care for a parent with dementia, or a child with autism. And there are minuscule issues like having to tidy up the contents of your bag.
To compare one problem with the other is like saying a sprain is the same as disc degeneration in that causes intense back pain. It's clear that there are things that swamp your life in a way that is unimaginable to the rest of us.
Take the year 2020, for example
It's when all of us got hit sideways with the pandemic, but for my father it was a year of utter chaos. He lost ⅓ of his body weight in a single year. He could barely eat anything and would throw up. Then, he'd get constipated, take medication and be on the toilet seat six-ten times a day.
India, where he lives, hundreds of thousands of cases of Covid on a daily basis, so he couldn't leave home. Trapped inside a house about 70 square metres, he got advice from about five separate doctors—and all on Zoom. It was clear he needed specialist care, but the hospitals were filled with patients who were in a worse condition than he happened to be in.
Most of our overwhelm never reaches that level of intensity
If our situation isn't dire, then it's usually controllable. If we continue to complain about it, it's possible that we are more in love with the sound of our voices. As much as we may believe that we are special—and I guess we are—we're still able to do a lot of the things that people who are truly swamped can't do.
We still go out to dinner, still watch endless TV, still have time to browse social media. The reality may well be that we don't want to fix that problem. That we find it more comforting to stay as we are, and even have some perverse joy in complaining.
Is this line of thought still sounding sanctimonious?
It probably does to a lot of us but we know that most of our overwhelm has a finite solution, and we can get there sooner, rather than later. Barring an earth-shaking crisis, most of us don't have a state of overwhelm. It's just an indulgence that needs to be tamed, and finally cut off completely.
The client, with all her problems, eventually decided to make a plan to get out of most of the problems circling her life. She looked at the things she could control and sorted it out. While she'd spent years trying to work out how to start a business, the loss of so much revenue meant that she had no choice.
Pushed off a cliff, she got going and within a year was thriving in her business and independence. My father, on the other hand, can now walk for about 7-8 minutes, which is a great improvement from when he couldn't stand for a more than 45 seconds. He's added a few kilos back and he's sounding and looking a lot better than he did just a year ago.
If you're not hit with a problem of such great intensity on an ongoing basis, then you have to ask yourself a question. Why is it that some people are more overwhelmed and others are less so?
I guess it's down to the next two lines. Remember the lines?
- Overwhelm and confusion are indulgences.
- Learn the mental prowess to tackle them.
- Instead of trying to eliminate them.
2) Mental prowess to keep going
Where does mental prowess come from? Hint: When it's not mental, but down on paper. If you look at people who are generally feeling overwhelmed, they seem to refer a lot to “their thoughts”. They talk about all the things they have on their mind.
Paper, it seems, is absent.
And when I first moved to New Zealand, I had a lot on my mind. I needed to find a place to stay, to figure out how to get around without a car, I didn't have a job, and there was a problem with my computer. I'd packed a computer, monitor, hard disk tower and all.
When immigrating, we'd been given twice the amount of luggage, but most of it was used up by my modern but heavy computer set up. I'd intended to use the computer to get jobs and do whatever assignments came my way.
Instead, the computer wasn't working as it had been damaged on arrival. There was one major crisis and many minor issues bouncing around in my head, and paper was nowhere in sight.
It's not like paper is the ultimate solution, either.
We have all written down plans and then promptly lost the documentation. However, there's a good chance that the plan itself may have been relatively convoluted and with too much detail. Overwhelm thrives when you have to take seventy-three steps. It's less confusing when you have to take just the next possible action.
Mental prowess only comes into play for that single step, maybe two.
That's when you have a set of slightly imprecise goals, but instead of trying to do it all, you take on the very minimum. For instance, I felt overwhelmed last week as I strained to think of topics to write about and to use for the podcast.
One thought supplanted another to the point where I couldn't pin any of them down. The first stage was to set a deadline. It's the first of the month, and I developed a deadline well ahead of the end, thus giving myself thirty days.
In thirty days, I'd have to write and edit eight articles. It doesn't take a lot of maths to figure out how many I'd need per week, does it? Toss in a bit of chaos, and it'd be safe to say that I'd need to finish those eight articles in the next fifteen days.
Suddenly the overwhelm swells up again, doesn't it?
