47. Tips for Public Health Overwhelm
Overwhelm is one of the most common challenges I see in my work. Whether it’s overwhelm around your workload, having to deal with a difficult boss, or experiencing COVID challenges or discrimination in the workplace, it feels all-consuming, like it’s about to take you under. And often, we end up getting stuck in a mud bath of overwhelm with seemingly no way out.
So today, we’re diving into what causes overwhelm and my top tips for how to deal with it in a new way. The truth is overwhelm isn’t outside of you, and it’s not your circumstances causing it. If this is hard to get to grips with, I invite you to stick with me here because I’m offering how this is actually great news.
Join me this week as I show you what actually causes overwhelm, why it often feels so challenging to shift out of, and some common examples of how overwhelm shows up for us. I’m giving you simple, practical tips for starting to reduce your experience of overwhelm so you can intentionally choose calm and peace instead.
If you want to take this work deeper and learn the tools and skills to feel better, all while having my support and guidance each step of the way, I invite you to set up a time to chat with me. Click here to grab a spot on my calendar and I can’t wait to speak to you!
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What You Will Discover:
What you think overwhelm is, and what actually causes it.
Why getting out of a cycle of overwhelm feels so challenging.
Common examples of how overwhelm comes up for us in our lives.
What makes the experience of overwhelm feel heavy.
My top tips for dealing with overwhelm.
Resources:
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Full Episode Transcript:
If you're two to five years out of your MPH degree, love public health, but find yourself secretly unhappy at work and maybe even thinking about quitting your job, then this is the podcast for you. I'm Marissa McKool, host of the Thoughts Are Your Root Cause podcast. Join me each week as I share tips, tools, and resources to help you have the career you've always dreamed of without any of the stress you are experiencing right now. Come along.
Hi everyone. I’m so glad you’re here. I’m always glad you’re here and I love sitting down and recording these episodes with you all. I’m really excited, before we get in the episode to share some things going on with me. I, as I think most of you know or some of you know at least, I always have my own coach.
Even though I’m a coach I still have a brain that I need to manage that sometimes I don’t really see the logic or the illogic I should say in my brain’s thinking and how it’s not being useful or not getting the results I want. Or having trouble accessing emotions or processing them, or needing help just deepening my thought work, and making bigger goals, and anything and everything. Everything I’m teaching you on the podcast, everything, if you’re my current client or a past client, I coach with you on.
I bring my brain to someone else to help me with my brain just like you bring yours to me. I think it’s so, so important. I actually think if you are working with a coach on mind management stuff and they are not getting their own management coaching and aren’t doing their own work on their brain, to me, I don’t want to say a red flag.
But I just, I guess I would say if you are all thinking about having a coach or choosing a coach I would for sure work with someone who is dedicated to managing their own mind and understanding their mind. And getting coaching and investing in themselves because they’re going to be a better coach for you for sure.
I mean every episode I write, every time I show up for one of my clients I am the best version of myself and able to really help them with their mind the cleanest and get them to the results faster and everything when I am coaching myself, when I studying my brain, where I am understanding myself. Ever since I found coaching I have always invested in coaching.
I don’t think I will ever not have a coach, whether a one-on-one coach, or being in a group coaching program, or any other type of program to really deepen my understanding with my brain and evolve my thought work, evolve myself, and my thinking, and my emotional capacity. It’s just, that’s how you get to your goals. That’s how you transform. That’s how you change your life truly.
And so, some exciting things happening now that I’m doing to invest in myself and my brain. One is I am doing an advanced certification in feminist coaching. And it’s really intersectional feminist coaching with my prior coach, Kara Lowentheil who I’ve talked about before on the podcast who I worked with. She was my first coach, worked with her for a couple of years, changed my life.
And I’m doing the Certification 1. It will help me enhance how I can help you all both on the podcast, in the courses I offer with my clients. Because it’s really understanding on a deeper level, because I already think about this a lot. And Kara’s already taught me a lot, but on a deeper level how socialization, how systems of oppression, how all those factors have impacted particularly women or individuals who are socialized as women’s beliefs about themselves and the thoughts they have in their brain and their negative self-talk and all that.
And then in fact, whether or not you identify as a woman or any gender, it has an impact. When we think about the patriarchy’s impact, it has a huge impact on men and how they deny themselves, allowing themselves to feel emotions and in so many things. So, it affects everyone truly.
And so, this certification is really diving into that and really understanding how all of our individual identities related to, whether it’s our culture, or ethnicity, or our race, our religion, our gender, our sexual orientation, and all sorts of things. How that impacts how we’re socialized and the messages we receive.
