Help! I'm Overwhelmed!

You're listening to the Uppercase Life or we don't wait for greatness we created. And I'm your host, Joseph Brewster. 

Some of you out there are listening to this right now and are in a state of feeling overwhelmed. And I'm going to define overwhelmed by the feeling that you are in over your head and you don't have the ability to rescue yourself in this moment.
Overwhelmed comes from a nautical idea. If you can just make a mental picture of high waves and rough seas and being stranded out there in the water with no sight of land and feeling as though each new wave is just coming over your head. You can't stay above the water. You can't catch your breath, and there's just no way out of this.
That is the summary of where we came up with this word and this idea of being overwhelmed. The end result of being overwhelmed for too long is that you just drowned in a very realistic sense. And I think when we're in the middle of trying something difficult or in a task or an endeavor that we feel incapable of completing, it does feel in a way like we are drowning in our life.
So I want to talk about what do you do when you recognize that feeling of being overwhelmed? How do you identify it and what steps do you take once you've identified it? In research, we've determined that, you know, some of the prolonged states of being overwhelmed come with just high anxiety, with being agitated or angry for reasons you don't know why, we're feeling extremely lethargic, like you don't want to get out of your house or you don't want to wake up in the morning.
Maybe it just feels like everything is too much. These are some signs that maybe you're dealing with this sense of being overwhelmed. So what do you do? What can we do when we are overwhelmed by the situations we face in life? Well, first thing I want to encourage you to do is pause. Pause. Now, this might seem elementary, but look, when you identify that there is a problem, let's say that you were driving a vehicle and suddenly you heard a very disturbing sound coming from your car and you don't know what it is.
We don't want to continue working on it as if everything is fine. We want to acknowledge something is not right here and we need to stop for a second and we need to assess the situation. So when you realize I am feeling overwhelmed, take a short pause, because if you determine you are just going to plow through that moment, what you may do is inadvertently go further down the wrong path.
Maybe you were doing something which is causing damage to your situation, and this feeling of being overwhelmed is an indicator of that. So take a pause and don't stop everything you're doing in life necessarily. But you need to take at least a few minutes out and assess the situation. In addition to pausing, the first thing I would tell you is you need to check your perspective.
Now, if you look up advice on being overwhelmed, the first thing you're going to see is people telling you, Well, you're doing too much and you need to say no to more things. And I'm going to tell you, I disagree with that. I don't think that that is always the case. I think that sometimes we are not overwhelmed because actually the waves in life are too high for us.
Sometimes we are overwhelmed because of our perspective. So you've paused. Now I want you to check your perspective. I want you to see what is it that I'm feeling? What am I thinking of this situation right now? And is my perspective accurate? And in order to assess that realistically, you might need to bring someone else into the situation who does not share your perspective.
Someone who can look at it, listen to your explanation in the way that you're feeling about it, and who can give you feedback realistically. The reason this is important is because overwhelmed is a feeling. It may be an indication that you are doing too much. It may be, but it may not be because it is a feeling and not a fact.
And so we want to check that feeling against reality and see, is our perspective accurate in this scenario? So you've pause. You're looking at your perspective. The next thing I want you to do is look at your plan, and this might be a good time to ask. You do have a plan, right? Because the fastest way to feeling overwhelmed is to not have a plan, to not have any idea of what it takes to accomplish this.
How long it requires and how you're going to go about doing that. So make sure you do have a plan in place. You've got things that you're working towards and hopefully you understand what they are and how you're hoping to achieve them in your plan might need to change. If you're feeling overwhelmed, maybe after pausing and reflecting a little bit, you realize things are not going according to plan.
Something is flawed in the plan here, and maybe we need to rethink the plan. If I just plow on down this path of doing what I'm doing while feeling overwhelmed, maybe what I'm doing is ineffective and my plan requires some tweaking. So look at your plan. Are you following the plan? Is the plan a good plan? Is it still working?
Does it need some change? Your plan is going to be the number one thing that helps keep that anxiety away. Because, look, if you know the direction you're going, you might be further away than you want to be from the destination. But at least you have an idea of how to get there. If you were out in the middle of that ocean of whatever your task is and you don't know how to get out of it and you don't have a plan, you have to make one.
Otherwise, you could be going in circles out there and you could be spending a lot of energy and not getting a lot of return on that energy to make sure that your plan is good. And there again, you might want to bring someone else in to look at it and give you their opinion to make sure that that plan is going to be effective.
So we've paused. We've checked our perspective. We've checked the plan. Now I want to check our performance. And here's where I'm going to challenge you when you talk about being overwhelmed and you express the difficulties of life, a lot of times what's going to happen is people are going to relate to that. They're going to encourage you to get out of that.
They're going to encourage you to relax more. And maybe those are good suggestions. But let's just be honest. Sometimes we don't want to have to do the hard thing. Sometimes we get into something and we really want the end results of it, but we don't want the actual sweat and the difficulty involved with accomplishing it. And we got to be realistic.
If we're not performing well, then we're not going to be able to efficiently account the things in our plan, and we're going to start feeling behind. We're going to start feeling overwhelmed. And the truth is, we just need to perform at a higher level. Now, that doesn't mean that you just take things as they are and you try harder.
I wouldn't say that that's the best way to go about it. I would say that you want to check what is your body feeling? What is your brain feeling? Are you operating at peak performance levels? You're going to try to do something hard here. Are you functioning well? Are you drinking enough water? Are you eating at the proper times every day?
Are you getting proper nutrition into your body? Are you getting out? Are you getting sunshine? Fresh air? Are you moving? Are you exercising? All of these things. Even if your job is in front of a computer for 6 to 8 hours a day, all of these things are really vital to helping your body and your mind perform at peak levels.
If you're not doing these things, if you're eating a bunch of junk food, if you're sleep, schedule is way off. If you are not taking care of the resources inside of your body, your performance is going to drop. And then in a in a sort of weird cycle, you're going to be pushed into more of those bad habits.
You're going to feel like, well, I'm really busy now...