How to STOP the feeling of OVERWHELM and get off the FAST Track?
Recently, so many people are talking about how overwhelmed they feel. How much stress and anxiety they are experiencing, and many are putting the blame on COVID 19. But what I realize is that these feelings have been there long before covid and covid has presented an opportunity for many people to feel comfortable to talk about it.
Overwhelm is an emotion that feels like all the things that you “have” to do is bigger than “you” and surrounds you and you feel like you’re drowning in a huge mass of things that you feel is your responsiblity. Have you ever been to the beach and a wave engulfs you and you go under the water and get turned around and in that moment you may start to panic because you think you are going to drown or you may react irrationally and start to flay around, having lost your sense of which way is up or down or you may freeze and be unable to react at all.
In the workplace and in life, many people feel this way and this emotion further fuels feelings of Stress and Anxiety, two components of the FAST (Frustration, Anxiety, Stress and Tiredness) track.
Here are some specific things that create overwhelm for so many people.
- Issues around personal and professional relationships
- Long lists of MUST do’s that their jobs demand of them
- Death of loved ones
- Care of loved ones due to sickness
- People feeling that they don’t have enough time to complete their “To Do” list
- Responsibilities around their children and additional feelings of guilt when they don’t deliver on expectations.
- When their expectations are not met
- Feeling like they don’t have enough time in general
- Thinking that nobody cares
- Believing that they must/should be able to cope
- Believing that they must/should be able to do “this” on their own
What really causes Overwhelm
Thankfully the answer to overwhelm is simple but perhaps not easy, because overwhelm like every emotion is caused not by anything external, but instead by our own thinking and that to me is GOOD NEWS!
Here are some of the kinds of thinking that causes overwhelm and keeps us feeling overwhelmed:
The 1st one is the All or Nothing thinking. This is where we think in extremes. If we can’t do everything then we can’t do anything and it often times doesn’t occur to us to think to do one thing.
The 2nd one is the Perfectionist thinking. This is where you spend an enormous amount of time focusing on the details to make your work or whatever you are doing, “perfect”. This approach makes it very difficult for you to achieve your objective in required time. Instead, move forward with “good enough” and know that over time, you will have opportunities to improve on the product or the service.
The 3rd one is The Should thinking. These are thoughts that you have about what you should be able to handle, manage, achieve, do. This “should” thinking not only adds the feeling of overwhelm when we don’t do what we “should” do but it also adds feelings of guilt.
The 4th one is the People Pleasing thinking. Many people create a roadmap of their success that includes other people seeing them in a particular light and they believe that if I do this then that will happen even to the detriment of their own area of responsibility. I think most people do this at some point as they move through their career, prioritizing everybody else’s important and urgent stuff and then dropping the ball on their own stuff. And end up experiencing the very thing that they people please in order to avoid.
How to move from Here to There
If you are having feelings of overwhelm and want to feel productive, calm, capable and confident. Here are some steps that you can take today!
Step 1. Acknowledge your feelings and investigate your thinking
Step 2. Once you determine that you want to “not feel overwhelmed” anymore, decide on a thought that would evoke feelings of calm and productive. Such as “I am focusing on one thing at a time”
Step 3. Look back at Your to do list. Pick one important thing that when you do this task, it will move you the quickest in the direction you want to go.
This alone will shift your energy from in-action to action and you will begin to feel a sense of achievement as well as feeling of capability. You will want to practice focusing on completing this one task and not allow yourself to get distracted by anything.
Step 4. Think about what is likely to get in the way of you staying focused and create a plan to bring you back to focus, when you get distracted.
Create a strategy such as saying to yourself – ‘I really don’t need to do those other things until I complete this right here in front of me’, I like to include something physical like doing 3 jumping jacks.
Step 5. Create a time frame for the action that you are taking now.
Stick to the time frame you scheduled to do this action and make it an outcome focused objective. For eg. During this 15 min. I will resolve my clients challenge and send her an email advising her of its reolution.
It can be very easy to get into feelings of overwhelm and it can feel very difficult to get out. Especially when you have the thought “I am overwhelmed” or “I am stressed”. Your thoughts keep telling you that you are overwhelmed and that you don’t know what to do, but neither is true.
YOU DO KNOW!!!
And when you make that first move and complete that one task, you will begin to feel that shift of energy take place, that feeling in your body and mind change as the weight come off and that calm come over you as you choose one more thing on your to do list.
Keep rinsing and repeating.
Watch yourself become more confident, calm and productive.
I’m Nadine Seaga and I’m a Life & Leadership Coach, Founder & Chief Energy Officer (CEO) of People Development Consultants. I can help you to harness your full potential and the full potential of your most valuable asset! Check out more of my website here at pdconsults.com for more information or shoot me an email at nadine@pdconsults.com to connect and get started on this life-changing work.