And then how we think and how we work to support clients and our students in understanding that. And for them to explore that with compassion, and love, and really work to decide what thoughts they want to keep and what beliefs, and what thoughts and beliefs they want to start believing. So of course, the certification is for the purpose of becoming a better coach to serve all you but through that process when you do those processes you transform yourself.
Because I always say you are your first client if you’re a coach. You are client zero. Your brain is the first thing you coach. So, I’m so excited about that. I can’t wait to kind of take what I’m learning and really support you all. The other thing is I have – well, as I’m recording this, as you’re hearing this it’s been several weeks.
But I hired a new one-on-one coach this week which I am really excited about. And I have to be honest, it was a little nerve wracking, even though I’m a coach, even though I’ve been getting coaching for years. It still is when I put that investment into – I felt this way with the certification too.
Any time I put in an investment, whether it’s a significant amount of time, or money, or otherwise into myself, into putting myself first and saying, “Here, this is how I’m going to invest myself. This is how I’m going to bet on myself. This is how I’m going to have my back and evolve.” There are doubts, and there are nerves, and there are so many emotions and thoughts that come up. Just like you all if you’ve signed up for a consult with me or are now a client, you went through this too. It’s normal.
It doesn’t change just because I’m a coach but it’s also really exciting because once you do that, and invest in yourself, and sign up, and say yes, then you can start really imagining the future and how you’re going to evolve and change, and how things are going to be different. And it’s just really exciting. So that’s what’s going on with me. A lot of exciting coaching, self-coaching and improving my kind of toolkit, and expanding it to support all you all.
This episode is going to be short and sweet, so I want to get into it, not spend too much time catching up. And I want it to be short and sweet because with overwhelm what happens is we indulge in the emotion. Meaning we bathe in it, we swim in it. And then we kind of get stuck in a mud bath in it and it’s harder to get out of overall. And so, because of that I’m going to just get straight to the point on what overwhelm is, what causes it and how to manage it or what to do. Some tips of how to deal with overwhelm.
This episode will be helpful no matter why you’re overwhelmed, whether it’s because of the challenges with your boss, or your workload, or being understaffed, or COVID, or experiencing discrimination, or anything at all. So, let’s talk about what you think overwhelm is. We often say, “I am so overwhelmed”, to describe an experience where we have a lot of work, or a lot of responsibilities, or a lot to do, or a lot to deal with personally or professionally. We might use it to describe an experience where we’re managing or dealing with other people who are challenging.
And the way most of you think about overwhelm is like this. A lot is happening to me, therefore I’m overwhelmed. I’m overwhelmed because a lot is happening to me. I am dealing with a lot. As if overwhelm is just happening to you, all the things happening to you cause your overwhelm.
That’s how you think about it. Growing up did you ever go to a waterpark with a wave pool? I’m sure many of you have never even heard of this. But I went a few times growing up. And it was when I was very young. And waterparks, if you’ve ever been to one, if you haven’t, no worries. They have a lot of times a big pool, a huge pool that – I don’t know how to explain it. It’s ‘deeper’ and it’s beyond deep. And then of course it’s smaller and smaller. So, you can walk into the pool. There is not really edges where you go downstairs like in a traditional pool.
You walk in, it’s supposed to mimic the ocean, how you walk from the sand into the ocean. And it mimics the ocean because it’s a wave pool. And it wants you to have the experience of being in ocean waves. So, the pool is filled with water, and it’s set with a timer to make huge waves, to mimic tidal waves that go off over and over. So that people in the pool can then experience that which even as I’m saying this I’m like that sounds kind of crazy because tide pools and tidal waves in an ocean is people drown in and die in and it’s not something to make light of or a game out of.
So, as I’m repeating this, looking back to my childhood doing this, I’m like that is kind of strange. But I’m still going to use this as a metaphor because I do think it describes how you are thinking about overwhelm where you’re in the ocean or even in a wave pool and the waves suddenly are aggressive and you get knocked over and you probably hit other people. If you were at the shore of an ocean or kind of swimming in the shallow end of the ocean and a huge tidal wave came, this is how you’re viewing overwhelm.
The reason it’s so hard to get out of overwhelm, a large part of it is because you view overwhelm this way. You think overwhelm happens to you and you can’t do anything. And if you tell your brain to see overwhelm as a huge surge of intense water rushing at you that you can’t run from, that you’re going to get hit and taken under then your brain doesn’t look for ways to get out of overwhelm. It just looks for ways to survive, to kind of keep your head above water, to keep treading.
And so, you don’t get out of overwhelm, you just try to survive it which for sure sometimes we just have to do that especially when you haven’t learned what overwhelm actually is and how to deal with it. But you’re learning, I’m teaching you today so put these in practice because how you’re thinking about overwhelm now as this tidal wave taking you under is not what overwhelm is even if it feels that way.
