You Can’t Organise Your Way Out of Overwhelm

[00:00:00] Rachel: A few months ago, I was at my coworking space, looked into a tiny little booth, having a zoom call with my psychiatrist. It was a review of my ADHD. And we were talking about the medication, how I was getting on how it was making me feeling, and all the other sort of stuff that you have to ask during a review like that.

[00:00:18] Rachel: But after a few minutes, I noticed the questions had stayed away from the ADHD, and she was starting to ask me things like. How has your mood right now? And do things feel hopeless at all. And have you had any difficult thoughts?

[00:00:32] Rachel: Now I knew that I was struggling over the last week or so I’ve been crying most days. But it’d been going on for while. And I knew the reason why. We had lost a few members of staff in the business, and I seem to be doing everything. We’d also had a really busy summer and September had hit me like a freight train. It always does. I don’t know about you, but when you’ve got kids going back to school, we’ve got lots of birthdays in September. We had some really big stuff happening. My daughter went to university so there was the emotions of that as well as loads of stuff going on. Lots of work, which I absolutely love, but it’s safe to say that I was feeling really overwhelmed and I was worried that I was heading towards burnout.

[00:01:14] Rachel: Uh, luckily I have such a fantastic team who’ve been really, really supportive. And so I don’t think I got as far down the vortex of busy-ness as I perhaps otherwise would have done with a, a non-supportive team and a very, very toxic workplace.

[00:01:29] Rachel: But I was feeding overwhelmed. And if I’m honest, I was feeling really embarrassed because I’m a resilience trainer, right? I’m someone who talks to people about spotting signs of burnout, about how not to get overwhelmed, and about how to get out of overwhelm.

[00:01:45] Rachel: Now the thing that saved my bacon was that I had a four day break books at the beginning of October. I also had some new team members starting. And I knew that if I could just get to that point. It would be okay. And I was saying to people. I’m just limping on till, till my break, and once they get my break, it will all be okay.

[00:02:05] Rachel: And so. I packed to go away with a couple of friends for a few days. I took loads and loads of books. I took my laptop. I took my reMarkable pad which I like to write songs, thought I can get so much done. I can get mega organized. I can write a list of everything that’s on my mind, everything that I need to, to. I can plan a load of podcasts and I can. Just organize my way out of the hole I seem to be in at the moment.

[00:02:30] Rachel: But what happened when I got to the hotel where we were staying? I just stopped. I didn’t feel like doing any organization. I didn’t feel like planning any podcasts. All I wanted to do was just lie down the pool and read crap fiction. Luckily where I went, they had yoga twice a day. So I got up and I did some yoga. I spent a lot of time just having lunch and chatting with my friends. But the thing I really needed to do just then was sit on the couch and read. Some ancient wisdom thought. I found a book called The Untethered Soul and I started reading it. I mean, it was just what I needed.

[00:03:06] Rachel: I’m a huge fan of podcasts, but I couldn’t listen to any podcasts that were telling me what to do and telling me how to get organized things that I would normally love. Instead. I listened to loads of music. And I watched the sunsets. And after a couple of days, I began to feel a bit better. I began to feel like I had more energy. I began to be interested in things again. I began to read some of those self-help books, which I love so much in which I bring with me everywhere. And I got my pad out on. I started doing a bit for review of the year and some journaling and plussing podcasts and making notes of things. And that it struck me that the way outs of overwhelm. Was not to become more organized, was not to do more, to get everything on paper. The only way out of overwhelm was to rest.

[00:03:52] Rachel: This is a You Are Not a Frog quick dip, a tiny taster of the kinds of things we talk about on our full podcast episodes. I’ve chosen today’s topic to give you a helpful boost in the time it takes to have a cup of tea so you can return to whatever else you’re up to feeling energized and inspired. For more tools, tips, and insights to help you thrive at work, don’t forget to subscribe to You Are Not a Frog wherever you get your podcasts.

