by Elyse | May 26 | Mindset
Overwhelm can be stressful and anxiety-inducing. It can make you feel stuck, don’t know what to do, and have no way forward. Overwhelm is an emotion–that means your thinking always causes it. Here are 13 causes of overwhelm.
1. Black-and-white thinking.
Also known as all-or-nothing thinking. This is when you think that if you don’t have time to do absolutely everything, you don’t have time to even do one thing.
Black-and-white thinking can keep you limited in your thinking. You will think you have limited options when making a decision and limited opportunities.
2. “Should.”
The idea that you “should” do something that keep you stuck in patterns of fear, guilt and obligation. “Should” can have you making decisions and commitments that you don’t really want to make.
It can also have you adding more to your plate or to-do list for no other reason than because you think you “should”. Not because you want to, you enjoy it or it will have you moving closer to your goals.
Resources:
3. Perfectionism.
Perfectionist thinking can have you stuck in overwhelm. If there is a fear of not wanting to fail or not wanting to feel shame, there is probably some perfectionist thinking.
Perfectionist thinking will have you not making progress on tasks until you know more information or feel more confident in your abilities.
It can also show up as procrastination. If you knew that you would have done a better job with more time, you can blame your “less-than-ideal” job on not giving yourself enough time.
4. People-pleasing.
People-pleasing is saying yes to everyone and everything else before you say yes to yourself. It is a way for you to try to control other people’s feelings, judgements and thoughts about you.
Instead of prioritizing yourself, your approval and your goals, people-pleasing has you prioritizing what other people want from you.
5. Indulging in drama, not facts.
When you separate out the facts from the stories you are telling yourself, it becomes a lot easier to solve a problem.
If you are stuck in a story that you are telling yourself, it is easy to get swept up into the emotion instead of making decisions and a plan to move forward.
Indulgent feelings that don’t move you forward are doubt, worry, self-pity, etc.
6. Indecision.
Not making decisions will keep you stuck and in so much overwhelm. Indecision will keep you spinning and looping in your head instead of making any progress forward.
You will feel less overwhelmed when you make a decision and move forward. Making a decision and moving forward will also give you more data than any analysis you can do in your head.
7. Undisciplined thinking.
When you have undisciplined thinking, it is very easy to indulge in unhelpful thoughts and unhelpful emotions. This habit can be hard to break out of if you don’t properly manage your mind.
Disciplined and deliberate thinking is how you keep yourself highly productive, focused and disciplined.
Resources:
8. Allowing I don’t know.
When you ask your brain a question and you allow yourself to answer with “I don’t know” you keep yourself stuck.
When you require your brain to make a decision in the moment, you create the ability to make a decision.
9. Lacking constraint.
Constraint is when you constrain your options.
An example of this is a vegetarian. A vegetarian has constrained their food choices to anything that doesn’t include meat. When they go out to dinner and are looking over a menu, a vegetarian doesn’t spend any time contemplating or thinking about the different meat options a restaurant offers. They just don’t eat meat.
Constraining can simplify your life, help you make quicker decisions and save you time and mental energy that would be better spent solving bigger problems.
10. Confusion.
Being confused is an easy way to stay in overwhelm and remain stuck where you are. Confusion is an indulgent emotion that feels useful but does not help you. You will learn more by just making a decision and moving forward than if you stay stuck in confusion.
If you are really confused and genuinely don’t know how to do something, than add “research how to do xyz” to your calendar to get you out of confusion.
11. Not staying committed to decisions.
Often, when someone is habituated to overwhelm thinking, they have a hard time staying committed to the decisions they make.
They make a decision to work on a task and then as soon as they start, they think that they should be doing a different task instead. This back and forth takes mental energy, contributes to decision fatigue and extends how long it takes them to get their task done.
12. Decision fatigue.
It takes a lot of brain power to make a decision and the more decisions you make, the more tired your brain gets. Then, it runs into decision fatigue and has a harder time making decisions and making good decisions. This can prolong the feeling of overwhelm.
When you make decisions ahead of time, constrain and commit, you can greatly reduce how overwhelmed you feel.
13. Scarcity thinking.
Scarcity thinking is a thinking pattern that is rooted in the thought that there isn’t enough. It presents when you feel overwhelm because overwhelm is typically an emotion caused by thinking there isn’t enough time or resources to get everything done.
A Final Note
The feeling of overwhelm is caused by the way that you are thinking but there are a lot of different thinking patterns that could be contributing to it. By learning the causes of overwhelm, you can see which cause is most likely to be happening for you and then can learn to change that pattern so you feel less overwhelmed.
by Elyse | May 19 | Mindset
Learning how to manage your mind can become an invaluable tool to feel better, stress less, accomplish your goals, and create new results in your life.
Your mind is full of thoughts every day, and you have tens of thousands of thoughts every day. Some will be helpful to you, and some will not.