So, let’s talk about what it actually is and what causes overwhelm. And overwhelm is an emotion you experience because of a thought you are having. I know, surprise, either caused by one specific thought or maybe caused by a series of thoughts that are happening very fast, that you’re not managing your mind around that are creating a lot of feelings. And overwhelm is caused by your reaction to those thoughts or that one thought and your emotional experience.
So, it isn’t happening to you, you are creating it with your mind. When overwhelm is being created by one thought it is because that single thought creates the emotion of overwhelm. So, for example, you look at your to-do list on your calendar and you have the thought, there’s no way I can get all this done. That one thought is creating the feeling of overwhelm in that moment, not the to-do list, not your calendar, which means to reduce or solve for the overwhelm you don’t have to reduce your to-do list, or you don’t have to change your calendar.
Doing those things doesn’t automatically reduce your overwhelm because your overwhelm is caused by your thought, there’s no way I can get all this done. You have to change your thought about those things first. And then when you do maybe you’ll make some different decisions. But what’s causing your overwhelm is your thought. So, when overwhelm is caused by several thoughts it’s often because you’re not consciously examining your thoughts. Every thought that comes through your brain you believe and there are so many.
And you have lots of thoughts swirling around in your head that you believe that cause you to feel overwhelm. Because when you have a lot of swirling thoughts you have a lot of swirling emotions, emotions you aren’t processing. So, for both of those scenarios what makes the experience so overwhelming is how you react to yourself when you resist your emotions, when you tell yourself it shouldn’t be happening, when you shut down, when you avoid a feeling.
Let’s walk through some common examples. So, the thought of there is too much to do, and this can be so many thoughts like I’m too busy, I can’t get this all done. It’s all similar. There is too much to do. Let’s say you look at your week in between work deadlines, doctors’ appointments, trying to work out, making food, chores, walking the dog you start to feel overwhelmed. You are not overwhelmed because of your week’s schedule, or the things that you have listed, or need to do, or want to do.
You are overwhelmed because when you look at your week’s schedule you think there’s too much to do, I can’t get this done, how am I going to do this and then you feel overwhelmed. And when you feel overwhelmed you shut down, you avoid, you don’t make active decisions, you make reactive decisions. You try to do it all. You don’t say no. You don’t ask for help. And then you feel worse.
Instead, recognize it’s your thought causing your overwhelm and interact with that thought, question it. Do I have to get it all done? What if I do have time to do it all? How can I make this week easier for myself? Where can I find space? Notice how different those questions and thoughts are. They don’t lead you to a dead end. They lead you to sustainable and empowered decisions.
From there your overwhelm will reduce because you’ll start to dissolve the thoughts or at least not give them as much power and detach a little bit, causing the overwhelm. And really lean into and give more power to empowering thoughts, to helpful thoughts, thoughts that would drive actions of asking for help, or saying no, or moving things around, or reducing distractions.
So, another kind of example, the thought of, I can’t handle this. So, let’s say you’ve had a lot of emotions and a lot of thoughts this week. Maybe you lost your job and are sad and angry. Maybe you’re worried about rent. Maybe you have a friend who’s acting weird, making you think they’re upset with you. Maybe your car got keyed, and you have to deal with that. And maybe it just seems everything wrong that could happen is happening.
What is creating your overwhelm isn’t the circumstances, isn’t the facts of what happened. It’s that you’re not processing your emotions, the sadness, the anger, the worry, the frustration, the shame, blame, whatever else. They’re building on top of each other from your thoughts causing all those feelings, whether the thoughts are, this is embarrassing, or I’m going to end up homeless, or I can’t catch a break, or anything else, and conscious or unconscious. That’s creating this heaviness effect, you believing all those thoughts and not examining them, and not detaching from them.
And you not allowing yourself to process the emotions. And then you think, I can’t handle this. It’s not the external things happening that you can’t handle. You are telling yourself you can’t handle your emotions, your thoughts. And when you do that you tell yourself not to process the emotions. You tell yourself to continue to believe the thoughts and then you shut down. And your body doesn’t finish its emotional response cycle. If you sat down and wrote down all your thoughts in your head, what would happen then?
If you sat and gave yourself time to feel your emotions, what would happen then? What your mind and body needs is space to process all of its thoughts and feelings. And when you shift into overwhelm you halt that process making it even harder for yourself. So here are some tips for dealing with overwhelm. Let’s talk – I put these in priority and secondary just because when you’re in overwhelm the priority tips are really helpful to kind of pause the intensity of it. And once you do that then you can kind of do the secondary.
If you’re still in the intense experience of it, it’s hard to do some of the secondary tips. So, you’ll see what I mean as I go through them. So, these tips and the kind of priority level will help you calm your nervous system which is kind of on alert or neon signs when you’re in overwhelm.