[00:04:24] Rachel: Just before I went away, I had also done one thing, which I think really really helped me. And that was, I canceled a couple of podcasts recordings. Now I gave them plenty of notice, but I felt terrible. So Thursday is my usual podcast recording day, and I had a couple of interviews that had been booked for ages. And I looked at them and I thought, I just don’t have the energy to do these. I don’t think I can bring my best to these.

[00:04:46] Rachel: But I felt really guilty because someone in particular had already been moved, and she’d been waiting a long time to come and do the interview. And part of me was saying, well, you should just get one exhibit. It’s only, it’s only an hour and a half and you’ve moved the months already, it would be really poor form. There’ll be really upset with you. What will they think?

[00:05:03] Rachel: But the other part of me was saying to myself, Rachel, what would you advise your best friends to do in exactly this situation? And I thought, well, I’d say to them Cancel them. It’s much better just to cancel and bet your best to do your interviews, because the podcast is a thing that, that has a real impact on people. So. I went ahead and I canceled them. I didn’t give him too much for a reason. I just said to them I’m really sorry. I can’t do the podcasts on that morning.

[00:05:29] Rachel: Now I have been so worried about upsetting these people. And the first person I didn’t get a response from. So I may well have upset them. But I didn’t hear back from them. I still haven’t heard that from them. The second person, I’ve got an almost immediate response saying that’s no problem at all. I hope you’re okay, sounds like you’ve got a lot on.

[00:05:48] Rachel: So rather than feeling absolutely terrible, I’d let people down, actually I felt really seen and really heard and made me feel very, very warm sourced, this person. And the other person. I thought it would be dreadful if they thought badly of me. You know what. I don’t really care. It’s not that big a deal. And who doesn’t love an extra hour and a half in their diary, right? But I’d really agonize over whether I should cancel that stuff. But I needed to cancel them. Just so I could let my system calm down.

[00:06:16] Rachel: You see when we’re overwhelmed. The normal advice is, and I’ve been guilty of giving people this advice. Just get it all on paper. Write it all down. Just get organized, work out what’s urgent, work out what’s important. But I’ve discovered that that is not the first thing you should do. When you’re overwhelmed, the first thing you need to do is stop.

[00:06:36] Rachel: You see when you’re in a state of overwhelm, organization just doesn’t work. When you’re overwhelmed. you’re triggered into the corner. Your mixer has to take to the threat. And what’s the threat. Well, the threat is of not doing something right, of not being able to do enough things, of annoying people, of letting people down of not being perfect, of maybe dropping one of the balls, and as somebody with ADHD, I know what that’s like to drop a lot of balls and miss things and muck things up, and that makes me feel dreadful. So it’s this threat I’m going to upset people. I’m not going to perform as well as I should. I’m not going to get everything done. That triggers me into my sympathetic nervous system. I call that being backed into the corner. When we’re there, as I’ve said many times before in the podcast, the blood rushes from your prefrontal cortex down into your big muscles so that you can run away, and your thinking becomes very, very black and white. You’re unable to feel empathy. And that’s quite useful. If a lion’s coming towards me, I don’t really need to feel empathy. I need to be able to run away.

[00:07:32] Rachel: The threat we detect when we’re overwhelmed, firstly, it’s a group threat. So we’re very worried about letting people down. When we lived in caves, that would have been fatal for us because if we upset someone, get chucked out of the group, we get eaten by a lion or die of exposure. So people pleasing is actually a very, very real threat. We all want to do it. Our amygdalas bring us towards pleasing people and away from letting people down.

[00:07:56] Rachel: When I think about it, overwhelmed is also a bit of a physical threat. Because if I can’t perform right, if I can’t do everything I need to do, I might not get any more work. People might not pay me to come and do talks anymore or to come and do some training. And if I’m not paid, how can I feed my family? And if I can’t feed my family and I can’t pay my mortgage or might I be out to my ear?

