Episode 32: The Worst Thing to Do When You Feel Overwhelmed

Feeling overwhelmed? You might think the ultimate solution is to just push yourself to do more, do more, do more.  In this episode, I’ll show you why overwhelm isn’t caused by your to-do list, but by what you believe about it—and how to shift from burnout to peace by sharpening your mental saw. If you’ve ever felt like there’s too much to do and not enough of you to do it, this one’s for you.

Full Transcript:

You're listening to the Think New Thoughts Podcast with Emily Ricks, episode number 32. The worst thing to do when you feel overwhelmed.

I'm Emily Ricks and this is Think New Thoughts, a life coaching podcast to help you find more joy in your relationships. In each episode, I'll share a simple idea that will help you see things in a new way so you can love God, your neighbor, and yourself more deeply than you ever have before. If you're ready to literally change your mind, I think you'll like it here.

Hello, my friend, welcome back to Think New Thoughts.

You want to know something fun? As of this week, we hit 2000 downloads since the first episode of this podcast. So I wanted to celebrate that with you and just say thank you for being here. Thanks for listening.

Thanks for sharing the podcast with your friends, for telling me what you're learning from the episodes and how these ideas are benefiting your life. I love hearing from you and I'm so glad you're here. Okay, so let's talk about today's topic, being overwhelmed.

What does it look like for you when you feel overwhelmed? Like, have you ever looked at a cluttered room, a sink full of dishes or a full calendar and felt like there was just way too much to do? Or maybe you've started making progress on changing a habit or improving something in your life and you feel motivated for a little while and then you lose steam and just get overwhelmed because it feels like there's too far to go. So let's talk about the worst thing you can do when you feel overwhelmed and then of course what I recommend instead. Here's what I see a lot of people do when they get overwhelmed.

I have all these things I need to do, all this stuff that's going on, all these things I'm managing, all these emotions I'm dealing with, all these problems I'm facing and I feel overwhelmed. So I just need to work harder. I just need to get as much done as I can.

This is something I used to tell myself all the time. If you feel overwhelmed, just get to work. Just get as much done as you can because if I can get more done, then I'm going to have less stuff on my to-do list.

And if I can decrease the amount of stuff that's staring me in the face that I'm supposed to get done, then I'm going to feel less overwhelmed. And this approach can kind of work for a short period of time. Like if you're up against a deadline and you're like, okay, we're just going to get as much done as we can and finish it by Thursday.

That might kind of work for this week. But if you use this strategy over and over in multiple categories of your life, that anytime you feel overwhelmed, you just assume the solution is I need to work harder and just push through to get more done. Eventually in the long-term, you'll hit the wall where this becomes unsustainable.

At some point when you've ignored your true deep needs long enough and sacrificed things like sleep, nutrition, exercise, quality time with God and with the people who matter most to you to try to get more done so you can feel less overwhelmed, at some point you will end up exhausted and totally burned out. And by the way, still overwhelmed no matter how much you were able to get done running yourself into the ground. Here's why.

Let's review the CTFAR model. My favorite life coaching tool, CTFAR. Circumstance, thought, feeling, action, result.

Circumstances are neutral. Thoughts are optional. Thoughts create feelings.

Feelings drive actions and then actions produce results. Okay, so thoughts create feelings. This means you don't feel overwhelmed because of your to-do list or the number of things on your calendar.

You don't feel overwhelmed because of the messes in your house or in your life. Those are just circumstances. They're just neutral.

You actually feel overwhelmed because of the thoughts you're thinking about that stuff. And the kind of thoughts that create overwhelm are thoughts about too much and not enough. If I think there's too much to do, I don't have enough time, then I'm gonna feel overwhelmed.

If I think there's too much to clean up, I don't have enough energy, then I feel overwhelmed. If I think there's too much at stake here, I don't have enough experience to do this, then I'm gonna feel overwhelmed. And what's interesting is that this feels like a fact when you think it.

People say, I don't have enough time, like it's a fact, like it's as true as I'm wearing a blue shirt, but I don't have enough time is actually just a thought. And so is I'm not thin enough. My house is too messy.

It's too hard. I'm not smart enough. There's too much going on.

So what is it for you? What is the too much or not enough belief that is fueling the overwhelm in your life? What are you convinced you don't have enough of? Do you believe you don't have enough time? Do you believe you don't have enough money? Do you believe you don't have enough energy? Before I found coaching, I used to believe the thought, I don't have enough time. And I believed it like it was scripture. I don't have enough time.

There are so many things to do. All of them are important. All of them need to be done and I don't have time to do them all.

And you can believe that you don't have enough time, but I want you to know it's not a fact. It's a thought and thoughts are optional and they create feelings. And if you believe that you don't have enough time, this thought will create a feeling of overwhelm in your life.

And even if you work, work, work, work, work, if your core belief is, I don't have enough time, no matter how much you get done, no matter how much you accomplish, it's never going to be enough. I want to tell you about another option. This is what I have found helps me the most.

