Tasks pile up, you struggle to get to them all, and then tasks fall off the plate. There is a thought in your mind, “I can never get ahead or even catch up.” Instantly, overwhelm takes over.
It feels like overwhelm has you in its grips and you’ll never be free of the snare. Each new task feels harder than the last and the pressure pushes down on your shoulders like a physical weight.
It is natural and normal to feel overwhelm when we are thinking our work is too much, too big, too complicated. At some point, everyone feels overwhelmed by work and life, often at the same time.
Overwhelm serves as an excuse to not accomplish what we’re meant to in the world because we get caught up in the busyness of checking off the boxes without revisiting priorities. We use it as a distraction from the hard work we need to do to accomplish our goals.
But overwhelm is not something that happens to you. You generate it because of how you are thinking about the work at hand. Let’s look at a couple of different angles.
Two individuals, Jack and Diane, have the same workload and the same forty hours in a workweek. They are developing the same number of plans, the same number of contracts, and have the same training needs to accomplish. Jack is pulling his hair out and Diane is cool as a cucumber. What’s the difference?
The difference is how they view their work. Jack looks at his work and thinks he will never get it all done. He’s too busy. He needs extensions on the deadlines. Rather than figuring out how to get it done, he spends his mental energy fretting.
Diane knows she has her work cut out for her. She thinks about organizing herself, determining the most efficient and effective place to start, and what needs to be top priority. She spends her mental energy working out a plan of attack rather than complaining to herself.
The beauty is that retraining your brain to think like Diane is possible and it starts with the following steps. Next time you feel overwhelmed:
- Accept the feeling but don’t indulge: Recognize overwhelm is normal and move on to the next step.
- Breath: Take five deep breaths, all the way into your belly. This floods the brain with oxygen. It also switches the body from a sympathetic (fight or flight) response to a parasympathetic (thinking) response.
- Write out your To-Do list: When you take time to write out the tasks you need to accomplish, you can see them. When they stay in your mind, they will swirl and jumble and seem like a larger tumbleweed than they are.
- Prioritize Your List: Move the highest priority to the top and the low priority to the bottom. The natural tendency is to do the straightforward stuff first, but the straightforward stuff is often not the highest priority and may not even be necessary. If something is going to fall off the list, make it a low priority task.
- Manage solutions rather than focusing on problems: Now that you have your list prioritized, you can look for solutions. Maybe you need help with the highest priority or maybe you need to go somewhere without distractions and work focused for an hour straight.
Changing your perspective may not change the number of tasks you need to accomplish, but it will pull your mindset away from a negative mentality to one that drives forward action. As you gain momentum, you find that the overwhelm drifts away. You build mini successes by getting work done. Those mini successes help you change your thoughts from, “I can’t possibly do all of this” to “I am making steady forward progress.”