[00:08:19] Rachel: So it does really go back to a physical threat as well. And it goes right back to those three lies we tell ourselves that I am what I do and I am what I have and I am what people think of me. So check out the other podcasts where we talk about that. We’ll put the link in the show notes.

[00:08:33] Rachel: But because we’re in the corner when we’re overwhelmed, if we write a list down, no matter how much we get on the list and how logical we think we’re being, we’re not actually thinking it through properly. We’re very much thinking with our emotions. So just like when I looked at those two podcast interviews, I just felt I can’t possibly cancel them, the logical bit of meets. Of course you can cancel them, Rachel, it’s not that important. The inner chimp bit of me was going, you can’t possibly let these people down. What will they think?

[00:09:01] Rachel: So then it’s very difficult to make decisions about what we should be doing, what we shouldn’t be doing. In fact, we start to use the word should all the time. I should do this. I should do that. I ought to, I’ve got to. When you’re overwhelmed, it just all becomes I’ve got to, I have to, like we have no choice about it. And then we feel trapped and we feel stuck and we just feel like we’re on this endless treadmill and we have no choice about whether we can get off or not. Because the consequences for everything seem absolutely dreadful.

[00:09:31] Rachel: When I’m overwhelmed, I catastrophize that if I don’t do this then this is going to happen, and then this is going to happen, mostly, it won’t. Like Mark Twain said, I’m an old man. I’ve known many troubles, most of them didn’t happen. So we catastrophize, we predict the future that’s not going to happen. We mind read other people. We always assume they’re thinking the worst of us. All those types of warped thinking that you can come across with, that happens when you’re in the corner because you are overwhelmed. And being overwhelmed is simply when your resources are not enough to meet the demands placed on you, the resources being time, energy, money, et cetera. So we ended up telling ourselves stories like, well, if I don’t do it, who’s going to?

[00:10:12] Rachel: So making decisions about how to manage our, to do list, how to manage our workload when we’re in the midst of overwhelm just doesn’t work. And we either make drastic decisions, we ended up throwing the baby out with the bath water and said, that’s it, I’m resigning, I’m leaving all together, or we get so over responsible, we go totally into that rescue role of F. If I don’t do it, who will?

[00:10:34] Rachel: So what’s the answer? The answer is to stop. Take that pause. Because we know that we tell ourselves these stories and the amygdala responds five times quicker than our rational human thinking system. So taking that pause is vital for being able to deal with this.

[00:10:51] Rachel: Now, when I say pause, I’m not talking about a 10 minute pause. I’m probably not even talking about an hour pause, I’m talking about a longer pause. Particularly when you are overwhelmed.

[00:11:01] Rachel: And this is very counterintuitive because when you’re overwhelmed, you’ve got too much to do, taking a pause. It’s like the one thing that you really, really can’t do. But again, I challenged that. I thought I couldn’t possibly cancel anything.

[00:11:14] Rachel: But I’d say this is the one time when it’s okay to let people down. It’s fact it’s better to let people down and council stuff, then it’s the plow ahead and get yourself more into burnout or plow ahead with stuff that you don’t have the energy to do, and you just make things worse and don’t do a good job anyway.

[00:11:31] Rachel: Because if we can get this right, then we can get ourselves out of overwhelmed quickly. It’ll be very protective for us in the future. And it will just mean that we start making much better decisions, and we can prevent ourselves from getting overwhelmed in the first place.

[00:11:45] Rachel: Now there’s an old story that I’ve had told in many, many different ways. And it goes like this. Centuries ago, there were some explores in Africa, and they’d hired some local villages to service guides and to help transport some supplies to a distant outpost.

[00:11:59] Rachel: Now, these guides were walking at quite a slow pace and the explorers wanted them to go quicker so they pushed them and pushed them, so by day three, they were really walking much quicker than they wanted to. And on day four, the African villages here, we’re acting as the guides sat down and wouldn’t budge.