So, the first one is write your thoughts down. This seems so simple, and innocent, and inconsequential but it is so important and so powerful. Your thoughts don’t have any power unless you decide to give them power. And writing down your thoughts helps you detach from them, helps you look at them from a bird’s eye view. It seems simple again, but it is so, so powerful, just getting those out of your brain on paper.
So, tip number two, process your feelings. Spend time being with your body, notice the emotions and where are the in the body and name them, and what do they feel like. Sit with it. Don’t resist it. Don’t run from it.
And number three, talk to yourself, talk to your brain, talk to yourself, talk to your nervous system. And if you can I find it most helpful to talk out loud. Now, you might not be comfortable depending on where you’re at in that moment and that’s fine, you can definitely do it quietly too. But I do find it helpful to talk out loud.
I like to think about it this way. If I was rock climbing, for me I have a slight fear of heights, and I started to get nervous. How I would help myself in that moment would be talking to myself by saying, “Marissa, it’s okay, you’ve got this. You can do this. You can get down if you want, you can ask for help. They’ve got you down there.” I would talk myself through that. And when you’re overwhelmed, no matter why you’re overwhelmed you need to do the same thing. Tell yourself you’re okay. Speak to your brain and your nervous system to calm it down.
Use your anchor thoughts, we’ve talked about anchor thoughts before. These are thoughts that you repeat that help calm your nervous system, that help bring you down to the foundation, to reality and reassure yourself enough for your nervous system to kind of calm down. So that’s a primary of the tips you can use when you’re in overwhelm to help calm your nervous system and get you to a place where you can move on to the secondary tips.
So, the first tip I have for once your nervous system is calmed a little bit is to make an immediate decision. Now, not an immediate decision and panic decision, that’s not what I mean. But just make one small decision, just one, no matter how small that can remind you and your brain that you are in control, that these things aren’t happening to you, that you’re in control of your experience.
So maybe that immediate decision is, I’m going to go for a walk, or I’m going to ask for help in this specific way, or I’m going to say no to this. Or even something like, I’m not going to reply to this email till tomorrow, or I’m going to get food to go tonight to just make it easier on myself. Anything, any small decision you make to help you feel less overwhelmed and more in control.
And the second tip, decide what you want to think. So, you really do need to get your nervous system to a place where it’s kind of calmer to do this piece of deciding what you want to think. And I really think it’s helpful to make a small decision before you do this to remind your brain, you are in control, and you can decide what to think. So, in this phase decide, what do I want to think about this experience? What do I want to think about my workload, about my boss?
When you have to look at your to-do list, what are the thoughts you want to think while you look at that to-do list that creates empowerment, or confidence, or motivation, or even neutrality or calm? And practice those thoughts, remind yourself of it.
Decide how you want to talk to yourself and your brain moving forward when you encounter those external factors, or those circumstances so you are in charge and not your primitive brain. Whether that’s deciding what you want to believe or think when you look at your to do list, or when you have to have a meeting with your boss tomorrow.
Or any other circumstance that you’re feeling overwhelmed because of your thoughts, but when you’re in that you can think differently about to help keep your own place, where you don’t drop into overwhelm. Or if you do, you don’t indulge in it and swim in it and you can work your way out of it. So that is the nitty gritty. And this is a skill and it’s a total skill especially if you find yourself in overwhelm a lot. So, you might want to relisten to this. You might want to save this episode and relisten to it when you find yourself in overwhelm.
And if this is something that you really want help with, maybe you are in overwhelm a lot. Maybe you really struggle calming your nervous system down. Maybe it’s inconsistent of how you can manage your mind or your emotions. Maybe you do just truly believe that it’s all happening to you, and you want to feel different. You want to feel peace for once. Your brain isn’t always at you. Your emotions aren’t always all over the place. Maybe you want to feel in control, other things don’t trigger you, your boss or your workload don’t trigger you, that you can be in control.
Maybe you just finally want to have some space where you can breathe and feel calm. When you have had a lot of experience of being in overwhelm, those things seem very far away but you know you want them. You know you would feel better if you had them. So, if that’s you and if you’re in that space, I can help you. We can take this deeper. We can work together one-on-one. I can guide you. I can be your support system.
I can help you manage your mind and learn the tools and the skills so you can feel better, so you can feel more at peace, and calm, and in control. And so, your boss doesn’t trigger you, your workload doesn’t trigger you. Anything else happening in work, whether it’s funding cuts, or changes, or being switched projects, or anything doesn’t trigger you and you believe that you’re in control of what you feel. And you don’t go into overwhelm, and you have confidence to make decisions, to have your own back and to feel good, to feel peaceful, to feel calm.