You can direct your brain to think thoughts that serve you instead of just accepting each thought that comes to your brain. The way to do this is to manage your mind.
Facts and Thoughts You Have
There are facts in the world, and then there are stories you tell yourself about the facts.
Those stories are thoughts.
Thoughts create your feelings.
When you take a fact, ten people can have ten wildly different thoughts about the same fact.
This is how you know that a fact is neutral.
Since your thoughts create your feelings, your thoughts are vital to creating an enjoyable life. How you feel dictates your experience of life, and since your thoughts are your perception of life, you want to make sure that you choose helpful thoughts.
Thoughts also cause stress, anxiety, overwhelm, and other negative feelings.
Resources:
Your feelings are not caused by the things going on around you. They are caused by the thoughts that you think.
This is important because how you feel impacts your actions and, therefore, the results you create.
What actions do you take if you think I don’t have enough time to do this, and it makes you feel overwhelmed?
Do you sit down, organize, plan, and get to work? NO.
You probably spin in your head about how much you must do, complain, feel bad, and continue feeling overwhelmed without getting any momentum or moving forward.
The result that you create is that you don’t have enough time to complete all your tasks.
But it is not because of the number of tasks you have. It is because of your thinking.
This is awareness and is the first step to managing your mind.
How to Manage Your Mind
Managing your mind is becoming aware of what you are thinking, separating facts from the stories you tell yourself, seeing the impact of those thoughts in your life, questioning and understanding your thoughts, and then creating and believing new thoughts to produce new and different results.
1. Become aware of your thinking. Write down all the thoughts going through your head in a stream-of-consciousness style. Even bringing awareness to your thoughts can help you create different results and feel better.
2. Go back through and identify what is a fact and what is a thought. Most of what you write is probably thoughts with minimal fact.
3. Pick one thought and determine its impact on your life.
Think the thought and then ask yourself how that thought makes you feel.
Now ask yourself, what actions do you take when you feel that way?
Then ask yourself what result those actions create for you in your life?
4. Now question the thought you picked out.
Why do you think your brain offered you this thought?
How is this thought serving you?
Do you want to keep this thought or do you want to let it go?
5. Now, think of a result that you want to create in your life.
What actions would you need to take to create that result?
What feeling would you need to be feeling to fuel you to take those actions?
What story would you need to tell yourself to get yourself into that feeling?
This is the thought that you need to start practicing and believing to create the new result in your life.
A Final Note
This is the process of managing your mind. It is being aware of what is going on in your mind, seeing how those thoughts impact your life, evaluating your thoughts, and then creating and practicing new thoughts to get you different results.
Managing your mind is how you solve your problems. It is how you stop feeling overwhelmed, stressed, or worried. It is how you change your feelings to create new results instead of repeating what you have already made.
by Elyse | May 12 | Mindset
Burnout vs. Overwhelm. In this article, we will go over the difference between burnout and overwhelm.
While many people use the terms burnout and overwhelm interchangeably, they are different.
Identifying if you are feeling burnt out or overwhelmed will help you figure out the root cause of why you are feeling the way you are and also help you know how to solve it.
I like to think of burnout and overwhelm as feelings on opposite poles of a spectrum.
What is burnout?
Burnout is a prolonged period of physical or emotional exhaustion. One article I read described burnout as being victimized for an extended period without appreciation or reward, and I often think about that description.
Burnout happens when you are working and producing a lot but not taking care of yourself or managing your mind.
In burnout, you are doing a lot but you are not taking care of your physical, mental, or emotional health. Being in burnout puts your well-being in jeopardy.
Burnout goes hand-in-hand with exhaustion.
What is overwhelm?
Overwhelm is a feeling that happens when you feel like you have too much not and not enough time to do everything. You feel overwhelmed when you feel like you are drowning in too much to do but you struggle to do any of it.
Resources:
- 3 Ways to Feel Less Overwhelmed at Work (free guide)
When you are in burnout, you are producing. When you are overwhelmed, you are not producing as much as you need to or as much as you know you are capable of.
It can also happen when you don’t have a priority because everything is a priority.
If everything is important, then nothing is.
Typically, overwhelm is also present with indecision, confusion, and feeling stuck.
Causes of burnout and overwhelm
The two leading causes of burnout and overwhelm are not managing your mind and not planning effectively.
When you manage your mind, you:
- empower yourself to think supportive thoughts
- fuel yourself with useful or positive emotion
- make strong decisions
- can say no to others so that you can say yes to yourself
- have boundaries
- honor commitments you have made for self
- practice real self-care
- manage your stress
When you plan effectively, you:
- plan time for yourself to relax, rest, and play
- plan time to take care of yourself
- know ahead of time if you need to change a deadline or your workload
- know precisely what you are producing and when
- say yes to yourself and your dreams
How to Know If You Are Experiencing Burnout or Overwhelm
Ask yourself these questions to know if you are experiencing burnout or overwhelm.
