Hello and welcome back to The Joy Within’s podcast. Today I want to dive into something that is really near and dear to my heart, because something that – honestly – I’ve had to work on a lot over the years, and that’s what to do when you feel overwhelmed.
I like to think of overwhelm as a less-intense form of stress, but un some ways it’s a bit trickier because it doesn’t always feel like stress – and it doesn’t always feel negative.
I know, for me, a lot of times when I get overwhelmed it comes from a place of enthusiasm and excitement. Maybe it starts becuase you see a ton of opportunities, or have a ton of great ideas about what you could do, and it feels great. You’re in the zone and each idea yields another and another.
Pretty soon, you have 1,000 things swirling around you head – and that’s when that feeling of overwhelm hits you like a brick wall: you have no idea how you’re going to do all of it. You don’t have the time, the energy, the resources, and you feel overwhelmed because you have no idea where to start.
Now, this can happen regardless of whether you are the one coming up with the list, or if someone else – like a boss, or a family member – is handing them to you. It could be projects, tasks, opportunities at work, or it could be ideas about where you’re going for your next vacation. Maybe everyone has an idea about where to go, where to stay, what to do, and you realize you don’t have the time or money to do 1/10th of it.
The point is: regardless of what it’s about, or where it comes from, feeling overwhelmed is like standing on a knife’s edge. It is an inflection point between positive and negative, between excitement and stress, enthusiasm and fear. How you handle it can send you spiraling…in a good way, or a disastrous one.
When this happens, there are a ton of things you could do. You could create a huge brainstorm map, you could chunk things down, you could step back and clarify your priorities, and while all of these tools can work, I don’t think they solve the core issue.
The real problem isn’t the wealth of ideas or opportunities or even the tasks involved. The real problem is the hidden belief that you think you need to do all of them…or else. Often this can happen subconsciously. The need to do it, the feeling that you have to, kills your desire. It kills the joy and enthusiasm you had a few moments before. And if you don’t deal with it, it will become stress, anxiety, and a host of other problems.
So, when you feel overwhelmed, what you really need is a new mental mode, a new frame of reference to think about all of these tools or ideas.
And it can be really, really simple. You just have to shift that feeling of needing to do something, to wanting to do it. Move from “I have to” to “Wouldn’t it be nice if…”
If you can make that shift, it changes everything. My personal favorite framing for this is to use the idea of a wish list. All of those 1,000 things that were overwhelming me, I pute them on the wish list. They become nice-to-haves, not necessities. And, that puts me back in control, because now I get to choose which one of them I get to focus on.
Listen to that language: the one I get to focus on. The one that most excites me, the one I get to explore.
That shift helps to get rid of the indecision – or, often, the fear of making the wrong decision – that often underpins overwhelm. Because you can think, for each of those tasks, whatever they are, you think “Oh, they’re just ideas on my wish list. They’re not essential, and they definitely don’t all need to happen today. I’ll get to them when I get to them.”
That shift lightens your energy. It gives you the chance to have more fun with the tasks. It becomes kind of like choosing a book to read. You might have a dozen novels you want to read, but chances are, you don’t feel stressed by that. You just pick one and read it. You can always pick a different one later – and if a new bestseller comes out, you might even ignore your own book list and read that new one instead. You’re in control.
Thinking of your tasks as a wish list helps you to take that same, stress-free approach to your daily actions, and you can do this no matter how much is on your plate right now, even if it seems like your task list is out of your control. It’s not. You just have to change the way you’re thinking about it. Make it more of a game, by turning it into a wish list, not a task list.
Give it a try the next time you feel overwhelmed. Try just imagining that all these ideas and tasks are just things on your wish list. They’re just things you want to do. Wouldn’t it be nice ifs. And see if that mental shift reshapes your energy and approach to them.