When I feel overwhelmed, what I need is to drop into awareness that my thoughts are creating that feeling. When I notice that I'm feeling overwhelmed and sometimes I don't notice the feeling. Sometimes I notice the actions that are coming from the feeling.

Like maybe I'm trying to do 10 things at once and not really getting anything done or I'm busying myself with something that doesn't really need to be done right now as a way of avoiding something that is important, but I don't want to face right now because it's overwhelming. Has that ever happened to you? This is when I go, Hey, Emily, you're overwhelmed. You're not zoned in.

You're not being effective right now. You need to slow down and take a look at your thoughts. And my brain doesn't like this idea at all.

My brain goes, yeah, right. I don't have time to make a model. I don't have time to examine my thoughts.

I have too much to do, which is so funny. It reminds me of the story Stephen Covey tells of the woodcutter who's cutting down trees and he's starting to get really tired and strain. And someone comes up to him and says, Hey, it looks like your saw is getting dull.

If you took a minute to sharpen that saw, you'd be able to cut down more trees. And the woodcutter is like, don't you see I'm busy. I don't have time to sharpen my saw.

I've got too many trees to cut down. Isn't it so funny? So running around trying to get as much done as you can because you feel overwhelmed is like chopping down trees with a dull saw. You just simply are not as effective and you get more burned out.

So if you notice that you're feeling overwhelmed, which you might notice because you're avoiding facing something and trying to busy yourself with other things or you're feeling burned out and exhausted because you're trying to do so many things all at once. I would encourage you to slow down for a few minutes, 10 to 15 minutes and take a look at your thoughts. Make a full CTFAR model if you feel comfortable doing that or just as a starting point, just write down the thoughts that are creating the feeling of being overwhelmed.

Write down what you think there's too much of and what you think there's not enough of. And then I want to invite you to accept, to acknowledge that this is actually just a thought. It's not a fact.

If you can acknowledge that it's a thought and not a fact, then you can start to open up to other options of what you can think. Here's something magical that shifts for me when I do this. I can access this possibility from Psalm 118 24.

This is the day the Lord has made. Have you heard that before? That's one of my favorite turnarounds for the thought I don't have enough time. It's like, okay, that's a thought, but here's another thought.

This is the day the Lord has made. Let us rejoice and be glad in it. Okay, this is the amount of time I'm going to get today.

This is the amount that I am working with. I'm not going to get more time. Trying to get more time than you have is an argument with reality.

You're never going to win it. Instead of thinking, I don't have enough time. I don't have enough energy.

I didn't get enough sleep. I'm not going to be able to get it all done. I can choose to think this is the day the Lord has made.

Let us rejoice and be glad in it. So if you're getting really tired, trying to chop down trees with a dull saw, I want to invite you to pause for a few moments and become aware of your thinking. And then clarify your focus and your objective.

What really matters today? What am I really trying to accomplish? And just as a warning, this will feel counterintuitive and your brain will probably start to freak out and your brain will be like, what? We're not going to sit down and think about what matters. We don't have time to do that. Your brain will be like, do not get off the hamster wheel.

You have to keep doing, doing, doing, going, going, going. Here's my favorite thing to tell my brain when it freaks out, that I'm taking time to examine my thinking and clarify my objectives. Here's what I tell my brain.

I do have enough time. I have exactly the right amount of time to accomplish what God wants me to do today. So I'm going to take a minute and find out what that is.

If I believe my thoughts create my feelings and I understand that I'm not effective when I'm frantically doing, doing, doing to try to not feel overwhelmed, I can actually diminish the feeling of overwhelm by changing my thoughts. Then I can go back to cutting trees, but instead of doing it frantically from a feeling of being overwhelmed and like there's not enough time, I can generate a feeling of being clear and focused and centered, which I create with my thoughts in about 15 minutes. Then I can work from that emotion, which is so much more effective in the end.

If you want to make progress on what really matters, you might want to take a minute to find out what that is before you just go to work trying to chop down every tree in the forest. You have exactly the right amount of time to accomplish what God wants you to do today. I promise.

But does this sound outrageous to you? It's tricky because we get very attached to our beliefs that things are not enough. So let me offer you one more idea on this. Think about Jesus and his disciples.

They had this big multitude. He'd been teaching them for a while. They're starting to get hungry and the disciples start to go, okay, well, we probably need to go into town to get some food for these people because they're super hungry.

And then they find out that they have five loaves and two fishes, right? And immediately their mortal brains go, well, that's not gonna be enough to feed the multitude. And that felt really true to them. They were sure it was a fact.

Five loaves and two fishes is not enough food to feed 5,000 people. And in some ways they're right. But if you look at the story, they actually turned out to be totally wrong.

Since we know how the story ended with the loaves and fishes, we can easily look at it and be like, well, yeah, actually five loaves and two fishes was enough to feed the multitudes. They just didn't understand how. When you think you don't have enough of something, it's just a thought.

Thanks for joining me today. I'll talk to you next week.