Want to Manage Overwhelm? Figure out the Mean Thoughts You Have About Your Work
Most advice related to overwhelm boils down to figuring out which tasks on our list we can postpone, delegate, or fully abandon. I will not argue that uncovering that can be very helpful.
But one thing we often ignore when it comes to overwhelm are the mean thoughts we have about the remaining tasks on our list, which are preventing us from making some of those tasks simpler, more joyful, or more manageable.
Those mean thoughts tell us that we are slacking off if we simplify things, that we are not good workers if we enjoy a task, or that we are not “pulling our weight” if we make a task more manageable for ourselves.
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Yesterday, I was working on notes for an upcoming presentation, and I found myself being very overwhelmed, because I wanted to be prepared for every possible question I could think of that might come up during my talk. Quite a tall order and pretty much impossible, right?
It is not at all surprising that this felt overwhelming. In order for me to get to a point at which I felt prepared for every question (or even for a majority of questions) on the topic would require reading copious amounts of literature and would take away weeks of time from all the other projects that I am currently working on.
So, in that moment, my choices were to go and do this extensive research while setting aside my other projects and to hope that by taking all of this action my overwhelm would subside on its own or to work on addressing the overwhelm now and saving myself the weeks of work I did not actually want to do (and the disappointment when I would likely discover that all that work did not resolve my overwhelm and insecurity in the end).
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I chose option two. I decided to focus on the key points that would be most helpful to my audience, and on doing a bit of additional research on several common questions that may come up. And I noticed all the thoughts that came up when I made that decision, such as:
I am being a slacker.
I am being unmotivated.
Everyone will be able to tell I have no idea what I am talking about.
I would look silly.
Here is where the working through overwhelm part of the exercise came in. I had to take each of these thoughts and question them. And I worked on coming up with a reframe that felt both true and a lot less overwhelming. For instance, I came up with the following thoughts, all of which seemed believable:
I am protecting my own time and health.
I am providing more value by being more focused .
I know some of the things on this topic and this is what I am sharing with people.
What people think about me is not something I can ever control. Someone may think I am brilliant even if I only say 2 words and someone else may think I am incredibly dumb even if I prepared for months.
This calmed down my brain significantly, allowed me to move forward with preparing for the presentation in an intentional and targeted way, and saved me the exhaustion and resentment that would have come from spending weeks on something to which I did not want to dedicate weeks of my time.
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There will always be some tasks on your list that may be very stressful when you want to do an A+ job on them, but would be significantly less time-consuming, less stressful, and more joyful if you let yourself do a B+ job on them. However, doing a B+ job would also require managing the mean thoughts that come up around not putting a “perfect” product out into the world.
If you need help doing that in your life, book a consultation call today and let’s discuss.