Are you getting enough done?
If yes, you are more likely to be experiencing burnout. If not, it is more likely that you are experiencing overwhelm,
Have you created a plan that you follow to get your work done?
If yes, then you are probably burned out. If not, then you are probably overwhelmed.
Burnout and Overwhelm
It is essential to know if you are experiencing burnout or overwhelm because they require different solutions for you to feel better.
Once you have identified if you are experiencing overwhelm or if you are experiencing burnout, you can start taking steps to feel better.
by Elyse | May 5 | Planning
Time is an asset we all have, and it is the one asset that is not replenishable. Here are 13 tips for time management.
- Decide how you will spend your time ahead of time. If you don’t decide ahead of time, it will be easier for you to be pulled in other directions by others or to become easily distracted. By determining ahead, you also consciously choose how you want to spend your time. Planning will also help you work out problems or mistakes ahead of time. This will save you time because you can anticipate if a plan will work and change it while it is still on paper instead of in the middle of executing the plan.
- Visualize how you’ll spend your time by time blocking. When you list how long you think each task will take you or how long you are willing to spend on any given task, place it in your calendar for that time, creating a time block. This is part of planning, and it will provide you with a sense of what you need to get done ahead of something else, how much you realistically fit in a day, and can help you visualize how much time you are spending on any one activity.
- Schedule your free time in your calendar. When I first learned about time blocking in college, I read about it was best to schedule your free time first. This way you have something to look forward to after you’re done working, and it keeps you focused on your present task so that you don’t have to cut into the free time you are looking forward to.
- Include white space on your calendar. When I first tried time blocking, I would block every hour I was awake. This would create a problem if something took longer than expected because there needed to be room for overflow. It also didn’t include any breaks. I would be so ambitious in the planning that I wouldn’t stop considering how I would feel that day, trying to stay on schedule.
- Think about your future self as someone you love and want to care for. When you decide on what you are going to do, how long it is going to take you, and what your working hours are, think of the future you (the one who is going to be executing your plans) as someone you love and want to take care of. Think of her capacity and how she will feel, and try to take care of her ahead of time so that it is easier to adhere to the schedule you create.
- Plan for results and not activities. When you put things on your calendar, make sure you plan the results you want to produce, not just the activity you will be doing. This will keep you from doing things that keep you busy but don’t move you forward and will help you feel clear and focused. If you feel overwhelmed at work, grab the guide 3 Ways to Feel Less Overwhelmed at Work.
- Know what your values are and what your current priority is. By knowing what you value and your priority, it will be easier for you to honor the commitments you make with your time. It will also be easy to see if you are living your values by how you are spending your time. Knowing your values and priorities will help you make decisions regarding your time.
- Delegate what you can. There are so many tasks that need to get done at work and at home. Try to delegate as much as you can to other people so that you are focusing on your most important work and your most important priorities.
- Automate. If there are things you can automate, like automatic bill pay or setting up a subscription service for household goods that you need, set these things up so that they happen automatically, and you don’t need to spend time on them every month.
- Batch tasks together. The more you can batch your tasks together, the more efficient you will be. You will be much more efficient and focused if you spend one hour replying to emails every morning than if you stop what you are working on and respond to each email as soon as they arrive.
- Ask if something can wait. When you feel the urge to run a load of dishes or do laundry, ask yourself if it can wait. If it can, then don’t do it right then. If the answer is no and the task can’t wait, it is time to do it.
- Focus on whatever you are working on when you are working on it. Only do one thing at a time. Keep the center of your attention focused on your task at hand. Shut out distractions, turn off notifications, and keep yourself focused on what you are working on. This will make you more efficient and more productive.
- Have a ritual for getting into a productive mood. This is especially helpful if you need help with getting into your work. Create a ritual for yourself that brings you joy. Get your favorite drink, light a candle, and turn on some music. Do something that will help you get into your flow and make it more enjoyable to start working.
Tips for Time Management
These tips will help you become more organized, efficient, and productive with your time. Your time is a precious resource and should be treated as such. By being committed, determined and focused you can get more done in less time and can set out to do everything you want to do.
by Elyse | Apr 28 | Leadership
Everyone wants to achieve the elusive work-life balance, which can seem complicated to accomplish when the work days are longer. Still, we are always connected, and there are always more responsibilities, engagements, and commitments to keep up with. There are ways to improve your work-life balance.
Know Your Values
The first step to improving your work-life balance is knowing what you value right now and want to value. What is your current priority? Is your family, career, school, or something else?
Your values and priorities inform your decisions or tell you when to honor your current focus.
If you say your value is family. Still, you attend every weeknight happy hour with your colleagues and are the first to volunteer on projects that will take you away from your family. Are you honoring your priority?
