Overwhelm Is System Overload: How to Unfreeze When Your To-Do List Seems Endless
Spam Filter For Your Brain - Episode 209
This In Case of Emergency session is about overwhelm. It's about that, those moments where you think, "I can't cope with how much I have to handle right now," and often when you've gone into freeze mode.
Quite often we think that overwhelm is incapability, that we're not doing all the things that we should do, that we have too much to do and we are not coping well enough.
But actually, often overwhelm is the exact opposite of that. It's not incapacity, It's our brains having too many tabs open, too many things to drive our attention the whole time, whilst we're also getting the signal that everything that we have to do is of equal importance.
There's probably nothing gone wrong here. You're probably not failing at all. You're probably coping a lot better than you think, but you're trying to process everything simultaneously, which no brain can do. And then you're criticising yourself for the fact that you're not coping with it all.
The reason why you've frozen when you're faced with all of these things at once is because you're just being overloaded and bombarded with too many messages.
Our brains don't calmly prioritise things when we are overstimulated. We get deer in a headlights. We all know this. But that kind of freeze response the paralysis isn't anything that you have done wrong. It isn't a weakness. It's not that you're lazy and can't manage all of the things. It's just system overload.
You're past capacity. That's why we call it overwhelm.
The thing is, quite often we feel like we need to brute force willpower our way through it, but that's never the solution. The solution is to close some of the browser tabs in your brain and see what actually is possible in this moment and is possible with the capacity that you have, with the body that you have.
So my fail-safe, I'm sure that if you've been around here a minute, you'll know that this is what I'm gonna say, is to get it all out of your head and onto paper. This is non-negotiable. It's the whole solution to everything. When it's swirling internally, we can't see what's going on, and we don't know what's in our head. Our brain changes the story every five minutes and tells us that every single thing is urgent. It's kind of this formless, smoky, can't-grab-it kind of dread with no edges to it.
Once we've written it down, we can see what we're actually dealing with. It becomes a list, and that list is finite. And that is a very important thing for your brain to be able to register, that there is a finite list of things that can be handled, rather than our brain when it's swirling around. It's everything, and it's everything all at once.
Once we've got this thought down out there, we can see all of the things that we need to handle. And even if we think that list of things is a lot, it's not everlasting.
So just putting everything down on paper with no order, no judgment, just getting it all out, gives us something that enables us to be able to see what we're actually dealing with.
Now I invite you to sort these things into three piles:
mine to do,
mine to do later,
and not mine at all.
That last pile is probably gonna be a lot bigger than you think. It's stuffed with things which we've absorbed, which were never ours to carry in the first place.
Because overwhelm hoards all of these responsibilities, socialisation teaches us that these are the things that we need to grab onto and get our teeth into, that give us value, worth, and safety, and then we blame ourselves for not being able to do them and say that it's our fault.
This lesson is an invitation to let go of some of those things that are not yours to be carrying.
So your next one step is to take one small step. What is the next physical action that is gonna take you closer to getting any of these things done? I know we need to create a game plan. I know we need to be able to see the path forward. What is the next physical thing that you could do? Is it send one email? Is it make one phone call? Is it put one sock away?
Overwhelm lifts through motion. It alleviates when we get into momentum of action. It is that freeze that allows our brain to just circle round on the same loop the whole time.
We think that if we think about things more, we're gonna be able to strategise a solution and a map out of all of this mess of the stuff that we need to hold, but actually that's a trick.
Your brain wants to stay thinking in things 'cause it keeps us in a state of complete inertia, and then we don't get anything done, and getting nothing done means that we're not gonna fail at anything.
Taking one small action breaks this cycle, and it is so much better than an hour's worth of strategising.
And honestly, deciding badly is always gonna be better than not deciding. You've heard me say 1,000 times, but B- and out the door. Get something started, and we can improve on it later.
That freeze response is connived so that you can not exert energy and not put yourself in any kind of danger. It convinces you that a wrong move is gonna be catastrophic when you already have nothing left, and so we don't take any action.
It's that not deciding that quietly becomes , its own little secret, insidious, jabby, pointy, terrible decision that we use as evidence that we are not good people and we're not doing well enough.
But actually, most choices are reversible. Most are far less final than we tell ourselves that they are.
It is that freeze action that we judge, that then leads us to thought spirals about what terrible people we are.
So my invitation for this class is to lower your standards. Like: move from perfect to done. Overwhelm loves a bit of perfectionism. It's that sense that you've got to handle everything flawlessly or you're not doing good enough. You don't. You never have done. You don't expect that from people around you.
What you need to do is to get the stuff done that you need to survive, and you need to do that in a way that isn't gonna completely annihilate your mental state. So handling things adequately and keeping breathing is far more preferable than telling yourself that everything has to be absolutely flawless.
Done and perfect is a myth. Perfect and stuck and frozen are things you know you don't enjoy. A little bit rubbish and in movement is something that you could try, and I bet you probably haven't dabbled in that much.
So this lesson, I just want to close with this real reassurance. You're not incapable. You haven't done anything wrong. This is a normal response. We are all overloaded. There's so much on our plates the whole time. And feeling like you are a terrible, awful person for not having got all of this stuff done... the way that you use your to-do list as evidence that you are not a good enough person is the thing that we want to be looking at, not actually the to-do list at all..
That fix is something that I hope that you can bring to the weekly group calls.
But for the things that are on your to-do list right now, try taking that one small action. Get it out of your head, sort your things into piles, take that one next step, and suddenly this mountain of a to-do list suddenly becomes a list of things that you can actually do
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