So, if that’s something you want, if this is something you’re struggling with, reach out to me. I’ll leave a link in the show notes, to set up a time to chat with me. No obligation, no expectations, no rush, no pressure, just come chat with me and we can talk a little bit more about what you’re struggling with.
And I can share a little bit more of as a coach what I see might be going on, what might be your biggest challenge that you don’t really see. That because you’ve been in overwhelm you haven’t been able to really see from the outside perspective actually where your biggest struggle is and where you can do the work to feel better. So, sign up. I would love, love, love to chat with you. And for everyone I hope you have a great week and I’ll talk to you next week. Bye.
Are you ready to make a change? Whether that's learning to love your job, making a career move, or anything in between, I can help. I'd be honored to coach you through figuring out what's next and navigating the steps to get there. So, head on over to mckoolcoaching.com/consult that's mckoolcoaching.com/consult to set up a time to chat and talk about how you can achieve the career of your dreams.
Hi everyone. I’m so glad you’re here. I’m always glad you’re here and I love sitting down and recording these episodes with you all. I’m really excited, before we get in the episode to share some things going on with me. I, as I think most of you know or some of you know at least, I always have my own coach.
Even though I’m a coach I still have a brain that I need to manage that sometimes I don’t really see the logic or the illogic I should say in my brain’s thinking and how it’s not being useful or not getting the results I want. Or having trouble accessing emotions or processing them, or needing help just deepening my thought work, and making bigger goals, and anything and everything. Everything I’m teaching you on the podcast, everything, if you’re my current client or a past client, I coach with you on.
I bring my brain to someone else to help me with my brain just like you bring yours to me. I think it’s so, so important. I actually think if you are working with a coach on mind management stuff and they are not getting their own management coaching and aren’t doing their own work on their brain, to me, I don’t want to say a red flag.
But I just, I guess I would say if you are all thinking about having a coach or choosing a coach I would for sure work with someone who is dedicated to managing their own mind and understanding their mind. And getting coaching and investing in themselves because they’re going to be a better coach for you for sure.
I mean every episode I write, every time I show up for one of my clients I am the best version of myself and able to really help them with their mind the cleanest and get them to the results faster and everything when I am coaching myself, when I studying my brain, where I am understanding myself. Ever since I found coaching I have always invested in coaching.
I don’t think I will ever not have a coach, whether a one-on-one coach, or being in a group coaching program, or any other type of program to really deepen my understanding with my brain and evolve my thought work, evolve myself, and my thinking, and my emotional capacity. It’s just, that’s how you get to your goals. That’s how you transform. That’s how you change your life truly.
And so, some exciting things happening now that I’m doing to invest in myself and my brain. One is I am doing an advanced certification in feminist coaching. And it’s really intersectional feminist coaching with my prior coach, Kara Lowentheil who I’ve talked about before on the podcast who I worked with. She was my first coach, worked with her for a couple of years, changed my life.
And I’m doing the Certification 1. It will help me enhance how I can help you all both on the podcast, in the courses I offer with my clients. Because it’s really understanding on a deeper level, because I already think about this a lot. And Kara’s already taught me a lot, but on a deeper level how socialization, how systems of oppression, how all those factors have impacted particularly women or individuals who are socialized as women’s beliefs about themselves and the thoughts they have in their brain and their negative self-talk and all that.
And then in fact, whether or not you identify as a woman or any gender, it has an impact. When we think about the patriarchy’s impact, it has a huge impact on men and how they deny themselves, allowing themselves to feel emotions and in so many things. So, it affects everyone truly.
And so, this certification is really diving into that and really understanding how all of our individual identities related to, whether it’s our culture, or ethnicity, or our race, our religion, our gender, our sexual orientation, and all sorts of things. How that impacts how we’re socialized and the messages we receive.
And then how we think and how we work to support clients and our students in understanding that. And for them to explore that with compassion, and love, and really work to decide what thoughts they want to keep and what beliefs, and what thoughts and beliefs they want to start believing. So of course, the certification is for the purpose of becoming a better coach to serve all you but through that process when you do those processes you transform yourself.
Because I always say you are your first client if you’re a coach. You are client zero. Your brain is the first thing you coach. So, I’m so excited about that. I can’t wait to kind of take what I’m learning and really support you all. The other thing is I have – well, as I’m recording this, as you’re hearing this it’s been several weeks.
But I hired a new one-on-one coach this week which I am really excited about. And I have to be honest, it was a little nerve wracking, even though I’m a coach, even though I’ve been getting coaching for years. It still is when I put that investment into – I felt this way with the certification too.
Any time I put in an investment, whether it’s a significant amount of time, or money, or otherwise into myself, into putting myself first and saying, “Here, this is how I’m going to invest myself. This is how I’m going to bet on myself. This is how I’m going to have my back and evolve.” There are doubts, and there are nerves, and there are so many emotions and thoughts that come up. Just like you all if you’ve signed up for a consult with me or are now a client, you went through this too. It’s normal.
