What is Overwhelm?
Overwhelm is a mindset characterized by feelings of dread, helplessness and uncertainty. Sound familiar?
It tends to trigger the fight or flight response. So we feel on guard all the time. We become easily angered or frustrated. We react without thought. And often we can freeze like a deer in the headlights.
Of course freezing, which often looks like procrastination, only digs us deeper into overwhelm!
Triggering overwhelm can be a tactic used to keep people distracted, distraught, and helpless.
Whether it’s through piling on so much work, creating so much struggle you can’t see a clear path through to calm and clarity, or rage baiting on social media, or horrifying news that leaves you feeling helpless and in despair about the world.
And this is important – when you are in overwhelm, it is very hard to think strategically or see clearly what’s really happening. It feels impossible to stop for a moment to create a plan of action.
Instead, you feel like you have to go go go and do do do because that feels like the only way out of the overwhelm.
But that keeps you trapped in the overwhelm mindset.
The real path through is to stop and recognize the thought patterns of overwhelm for you. Everyone is different and the thought patterns that trigger overwhelm for you may be different than for others. (What are yours? Write them in the comments!)
How do you do that? How do you understand your thought patterns when they feel like reality? The first step is to recognize that your thoughts are not right, real or true. I know they feel real. They feel true. But they aren’t. They are just thoughts – mind constructs to make sense of the world around you.
And here’s the rub: you can’t address the real issues of your circumstances from within the overwhelm mindset. The overwhelm mindset keeps you stuck in overwhelm, stuck feeling like there’s no way out, stuck in being the victim.
Stuck!
Recognizing that your thoughts are simply constructs, if they aren’t right, real, or true – then you have power. You have choice. You can look at your circumstances and choose to think about them differently.
Shifting this mindset, so you can think and see clearly, will enable you to plan, strategize, and act.
How do you shift that mindset? This is what we will cover in the first phase of the Ultimate Productivity Revolution – Turn Procrastination and Overwhelm into Productivity: Transform Obstacles into Action. Check it out!
