April 11, 2024

Overwhelmed

By Ken Giglio, Principal of Mindful Leadership

What if feeling overwhelmed was mostly in our heads? What would change if we became aware that “being” overwhelmed was a state of mind? And, what would it be like if we could simply walk away from our overwhelmed state of mind?

There are many ways to approach being overwhelmed. For simplicity’s sake, I’ll break down the contributing factors into two buckets—what’s out there (our external environment, our world of relationships and systems), and what’s in here (our beliefs, thoughts, and emotions about the world out there).

What’s out there is beyond our control for the most part. The prime example is our shared global environment, which is objectively overwhelming, from the wars displacing thousands and starving children to the socio-political climate of confusion and toxicity. No matter how much we monitor our news intake, we cannot fully avoid the stark reality of suffering and tragedy in the world.

The closer-in environments of our families and workplaces are also out-there places, with some are more “out there” than others. We like to think we control our more local places where we show up every day. However, any measure of control over and/or of influence is usually fleeting, such as the third reorganization for your department or your second boss within a year.

What’s in here is our minds reacting to what’s out there. Our thinking process in response to, for example, a deadline approaching (or already missed) stirs up our emotions, such as worry about letting others down or fear we’ll be seen as unreliable. This mixing of our beliefs in with our thoughts and feelings in response to “external “happenings” is at the heart of when and how we get overwhelmed.

The mind is made up of a river of constantly flowing thoughts, fed by streams of deeply held beliefs, biases, perceptions, and judgements, all of which have been picked up and conditioned into us over the course of our lives. Some of these thoughts we are conscious of, others are barley in our field of awareness, and others are unconscious. Our unconscious thoughts and beliefs, the ones we are most attached to, can control our lives and wreak havoc for ourselves and those around us.

For the executives I coach and coaches I supervise, the key insight into feeling overwhelmed is our inner world shapes our outer world. Even though we are powerless over global events and often limited in our influence over our life situations, we have the innate ability to exert a measure of control over our minds. We can manage our thinking patterns if we are mindful enough of what’s in here, which are our beliefs, perceptions, and reactions to all that is happening out there.

Such was the case with the executive who would consistently tell others how much work he was always “digging out from under” and how his days were “nonstop, 24/7, with no time to breathe.”

I asked this coaching client what would happen if he stopped talking about being overwhelmed. He argued nothing about his massive workload and increasing responsibilities would change if he stopped talking about it. I agreed with him it was all real and asked him, as an experiment, to do two things: (1) pause whenever he felt himself becoming overwhelmed, and (2) stop talking about it with others as a never-ending struggle, an endless slog up the mountain.

After a month of pausing when he remembered and mostly avoiding talking the language of overwhelm, the executive’s workload remained unchanged, and yet he expressed more optimism about being able to manage it all. He reported feeling calmer and more centered.

The mindful pausing helped him become more aware of his inner dialogue when it veered toward victimhood and futility; he was more in touch with his feelings of powerlessness and anxiety. The executive was becoming a more mindful leader, one who is practiced in paying attention to their reactive thought patterns and feelings as they happen.

In addition to the mindfulness practices of pausing to step back internally from his thoughts when they became overly intense and/or obsessive and paying attention to his words as expressions of his mindset and feelings about being overwhelmed, I shared another practice to support him when he felt himself becoming overwhelmed: focus on one thing, one person at a time by giving it/them your full attention and presence.

He found this practice of noticing and being fully in his body naturally slowed him down enough to focus and center on whatever was in front of him at that moment. Again, he experienced increased calm as a result of his increased awareness, and, as a result, became less stressed and spread less stress to others.

There are many factors that contribute to feeling overwhelmed, and I am not suggesting the feeling is all in our heads. There is an ever-growing body of research that shows the impact of being stressed and feeling overwhelmed is disengagement and compromised performance. Without practical strategies for working with feelings of being overwhelmed, there is the threat of burnout.

The myth of Sisyphus serves well as a metaphor for how we can overwhelm ourselves. You may recall he was the unjust king from Greek mythology who angered the gods and was given the eternal punishment to push a boulder up a mountain over and over, just to see it roll back to the bottom again and again.

We can see ourselves as being stuck like Sisyphus in a never-ending pattern of futile effort and feel overwhelmed by our external environment, or we can look inside and become mindful of our wayward, unsupportive thought patterns that amplify what’s out there into something burdensome in our minds. This habit is our minds turning our experiences into feelings of being overwhelmed.

The author Stephen Mitchell, in a parable about Sisyphus, speaks to how we become attached and even fall in love with our thoughts and perceptions, even if they cause us suffering. Our mindsets, which can cause us to feel overwhelmed, are symbolized by the rock we push up the mountain again and again.

We have the choice to let go of these unproductive thought patterns in here that are reactions to what’s out there. As Mitchell imagines Sisyphus, we always have a choice to break the patterns in our mind if we feel overwhelmed.

“He doesn’t realize that at any moment he is permitted to step aside, let the rock hurtle to the bottom, and go home.”