It doesn’t change just because I’m a coach but it’s also really exciting because once you do that, and invest in yourself, and sign up, and say yes, then you can start really imagining the future and how you’re going to evolve and change, and how things are going to be different. And it’s just really exciting. So that’s what’s going on with me. A lot of exciting coaching, self-coaching and improving my kind of toolkit, and expanding it to support all you all.
This episode is going to be short and sweet, so I want to get into it, not spend too much time catching up. And I want it to be short and sweet because with overwhelm what happens is we indulge in the emotion. Meaning we bathe in it, we swim in it. And then we kind of get stuck in a mud bath in it and it’s harder to get out of overall. And so, because of that I’m going to just get straight to the point on what overwhelm is, what causes it and how to manage it or what to do. Some tips of how to deal with overwhelm.
This episode will be helpful no matter why you’re overwhelmed, whether it’s because of the challenges with your boss, or your workload, or being understaffed, or COVID, or experiencing discrimination, or anything at all. So, let’s talk about what you think overwhelm is. We often say, “I am so overwhelmed”, to describe an experience where we have a lot of work, or a lot of responsibilities, or a lot to do, or a lot to deal with personally or professionally. We might use it to describe an experience where we’re managing or dealing with other people who are challenging.
And the way most of you think about overwhelm is like this. A lot is happening to me, therefore I’m overwhelmed. I’m overwhelmed because a lot is happening to me. I am dealing with a lot. As if overwhelm is just happening to you, all the things happening to you cause your overwhelm.
That’s how you think about it. Growing up did you ever go to a waterpark with a wave pool? I’m sure many of you have never even heard of this. But I went a few times growing up. And it was when I was very young. And waterparks, if you’ve ever been to one, if you haven’t, no worries. They have a lot of times a big pool, a huge pool that – I don’t know how to explain it. It’s ‘deeper’ and it’s beyond deep. And then of course it’s smaller and smaller. So, you can walk into the pool. There is not really edges where you go downstairs like in a traditional pool.
You walk in, it’s supposed to mimic the ocean, how you walk from the sand into the ocean. And it mimics the ocean because it’s a wave pool. And it wants you to have the experience of being in ocean waves. So, the pool is filled with water, and it’s set with a timer to make huge waves, to mimic tidal waves that go off over and over. So that people in the pool can then experience that which even as I’m saying this I’m like that sounds kind of crazy because tide pools and tidal waves in an ocean is people drown in and die in and it’s not something to make light of or a game out of.
So, as I’m repeating this, looking back to my childhood doing this, I’m like that is kind of strange. But I’m still going to use this as a metaphor because I do think it describes how you are thinking about overwhelm where you’re in the ocean or even in a wave pool and the waves suddenly are aggressive and you get knocked over and you probably hit other people. If you were at the shore of an ocean or kind of swimming in the shallow end of the ocean and a huge tidal wave came, this is how you’re viewing overwhelm.
The reason it’s so hard to get out of overwhelm, a large part of it is because you view overwhelm this way. You think overwhelm happens to you and you can’t do anything. And if you tell your brain to see overwhelm as a huge surge of intense water rushing at you that you can’t run from, that you’re going to get hit and taken under then your brain doesn’t look for ways to get out of overwhelm. It just looks for ways to survive, to kind of keep your head above water, to keep treading.
And so, you don’t get out of overwhelm, you just try to survive it which for sure sometimes we just have to do that especially when you haven’t learned what overwhelm actually is and how to deal with it. But you’re learning, I’m teaching you today so put these in practice because how you’re thinking about overwhelm now as this tidal wave taking you under is not what overwhelm is even if it feels that way.
So, let’s talk about what it actually is and what causes overwhelm. And overwhelm is an emotion you experience because of a thought you are having. I know, surprise, either caused by one specific thought or maybe caused by a series of thoughts that are happening very fast, that you’re not managing your mind around that are creating a lot of feelings. And overwhelm is caused by your reaction to those thoughts or that one thought and your emotional experience.
So, it isn’t happening to you, you are creating it with your mind. When overwhelm is being created by one thought it is because that single thought creates the emotion of overwhelm. So, for example, you look at your to-do list on your calendar and you have the thought, there’s no way I can get all this done. That one thought is creating the feeling of overwhelm in that moment, not the to-do list, not your calendar, which means to reduce or solve for the overwhelm you don’t have to reduce your to-do list, or you don’t have to change your calendar.
