Feeling overwhelmed? If you are, you most likely are stressed, frustrated, and probably procrastinating. What most likely is going on is that you have a whole bunch of stuff you need to get done or that is on your mind and it is all jumbled up in your brain. This causes you to feel overwhelmed and you don’t know how or where to start and you are either starting things and not finishing or you’re becoming paralyzed. Sometimes when we become paralyzed and we start beating ourselves up or panicking and we don’t know where to go from there.
When we have a lot of things going on and we feel overwhelmed, our fight, flight, or freeze can kick in. So what may happen with you is that you may freeze in these situations, you may get very irritated or panicky and feel like you need to fight or you may completely avoid it. The things we stress about in today’s world is much different than what we stressed about 100s and 100s of years ago.
When we were stressed in for instance the cavemen times we genuinely had to fight for our life and now life is not like that. We are not afraid of being attacked by bears unless you are living in the middle of nowhere. The things we are stressed about now are more revolved around our living situation, homes, our relationships, work, things we need to get done/goals. Those are things we more so get stressed about now. And still, our fight or flight kicks off in those situations and we still react to things in the same exact manner as back in the day.
Just know you are not lazy or dumb, you are feeling overwhelmed and your fight, flight or freeze is kicking in. So now knowing this information, how do you deal with being overwhelmed?
The first thing is that you need to recognize your self talk and to check how negative it is. How many are fearful or negative thoughts? It is also really important that you don’t beat yourself up and you don’t be negative towards yourself. A lot of times when we are overwhelmed we can start to beat ourselves up, we feel like a failure, we start to doubt ourselves and we start to panic. It is important you are careful of that self talk and you make sure you are not doing that. You want to work on ways to ease your anxiety rather than intensify it and feed it.
Imagine you are trying to help a child learn how to walk. If you’re consistently yelling at that child and telling them they are not doing it well enough and they should have already run by now, they are not going to want to walk. The child probably already feels defeated and anxious. That is how you treat yourself every time you put yourself down when you are not at the place you want to be.
You are setting yourself up for that failure. It is causing you to not want to do those things. That is added stress to you already feeling overwhelmed, you are adding pressure to yourself that you don’t need. If you keep putting yourself down, you have nothing to work with, you won’t want to do anything because you feel terrible. it feels like it is not good enough.
You need to find ways to relieve that pressure, so make sure you are talking to yourself the way you would talk to a friend. Recognize when you are saying anything negative to yourself and say hey I am not going to talk to myself like this, it is not helpful. Make sure you are positive towards yourself and very nurturing and compassionate towards yourself.
During the self talk, it is important to focus on the things you are trying to complete, rather than what you did not complete. What you focus on is so important. So if you recognize your mind starts drifting to start drifting on other things, bring yourself back to what you are doing. This is part of retraining your brain from feeling overwhelmed and feeling like you need to be the best and the completionist attitude.
You need to talk to yourself and say ” Okay we will get this one thing done but first we are going to focus on this, first I am going to vacuum before I go to the next thing. You be in the moment, be mindful, try to stay present.
Should is a bad word, whenever I hear my clients say should, I say ” nope that is a bad word!” Should is literally putting yourself down and telling yourself what should have done and so it is another form of beating yourself up. It is better to say ” I am going to, I get to, I need to..” So you make it a future action you are going to do rather than putting yourself down. It is moving forward rather than looking backward.
The next thing that may help is that you journal. What is happening is that everything is scrambled in your mind and you do not know where to start or you feel like you can’t. You may start things and you may not be able to finish so you have a whole bunch of half-finished projects done. So it is really helpful for you to write everything that is on your mind.
Something that you may be struggling with is prioritizing and knowing what needs to be done. Also sometimes you may get in this sense of helplessness or this completionist attitude where you don’t know how to move forward until this one thing is complete. What you need to do is you need to write out everything that is on your mind, all the things you need to get done. Then the next thing that’s helpful is to write the solution to each thing that you are overwhelmed about. Even if it is as simple as changing the way you talk about it or see it.
If you are overwhelmed about something that is completely out of your control than you most likely need to change the way you think about it or you need to understand that maybe it is something that you can’t take care of at this moment. You need to understand if you can’t take care of it then you need to change your mindset about it. You need to accept the fact that you can not take care of it right now and it is out of your control. So try to focus on what you can control rather than what you can’t.
With this feeling of helplessness, you may not know what the next move to take is so then you may completely avoid that thing but then feel really bad or anxious about it. And you are just sitting there, feeling overwhelmed, feeling helpless, not knowing what to do. What will help is by writing the solution to each thing because you want to help yourself feel empowered rather than feeling helpless. Writing the solutions to each of your problems, it will help fight against the helplessness feeling. It will give you the feelings of being able to take care of it and are able to do it.
You want to break things up for yourself and you don’t want to give yourself too much at once. What helps is to give yourself a task and let’s say for instance if you have that completionist attitude, it can help to give yourself a little star, a little checkmark to make you feel like you completed something.
So try to break big tasks into little tasks and give yourself something like 3 mini-tasks to complete and then when those are done, you tell yourself you did a good job/praise yourself and then give yourself more mini tasks. This will help you to move forward. Its easier to break things down and focus on the little picture than the bigger one. Once you complete it little by little, you will feel like you accomplished things and like you can move forward.
What do you guys think? Do you have any tips or have experiences of being overwhelmed you would like to share? Leave it all in the comments below!
