Ready to Start to Break Up with Overwhelm?

Are you ready to start to break-up with overwhelm?

Today’s journal entry is going to be exploring the topic of overwhelm, including –

• What is Overwhelm?
• What are the Causes of Overwhelm?
• How Can you Start to Break Up with Overwhelm?
• 5 Ways to increase Personal Effectiveness.

Let’s get started..

What is Overwhelm?

Have you ever had that feeling where the number of tasks on your ‘to-do’ list is completely out of control? Maybe you are continually running late for appointments? Or missing deadlines or important events? Chances are you are familiar with overwhelm and don’t worry, you are definitely not alone! That place of overwhelm is familiar…

Some definitions of overwhelm include –

• “bury or drown beneath a huge mass of something, especially water” ~ Google
• “to overwhelm completely in mind or feeling” ~ Dictionary.com
• “to burden excessively” or “to overpower in mind or feeling” ~ the Free Dictionary.
• “to affect (someone) very strongly” or “to cause (someone) to have too many things to deal with” ~ Learner’s Dictionary.

What are the Causes of Overwhelm?

There are many causes of overwhelm and it varies from person to person. Some of the common causes include –

1. Being a perfectionist or having traits of perfectionism.
2. Over-committing or taking on too much.
3. Putting extra pressure on yourself to overachieve.

How Can we Break Up with Overwhelm?

If you have already identified you are overwhelmed, congratulations as awareness and honesty of your situation is the first step. Now to take some action. Two habits we focus on at Habits for Wellbeing are personal effectiveness and self-management.

Personal effectiveness means making use of all the resources (both personal and professional) you have at your disposal (i.e. your talents, strengths, skills, energy and time) to enable you to master your life and achieve both work and life goals.

How you manage yourself (i.e self-management) impacts on your personal effectiveness. According to CASEL, self management is “…the ability to regulate one’s emotions, thoughts, and behaviours effectively in different situations.” This includes –

• managing stress,
• controlling impulses,
• motivating oneself and being responsible, and
• being personally accountable and setting and working toward achieving personal and professional goals.

5 Ways to Increase our Personal Effectiveness

In order to increase or change your personal effectiveness or performance, you need to take time out to reflect to see where you currently are. Once you know this, you can then take action and monitor your behaviours to see if you are getting the results you would like.

5 ideas on how you can take time out to reflect and get to know yourself better include –

• identifying your values and reflecting if you are currently living in alignment with them,
• identifying your priorities in life and putting first things first,
• identify what you really want, give yourself permission to follow your dreams and look at any distorted thinking around your wants/dreams,
• asking for feedback from people you trust and feel comfortable with (i.e. a coach or mentor) as  you don’t know what you don’t know, and
• identifying all of your unfinished/essential tasks and completing them one by one.

Over to You…