Doing those things doesn’t automatically reduce your overwhelm because your overwhelm is caused by your thought, there’s no way I can get all this done. You have to change your thought about those things first. And then when you do maybe you’ll make some different decisions. But what’s causing your overwhelm is your thought. So, when overwhelm is caused by several thoughts it’s often because you’re not consciously examining your thoughts. Every thought that comes through your brain you believe and there are so many.
And you have lots of thoughts swirling around in your head that you believe that cause you to feel overwhelm. Because when you have a lot of swirling thoughts you have a lot of swirling emotions, emotions you aren’t processing. So, for both of those scenarios what makes the experience so overwhelming is how you react to yourself when you resist your emotions, when you tell yourself it shouldn’t be happening, when you shut down, when you avoid a feeling.
Let’s walk through some common examples. So, the thought of there is too much to do, and this can be so many thoughts like I’m too busy, I can’t get this all done. It’s all similar. There is too much to do. Let’s say you look at your week in between work deadlines, doctors’ appointments, trying to work out, making food, chores, walking the dog you start to feel overwhelmed. You are not overwhelmed because of your week’s schedule, or the things that you have listed, or need to do, or want to do.
You are overwhelmed because when you look at your week’s schedule you think there’s too much to do, I can’t get this done, how am I going to do this and then you feel overwhelmed. And when you feel overwhelmed you shut down, you avoid, you don’t make active decisions, you make reactive decisions. You try to do it all. You don’t say no. You don’t ask for help. And then you feel worse.
Instead, recognize it’s your thought causing your overwhelm and interact with that thought, question it. Do I have to get it all done? What if I do have time to do it all? How can I make this week easier for myself? Where can I find space? Notice how different those questions and thoughts are. They don’t lead you to a dead end. They lead you to sustainable and empowered decisions.
From there your overwhelm will reduce because you’ll start to dissolve the thoughts or at least not give them as much power and detach a little bit, causing the overwhelm. And really lean into and give more power to empowering thoughts, to helpful thoughts, thoughts that would drive actions of asking for help, or saying no, or moving things around, or reducing distractions.
So, another kind of example, the thought of, I can’t handle this. So, let’s say you’ve had a lot of emotions and a lot of thoughts this week. Maybe you lost your job and are sad and angry. Maybe you’re worried about rent. Maybe you have a friend who’s acting weird, making you think they’re upset with you. Maybe your car got keyed, and you have to deal with that. And maybe it just seems everything wrong that could happen is happening.
What is creating your overwhelm isn’t the circumstances, isn’t the facts of what happened. It’s that you’re not processing your emotions, the sadness, the anger, the worry, the frustration, the shame, blame, whatever else. They’re building on top of each other from your thoughts causing all those feelings, whether the thoughts are, this is embarrassing, or I’m going to end up homeless, or I can’t catch a break, or anything else, and conscious or unconscious. That’s creating this heaviness effect, you believing all those thoughts and not examining them, and not detaching from them.
And you not allowing yourself to process the emotions. And then you think, I can’t handle this. It’s not the external things happening that you can’t handle. You are telling yourself you can’t handle your emotions, your thoughts. And when you do that you tell yourself not to process the emotions. You tell yourself to continue to believe the thoughts and then you shut down. And your body doesn’t finish its emotional response cycle. If you sat down and wrote down all your thoughts in your head, what would happen then?
If you sat and gave yourself time to feel your emotions, what would happen then? What your mind and body needs is space to process all of its thoughts and feelings. And when you shift into overwhelm you halt that process making it even harder for yourself. So here are some tips for dealing with overwhelm. Let’s talk – I put these in priority and secondary just because when you’re in overwhelm the priority tips are really helpful to kind of pause the intensity of it. And once you do that then you can kind of do the secondary.
If you’re still in the intense experience of it, it’s hard to do some of the secondary tips. So, you’ll see what I mean as I go through them. So, these tips and the kind of priority level will help you calm your nervous system which is kind of on alert or neon signs when you’re in overwhelm.
So, the first one is write your thoughts down. This seems so simple, and innocent, and inconsequential but it is so important and so powerful. Your thoughts don’t have any power unless you decide to give them power. And writing down your thoughts helps you detach from them, helps you look at them from a bird’s eye view. It seems simple again, but it is so, so powerful, just getting those out of your brain on paper.
So, tip number two, process your feelings. Spend time being with your body, notice the emotions and where are the in the body and name them, and what do they feel like. Sit with it. Don’t resist it. Don’t run from it.
And number three, talk to yourself, talk to your brain, talk to yourself, talk to your nervous system. And if you can I find it most helpful to talk out loud. Now, you might not be comfortable depending on where you’re at in that moment and that’s fine, you can definitely do it quietly too. But I do find it helpful to talk out loud.