[00:12:17] Rachel: The explorers, but trying to get them to move, they had so much to be. But the leader at the village guides just said, I’m sorry, we’re not going any further today. Why ever not? Said one of the explorers here, everyone seems okay, they could walk. And the leader just said, yes, but they went so quickly yesterday that today, we’ve got to wait for our souls to catch up.

[00:12:38] Rachel: And that is exactly how I felt when I went away. I needed. It’s a stop. And wait for my soul to catch up. So. If we use the word stop when we’re overwhelmed. I think we can’t go far wrong.

[00:12:50] Rachel: So S is for soul. How does your soul catch up with you? When you’re overwhelmed, what do you do that really nourishes your soul? Now, it will be different for everybody. For me. Getting into nature. Moving my body a bit, but not too much. Like not going all out, running a marathon. Not that I could anyway, but you know, gentle exercise, looking at a beautiful view, listening to music. That’s when my soul really sings.

[00:13:18] Rachel: For some of you, there might be ceremonies rituals. You might want to attend a faith gathering. You might listen to podcasts, reading a book, reading, some ancient wisdom. Any ancient religious texts or perhaps some poems by Mary Oliver. Or some fiction, which is good for your soul. So, what do you do to replenish your soul?

[00:13:42] Rachel: So you might want to write down some activities that, you know, restore your soul, and I don’t know what they’ll be, but I can bet your bottom dollar that they are not quick. They don’t take two seconds. They probably take a little bit of time. Because you can’t rush these things, can you? So if you use the word stop, S is for soul. Wait for your soul to catch up. Do some things that restore your soul.

[00:14:07] Rachel: T stands for take some time out. Time out. Now, what I insensitive is to regularly put some times for me to stop into my diary, some planned time off. And lots of people have come to me and said that they used to just go from one big holiday to another, but they were so far apart that even just putting in a day off of your annual leave every four to six weeks. It’s really, really important for them.

[00:14:32] Rachel: So if you can make sure you plan regular time out, but if you can’t and you’re feeling overwhelmed now, then cancel what you can. Most things can be canceled. You may be able to swap surgeries, swap shifts. You may be able to take a day of annual leave or some time owing. If you can’t see that you can counsel some evening activities. If you’ve got very small kids, then get some help in if you can. Counsel that family gathering. It’s okay to cancel stuff.

[00:15:01] Rachel: And if you’re struggling, just think to yourself, well, what would my best mate say? If my best mate was organizing my diary now, what would they do?

[00:15:07] Rachel: O stands for out of office. Not just the out of office reply in your email, although by all means, use that, just put on taking a couple of days of rest and recuperation or just, I am not around for two days or I am not available for however long. But also get out of the office, go where you can’t be found. That might even be booking yourself into a hotel for the day. I don’t know. Find somewhere beautiful and go. Go be on your own.

[00:15:35] Rachel: It might be on your own inner, infinite, strange. I quite like that. I quite like sitting in a cafe with loads of people around me that I don’t know, and I can put my headphones on and I can just read my book and get into stuff. And turn off all those notifications and all those things that are just gonna add to your overwhelm. They will always be there. And generally, if there’s an emergency or someone needs you really agent need, they’re going to call you.

[00:16:00] Rachel: And then P stands for prioritize the parasympathetic. And the parasympathetic is your rest and digest sane. It’s the opposite to your threats zone. Think of a lion. Lying around just like basking in the sun.

[00:16:16] Rachel: And it’s quite difficult, sort of think your way into the parasympathetic. You need to breathe your way into the parasympathetic. You need to rest your way into the parasympathetic. So yoga, breathwork, just lying down, time out, all that sort of stuff where your body is not on heightened alert all the time. That will get you into your parasympathetic nervous system. Mindfulness, meditation, prayer, noticing. All those sorts of things and there’ll be different for different people.

