Why do you feel overwhelmed?

I recorded a video today that covers some tactical, short-term tips and some strategic, long-term strategies for feeling less overwhelmed. That video will be up on YouTube some time in the coming weeks. In the meantime, let’s reflect together on what causes you to feel overwhelmed.

Notice first that overwhelm is a mental and emotional state. It’s not a state of the world. At a high level, the world is pretty much the same from day to day, month to month, and even decade to decade. People are born, people live, people die. There is love and there is conflict. The world is not literally the same, of course, but it’s the same enough that that’s not where overwhelm comes from.

If we zoom in on your particular life, circumstances do vary from day to day and even from year to year. You might start a new, high-pressure job. You might have a kid or two or three. You might have to deal with several traumatic events in a short period. Still, some people are in worse shape than you without feeling overwhelmed. And you are also sometimes more overwhelmed and, at other times, less overwhelmed—in similarly busy circumstances.

So overwhelm is a feeling, an experience. That doesn’t mean it’s fake. Overwhelm is real, but we have to primarily fix it in our minds and bodies and in our attitude. We can make some changes in our circumstances (for example, taking on fewer responsibilities), but the true long-term solution is to relate differently to what we want to do and need to do.

Observe, too, that there are always more things worth doing than we have time for. We simply have a limited lifespan (and limited energy, too) so we must choose what to do. And, implicitly or explicitly, we must choose what not to do. We cannot fix our feeling of overwhelm by moving faster on the treadmill. Whenever we check off tasks and experiences, others reveal themselves. If we let the size of our haven’t-done list determine how overwhelmed we feel, we’ll always lose.

This means overwhelm also comes from having certain expectations. If we expect to be able to make a big contribution to the world in our career and to be a fantastic parent and to be a loving spouse and to take care of our elderly parent and to volunteer twice a week and to stay in shape by swimming daily and to travel to see the world and to be on top of all of our admin… you see where I’m going.

You cannot give everything the attention it deserves. You can give anything the attention it deserves, but not everything. If you expect to give everything your 10/10 effort and in so doing to have everything under control all the time—your expectations are unrealistic, to put it mildly. And you’ll feel incredibly overwhelmed, of course, because you can’t meet your expectations.

Tactically there is a lot you can do to feel less overwhelmed in the short term and strategically there is a lot you can do in the long term. You can (and should) build a system to capture and organize your to-dos. You can (and should) do weekly reviews. You can (and should) periodically reflect on your high-level goals and the action steps you’ll take to achieve them.

But in addition to that, you’ve got to up your mental game to deal with overwhelm. It’s a productivity project but also a personal growth project and a physical and mental health project. Give it the attention it deserves.