I like to think about it this way. If I was rock climbing, for me I have a slight fear of heights, and I started to get nervous. How I would help myself in that moment would be talking to myself by saying, “Marissa, it’s okay, you’ve got this. You can do this. You can get down if you want, you can ask for help. They’ve got you down there.” I would talk myself through that. And when you’re overwhelmed, no matter why you’re overwhelmed you need to do the same thing. Tell yourself you’re okay. Speak to your brain and your nervous system to calm it down.
Use your anchor thoughts, we’ve talked about anchor thoughts before. These are thoughts that you repeat that help calm your nervous system, that help bring you down to the foundation, to reality and reassure yourself enough for your nervous system to kind of calm down. So that’s a primary of the tips you can use when you’re in overwhelm to help calm your nervous system and get you to a place where you can move on to the secondary tips.
So, the first tip I have for once your nervous system is calmed a little bit is to make an immediate decision. Now, not an immediate decision and panic decision, that’s not what I mean. But just make one small decision, just one, no matter how small that can remind you and your brain that you are in control, that these things aren’t happening to you, that you’re in control of your experience.
So maybe that immediate decision is, I’m going to go for a walk, or I’m going to ask for help in this specific way, or I’m going to say no to this. Or even something like, I’m not going to reply to this email till tomorrow, or I’m going to get food to go tonight to just make it easier on myself. Anything, any small decision you make to help you feel less overwhelmed and more in control.
And the second tip, decide what you want to think. So, you really do need to get your nervous system to a place where it’s kind of calmer to do this piece of deciding what you want to think. And I really think it’s helpful to make a small decision before you do this to remind your brain, you are in control, and you can decide what to think. So, in this phase decide, what do I want to think about this experience? What do I want to think about my workload, about my boss?
When you have to look at your to-do list, what are the thoughts you want to think while you look at that to-do list that creates empowerment, or confidence, or motivation, or even neutrality or calm? And practice those thoughts, remind yourself of it.
Decide how you want to talk to yourself and your brain moving forward when you encounter those external factors, or those circumstances so you are in charge and not your primitive brain. Whether that’s deciding what you want to believe or think when you look at your to do list, or when you have to have a meeting with your boss tomorrow.
Or any other circumstance that you’re feeling overwhelmed because of your thoughts, but when you’re in that you can think differently about to help keep your own place, where you don’t drop into overwhelm. Or if you do, you don’t indulge in it and swim in it and you can work your way out of it. So that is the nitty gritty. And this is a skill and it’s a total skill especially if you find yourself in overwhelm a lot. So, you might want to relisten to this. You might want to save this episode and relisten to it when you find yourself in overwhelm.
And if this is something that you really want help with, maybe you are in overwhelm a lot. Maybe you really struggle calming your nervous system down. Maybe it’s inconsistent of how you can manage your mind or your emotions. Maybe you do just truly believe that it’s all happening to you, and you want to feel different. You want to feel peace for once. Your brain isn’t always at you. Your emotions aren’t always all over the place. Maybe you want to feel in control, other things don’t trigger you, your boss or your workload don’t trigger you, that you can be in control.
Maybe you just finally want to have some space where you can breathe and feel calm. When you have had a lot of experience of being in overwhelm, those things seem very far away but you know you want them. You know you would feel better if you had them. So, if that’s you and if you’re in that space, I can help you. We can take this deeper. We can work together one-on-one. I can guide you. I can be your support system.
I can help you manage your mind and learn the tools and the skills so you can feel better, so you can feel more at peace, and calm, and in control. And so, your boss doesn’t trigger you, your workload doesn’t trigger you. Anything else happening in work, whether it’s funding cuts, or changes, or being switched projects, or anything doesn’t trigger you and you believe that you’re in control of what you feel. And you don’t go into overwhelm, and you have confidence to make decisions, to have your own back and to feel good, to feel peaceful, to feel calm.
So, if that’s something you want, if this is something you’re struggling with, reach out to me. I’ll leave a link in the show notes, to set up a time to chat with me. No obligation, no expectations, no rush, no pressure, just come chat with me and we can talk a little bit more about what you’re struggling with.
And I can share a little bit more of as a coach what I see might be going on, what might be your biggest challenge that you don’t really see. That because you’ve been in overwhelm you haven’t been able to really see from the outside perspective actually where your biggest struggle is and where you can do the work to feel better. So, sign up. I would love, love, love to chat with you. And for everyone I hope you have a great week and I’ll talk to you next week. Bye.
Are you ready to make a change? Whether that's learning to love your job, making a career move, or anything in between, I can help. I'd be honored to coach you through figuring out what's next and navigating the steps to get there. So, head on over to mckoolcoaching.com/consult that's mckoolcoaching.com/consult to set up a time to chat and talk about how you can achieve the career of your dreams.
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