While two articles a week sounds doable, four a week is sheer madness. However, I have to think creatively if there's no way out of this mess. Maybe all the articles don't have to be 3000 or even 1000 words long.
Perhaps, a few can be long and detailed, and the others can be shorter, possibly 500 words each. Instead of coming up with all the content myself, maybe I could do a few book reviews based on what I've already read. Knowing I still have to finish those eight articles in the next two weeks, how would I go about it, so I'm not swamped?
Paper gives me a better chance of solving that one problem: completing the articles.
There may be dentist visits, answering e-mails, writing a book, conducting a course, cooking, painting, photography etc. When I write things down and try to fit them on a map of the next 30 days, it's clear what can be achieved and what is nice to have but needs to be put off until later.
Having mental prowess is a great thing.
And more so when the sense of overwhelm is incredibly overpowering, like health, a death in the family or an existential crisis. In those conditions, the power to think your way through the situation is almost all that counts. However, when it comes to day-to-day stuff hitting you on all sides, you need to get stuff away from your brain and on paper.
Chaos matters too
A large part of overwhelm is how we seem to ignore that things will go wrong. We seem blindsided by something that shows up from nowhere, but it's clear that our plan hasn't considered chaos. It's not like the overwhelm factor goes away when it gets down on paper. When Renuka and I sit down to plan, we end up more tired than before.
Yet, give it a day, go back and remove the messiness, and you're likely to find that you have a sense of clarity, both about what you must do and what you need to drop. And that's because overwhelm isn't going away.
You can't eliminate it. Not now, or ever.
3) You can't eliminate the overwhelming feeling
When my grandmother was around 20, she got a job as a school teacher. The distance between the school and her home was between 3-4 hours, based on the existing forms of transport back in 1925. You could say it was overwhelming enough that she stayed in one location, choosing to go home only during school holidays and long breaks.
Today, it's likely that that four-hour journey would take us about 45 minutes or an hour.
For many, that would be less than their average day-to-day commute. Yet, despite the conveniences of today's technology, we are just as overwhelmed as my grandma would have been more than a hundred years ago.
It may seem to us that it was a quieter, less stressful time, but that's just us looking at history through rose-coloured glasses. We aren't necessarily more or less stressed than before. However, in every century, there have been people who have managed their stress to their advantage.
Those people are the ones who realise that overwhelm can't be eliminated.
We all believe that we'll be okay if we finish completing one task or reach one goal. However, that's a bit like climbing up a mountain, only to realise there's a whole mountain range. The ones who get battered by an overwhelming feeling aren't very different from you and me. They have similar tasks as we do and seemingly identical goals too.
However, one group knows you can't overcome the overwhelm issue.
From time to time, life will throw them under the bus, but even in those cases, the people who accept things the way they are, are much better off. Instead of getting swept away by the feeling, they accept it, make a small plan, account for chaos and keep going.
The reality is that you can, like my client, find that your revenue has been wiped out by 70-80%; you can see that your child needs a lot more attention than you expected; that there's a distance between you and your ageing parents; possibly even a death in the family. And no matter how great your problems, there will be someone with all of those problems and no running water or no electricity.
Someone who has more significant problems than you ever will.
It's time to get over the feeling of soaking yourself in the bathtub of overwhelm. That deep soak is often enough, just an indulgence. It would help if you had paper, a plan and mental prowess to overcome the ongoing overwhelming situation. And yes, it's not going away anytime soon, so you may as well get used to it.
Epilogue: Everyone is overwhelmed—but everyone doesn't feel the same about overwhelm.
In general, when you look around, there will be people with forty-five projects going. And for them, the forty-sixth, forty-seventh and forty-eight will be quite the stretch. Which is similar to what someone who has ten projects may feel. The eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth are a struggle.
Nonetheless, anyone facing new challenges has more or less similar factors of overwhelm. It's just that you can't get to a large number without having excellent systems and management in place. The good news is that you don't have to go very far to find both these people.
Both of these people are located in you.
If you look back just ten or fifteen years in time, you'll find that you were reasonably incompetent in many things that are pretty ordinary for you today. If you were to advise your younger self, you'd likely say: Yes, that's difficult, but everything is difficult before it's easy.
It's too tiring to give into a feeling of always being overwhelmed. You might as well do something about it. Do you know what you will do?
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