[00:16:45] Rachel: So overwhelm is not an organization issue, it’s a soul issue. And when you feel overwhelmed, you need to stop. Wait for your soul to catch up, take some time out, get out of the office and prioritize your parasympathetic system. And once you’ve done that. And you can get organized, then by all means, start on those lists, write stuff down grade stuff, prioritize stuff, work out what’s really important. But don’t do that from a place of overwhelm when you’re in the corner, when you and your fight flight or freeze zone. So it from a place of rest.

[00:17:21] Rachel: Now we have our Overwhelm SOS Toolkit, and the very first step on the overwhelm SOS Toolkit is to pause and to do this. So that’s in the show notes and you can go and download that.

[00:17:35] Rachel: We’ve also got a free tool kit for you, which is called How to recharge when You Can’t Go on Retreat, because I’m sure some of you are thinking well, Rachel, that’s well and good that you had lovely four days off. I don’t have that at best. I might get two hours on a Sunday morning or maybe even just half an hour. Okay, great. What can you do with that half an hour?

[00:17:53] Rachel: And in the How to recharge When You Can’t retreat there some suggestions for an hour retreat, a half day retreat, a day retreat that you can just do by yourself, like in your local words. That’s the podcast, there are some resources, there’s some books, all that. So have a look at that, download that, and prioritize that.

[00:18:11] Rachel: Now there are some mistakes that we can make in all of this. The first one. Is taking that second arrow. So feeding so ashamed of yourself that you’re even feeling like this in the first place that you just end up feeling really guilty and really bad. Let’s just ditch that, okay? Let’s not take the second arrow. This happens to everybody, no matter how self-aware you are or how much you teach about this. It happens mainly because we’re good people and we just want to do a good job.

[00:18:39] Rachel: Another mistake we make is that we do limp towards mour holidays, but then a holidays are so busy that they just feel like hard work somewhere else. And we cram stuff in, because we got to do stuff with the kids. We want to travel. But can I encourage you when you book your time off to think about how you are going to really, really rest within that time off?

[00:18:57] Rachel: And of course there are some stages of life that are particularly fought, particularly if you’ve got young children, for example, or you’ve got a big family or there’s lots of comings and goings, it can feel like there’s just absolutely no room for you in the storm. So I know what it’s like to be overwhelmed with family stuff. But so often we don’t counsel the stuff that we could do and we don’t do the stuff that’s in our zone of power ’cause we just feel really guilty and we feel well, I ought to because a good mother or a good father would do this, that or the other, let’s just ditch the guilt and think, what is it that I need right now?

[00:19:28] Rachel: The other mistake we can make is saying, well, I’ve got a holiday coming up and it will be better when I’ll be back when we’ve got that extra member of staff or when this happens. But the problem with health care at the moment is we don’t know when that’s going to happen. We need to make sure we’re okay now. Because even when we’ve got that extra member of staff or when we sorted this or that out, there’ll be other stuff coming up. So don’t put this off.

[00:19:53] Rachel: And finally one of the mistakes I made was that I failed to predict how I was going to fail. Now, September is always a nightmare. I’ve always got so much on in September, and I think a lot of people feel the same. So it would be really sensible if every year I recognized that I’d put in some breaks earlier. We can often predict when things are going to be difficult. I was so thankful that I had booked this time away.

[00:20:15] Rachel: So if you’re feeling overwhelmed right now, Please give yourself permission to stop. Cancel what you can. Cancel more than you think you can. Give time for yourself to catch up. Then you can do all the organizing you want to,

[00:20:29] Rachel: And the good news in all of this is that it doesn’t actually take very long. A couple of days is what it took me, and I was really quite far down that vortex of busy-ness. But because I did take a complete break. I actually felt a lot better, a lot quicker than I thought I would.

[00:20:44] Rachel: So make sure you regularly get some planned time off in your diary, make sure you know what you can do to restore your soul, and the next time you feel overwhelmed, the answer is not scalable, organized. It is to stop.