overwhelm

Last week’s list of stress management techniques can be quite effective, but they’re still just band-aids to cover deeper issues. 

This week, we’ll address those deeper issues directly. This is the only way to permanently lower your stress to healthy levels.

Let’s start with an obvious one: the stress originating from that horrible feeling of overwhelm. 

Why are you overwhelmed?

Many people today feel overwhelmed by their responsibilities or by life in general. 

There are several possible reasons why you might end up overwhelmed. So, the best place to start is to actually understand which one applies to you. Here are three likely candidates:

• The fear of losing your income. Knowing that you won’t be able to make ends meet if you temporarily lose even just a fraction of your income makes it much easier to end up overwhelmed.
• Impatience and fear of losing out. Wanting things to happen unrealistically quickly is another good way to become overwhelmed. 
• Complicating your life. Perhaps your responsibilities in each area of life look OK in isolation, but when you put them all together, it becomes obvious why you’re overwhelmed. 

Let’s look at each one in turn.

Fear of losing your income

Apparently, 4 out of 5 Americans live paycheck to paycheck. In this modern age of abundance with sound financial advice all around us, this is a truly unbelievable statistic. 

A worker living paycheck to paycheck has no leverage. And a worker with no leverage is generally a stressed worker.

If you’re too worried about your income security to turn down tasks, chances are that you’ll routinely end up with too much responsibility and, more importantly, all the most tedious and/or stressful tasks. 

This is a big problem because overwhelm strongly decreases long-term performance. Taking on too much (often demotivational) responsibility in the fear of losing your job therefore increases the chances that your fears come true. 

There are two ways to take back your leverage:

• Become indispensable. Do everything within your power to control your responsibilities and give yourself a fair shot at consistently delivering your highest quality standards. Then get to work on building a reputation for quality and integrity.
• Build a financial buffer. A solid investment portfolio that can sustain your lifestyle for an extended period of time releases a lot of tension.  

Impatience and fear of losing out

Competition can be a very healthy driving force behind progress, but it can also be taken too far. Just like the previous section, overloading yourself is an excellent way to ensure that you fall behind the competition. 

In this case, you need to work on the skill of prioritization. Make sure you only spend your time on tasks that can have the greatest impact. Defer, delegate or delete other tasks. 

On a more philosophical level, it’s critical to accept that all good things take time. In day-to-day life, it often feels like we’re going nowhere slowly. It’s only when we step back and view life on a year-to-year basis that progress becomes clearly visible. We’ll be talking more about this in two days’ time. 

A complicated life

Life has many aspects aside from work. And it’s very easy to let several of these grow to the point that, collectively, they become totally overwhelming. 

The key here is to see your life as a whole. Whenever you’re thinking about taking on a large new responsibility, you must be very clear about what other responsibility you will give up. 

Starting a family is the most obvious example. This is a massive undertaking, greatly increasing both your responsibilities and your expenses. Don’t commit to this if you can’t give up a large chunk of your existing responsibilities. 

Other aspects like hobbies, social life, social media use, and side-hustles can also easily grow too large. Keep a close eye on these.

The example of this blog

I have a lot of painful experience with pushing myself to (and beyond) the point of complete overload. It’s super stressful, but somehow also very easy to keep doing over and over again. 

It took me many years to reach the level of mindfulness required to break this cycle. Now, I diligently adhere to the principle of giving something up for every new responsibility I take on. 

For example, I would never have started this blog if I did not reduce my degree of employment at my current job to 60%. Without this trade-off, this blog would probably have lasted no more than a month or two. 

So, please think carefully through your responsibilities and your future commitments. In many cases, less is more 🙂