by Glynnis McDonnell, M.A.
I’ve been noticing more and more that I, along with many of my friends, family, and clients, have been saying, “I’m so overwhelmed!” on a fairly regular basis. It seems inevitable in our fast-paced society that we all feel overwhelmed from time to time. There simply seems to be a non-stop rush of commutes, meetings, projects, deadlines, clients, classes, and a whole host of other responsibilities that we are accustomed to performing each day. I know that I, along with many others, find that this sense of being overwhelmed can really hinder our productivity at times. I think we’ve all been there- that moment when you have so much to do that you don’t even know where to start, so you just sit there trying to figure out where to start and end up getting little, if anything, done.
I’ve given this experience some thought lately, and have noticed that I get caught up in this “overwhelmed” feeling when I insist that I absolutely MUST get it all done. When I demand that I get everything done at times that my responsibilities feel overwhelming, I just end up creating anxiety and getting stuck in this ruminative process where I spend all my time trying to figure out how to effectively get everything done instead of starting to actually get things done.
When this happens, I try to bring myself back to the advice a wonderful mentor gave me several years ago. I was stressing out over editing a paper with what seemed like a thousand revisions. I expressed to my mentor how overwhelmed I was feeling about that project, and her response was, “When you feel that way, open the document and just work on one sentence. And most of the time, you’ll find that you keep going. But just tell yourself you’ll do one sentence.” This advice has been immensely helpful to me throughout graduate school, and I’ve adapted it for other seemingly overwhelming tasks in my life. If I have to clean my whole apartment, I’ll start by telling myself I’ll just dust the living room and see where that takes me. If I need to run a ton of errands, I’ll start with just one.
This attitude really helps me to break down overwhelming tasks into more manageable ones. Once I get one part done, the rest of the task (or list of tasks) usually doesn’t seem as daunting. The success of this technique lies in being able to let go of my demand that everything MUST get done now because it emphasizes doing what I CAN, rather than demanding that everything must happen right away. In reality, many of these tasks do not need to be done immediately, so there is no sense in stressing myself out by forcing myself to finish them all immediately. Not to mention, when I let go of the demand that everything must get done immediately, I spend my time actually chipping away at tasks instead of spending all my time trying to figure out how to get everything done right away.
Next time you’re feeling overwhelmed, try telling yourself that you’ll just do one part of what you need to do and see where that takes you.