By knowing what you value and your current priority, you can use your priority as a decision filter to know what to say yes to and what to say no to.
A Word On Balance
Balance means that everything is weighted equally. If you thought of your life in terms of life categories: health, career, environment, relationships, personal growth, contribution, spirituality, finances, family, and fun, you would give equal importance to each category.
You would spend just as much effort, time, and energy focused on your career as you would on your finances, environment, relationships, etc.
The problem with this is that it needs to consider your priorities or the season of life you are in. The definition of priority is that something is treated as more important than another. And there is a good reason why you sometimes want to prioritize something over another.
This goes hand-in-hand with the season of life that you are in. There are certain seasons where you need to be more balanced, and others where going off balance will serve you.
If you just gave birth, you probably want to prioritize your family and healing during postpartum. If you aim for a promotion, you will spend more time, energy, focus, and energy on your career than on fun during that season. If you are getting your master’s degree, you will prioritize that during the season that you are enrolled in school.
Seasons come and go. There is the season you are in school, the season you are in college, the season you focus on your career, the season you focus on your family, etc. And it can be good to have a particular focus, aka priority, for a season.
It is always a good idea to ask yourself if you want to be balanced right now or if you want to be unbalanced for a season. If you know why you are doing something, it will be easier to stick with it when it gets complicated.
Set Boundaries
With so many different things and people competing for your attention, it can be easy to get lost in the chaos or become consumed with what other people ask, demand, request or expect of you.
A way to combat this is to set boundaries. Set boundaries around the hours you are willing to work, when you will respond to messages and phone calls, and by saying no to commitments that are not your priority.
You don’t have to say yes if someone invites you to speak at a conference or out for coffee.
You can say no and, and you your time, values, and priorities.
It is up to you to uphold and maintain your boundaries.
If your phone rings, you don’t have to answer it. You can always call back at a time that is more convenient for you.
If someone texts you, you don’t need to respond right away. You can reply when you want to.
Plan Results
When planning your time and what you will produce at work and home, determine the result you want to create instead of just the time you will spend doing the activity.
If you need to create a presentation at work, don’t plan to “work on the presentation.” Instead, plan to “create client presentation.”
This also works at home for tasks you have to do. Don’t plan to “clean your house.” Instead, when you are making your plan, plan to “clean bathtubs, sinks, and counters.” This is much more specific, and you know the particular result you are trying to create.
This keeps you focused and ensures you create results instead of spending time on activities that keep you busy and unproductive.
Resources:
- 3 Ways to Feel Less Overwhelmed at Work (free guide)
Set Constraints For Yourself
It can be helpful to place constraints on yourself when you want to focus more on a goal or when you want to free up your mental energy.
It is best used to free up mental energy. There are so many decisions that need to be made in a day, and those decisions compound if you do something like scrolling social media because you will be bombarded with even more decisions, such as:
- should I like this post?
- should I comment on this post?
- do I want to skip this story?
- do I want to go back and rewatch that last story?
- should I message her?
- should I keep scrolling?
- should I stop scrolling?
- should I click this button?
- do I want to buy this?
Eventually, you will get decision fatigue and tire out your brain. Those are only questions for when you are scrolling through social media. There are so many more questions that you have to answer every day, like what you want to wear, what route you want to take to work, what you want to eat, how you want to start your day if you’re going to run an errand on your way home or save it for later, etc.
By implementing constraints, you can stop a lot of that chatter. You can choose to put a rule in your life about anything. You only check your email after 9 am and spend only one hour on emails daily. It can be that on Tuesdays, you have tacos for dinner, and you can wear a skirt and a blouse daily to work.
Ideas for constraints you can set in your life:
- the types of foods you will eat and when you will eat them
- what clothes will you wear
- the times of day that you will put your phone in another room
- how many hours a day you will spend watching tv
The point of constraints is that you have already decided for yourself, so you don’t need to entertain the mental chatter of going back and forth about making a decision.
Setting constraints in your life is a way to simplify your life.
Say No
Say no to others when they ask you to do things you don’t want. Other people will always make requests and ask you to do something. But just because they ask doesn’t mean you have to say yes.
It is up to you to protect your time and determine what is important to you.
In the book The First 90 Days, the author recommends that when a colleague asks you to do something, you don’t automatically say yes right away. Many women are in the habit of saying yes to others to please them.
Instead, you can say that you will get back to them. This is especially important if you already have a full plate. You don’t want to overcommit, overextend yourself, and be unable to follow through and deliver on what you promised.
A Final Note
You have a choice. You can choose to say no to baking one hundred handmade cupcakes; you can say no to volunteering at events you don’t want to be at. You can even say no to cleaning your house or cooking dinner, and you don’t have to do any of it.
Sometimes just remembering that you have a choice in these things and that you don’t have to do something you don’t want to do can help you feel better about doing what you want to do.
