How To Stop Feeling Constantly Overwhelmed

“The key to success is not doing more; it’s about doing more of what matters.” — Gary Keller

On This Page

What Does Overwhelmed Mean?
Why Overwhelm is Such a Big Deal
What Causes Overwhelm?
Are You Overwhelmed?
What’s the Wrong Response?
8 Strategies for Overwhelm
5 Mindset Shifts for Overwhelm

Are you feeling overwhelmed?

You know the feeling when your to-do list seems never-ending, your mind races with tasks, and the weight of responsibilities bears down on you, leaving you frazzled and anxious.

How can you overcome overwhelm and achieve your most compelling goals?

I’m sharing what I’ve learned as a high-performance coach at Microsoft for more than two decades of helping people deal with burnout, overwhelm, and the perpetual challenge of too much to do and not enough time.

Feeling overwhelmed is a particularly difficult challenge because the more behind you feel, the more behind you get.

And the most insidious and ironic thing is, the more behind you get, the more you take on and perpetuate the problem.

In this article, I show you how to break the loops, with practical strategies to help you effectively manage feelings of overwhelm in work and life.

How To Deal with Feeling Overwhelmed

Before we dive into things, I want to summarize how to think about and tackle overwhelm.

Here’s why we get overwhelmed:

We get overwhelmed because we take on too much that we should have said “no” to.
We fill our plate with things that drain us instead of energizing us. We don’t put boundaries around our time and work.
And, perhaps most importantly, we don’t transition well between tasks or activities where we should take a break to reset and rejuvenate before switching into what’s next.

When we frame the problem of overwhelm this way, the solution becomes clearer:

Establish a better morning routine
Master our transition rejuvenation moments
Focus on fewer things on our plate that matter.

And across the board, we get better when we practice our energy management and stress skills in the form of focus, breath work, and mindfulness.

What Does Overwhelmed Mean?

What does it mean to feel overwhelmed?

The dictionary defines overwhelmed as:

“Overcome by force or numbers” or “completely overcome or overpowered by thought or feeling.”

It’s the sensation of being pushed beyond your capacity to effectively manage or cope with the situation at hand.

“Overwhelmed” is an emotional and psychological state in which you feel excessively burdened or inundated by the demands, tasks, or emotions you’re facing.

When you feel overwhelmed, you often perceive that you have an unmanageable volume of responsibilities, obligations, or challenges to address.

Why Overwhelm is Such a Big Deal

This sense of being inundated can manifest as stress, anxiety, or even a feeling of helplessness.

It’s as if the weight of these demands surpasses your ability to keep up and maintain a sense of balance in your life.

Overwhelm can occur in work, school, life…anywhere, really.

Overwhelm hurts your productivity, disrupts your focus, and can lead to burnout, impacting your overall well-being.

Chronic overwhelm can strain your relationships and limit your personal growth.

What Causes Overwhelm?

It sounds simple but overwhelm often comes from taking on too much stuff that you know you should have said “no” to.

Fear plays a significant role in this cycle of overwhelm. Fear comes in the form of three kinds of pain avoidance:

the fear of loss
the fear of hardship or disappointment
the fear of disaster

All these fears boil down to our deep-seated concern about experiencing pain:

The fear of loss might make us afraid of missing out on opportunities or connections, leading us to say “yes” when we should say “no.”
The fear of hardship or disappointment can drive us to overcommit to avoid the discomfort of letting others down or dealing with challenging situations.
The fear of disaster, the most extreme form, pushes us to accumulate tasks and responsibilities as a defense mechanism against imagined catastrophes, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy of overwhelm.

Cognitive Impacts of Feeling Overwhelmed

Feeling overwhelmed can have significant cognitive impacts, affecting your ability to think clearly, make decisions, and perform tasks effectively.

Here are some cognitive impacts of overwhelm:

Here are the 5 most valuable insights from the provided information on how overwhelm can impact cognitive functioning:

Impaired Concentration: Overwhelm can hinder your ability to focus on tasks, leading to a scattered mind and difficulty concentrating on one thing at a time. This suggests that managing overwhelm is crucial for maintaining productivity and efficient work.
Reduced Working Memory: Overwhelm can diminish your working memory, making it harder to handle multiple tasks or remember essential information. This highlights the importance of stress management in preserving cognitive functions required for daily tasks.
Poor Decision-Making: When overwhelmed, your decision-making abilities may suffer, potentially leading to irrational choices or difficulty weighing options. Effective stress management is critical for sound decision-making in various aspects of life.
Increased Forgetfulness: Overwhelm can result in forgetfulness, causing you to miss appointments and deadlines. Recognizing the impact of overwhelm on memory can help you implement strategies to enhance memory retention and organization.
Negative Self-Talk: Overwhelm often triggers negative self-talk and self-doubt, creating a cycle of stress that further impairs cognitive function. Promoting positive self-talk and self-care can be essential for maintaining mental clarity and well-being in overwhelming situations.

These cognitive impacts can have a profound effect on your daily life, work, and relationships.

How Do You Know When You are Overwhelmed?

Feeling overwhelmed is a common experience that can manifest differently for each person. Recognizing when you are feeling overwhelmed is important so that you can take steps to address and manage these feelings.

Here are some signs and indicators that you may be feeling overwhelmed:

Stress and Mental Strain: Overwhelm is characterized by heightened stress levels, leading to persistent tension, irritability, and anxiety. Managing stress is crucial for maintaining mental well-being.
Physical Manifestations: Overwhelm often manifests physically through symptoms like headaches, muscle tension, fatigue, and digestive issues. Recognizing these physical signs can help identify when overwhelm is affecting your body.
Cognitive Impairments: Overwhelm can disrupt cognitive functions, resulting in difficulties with concentration, decision-making, and clear thinking. Addressing overwhelm is essential for maintaining mental clarity.
Emotional Responses: Procrastination, increased irritability, negative self-talk, and a loss of interest in enjoyable activities are emotional responses to overwhelm. These signs highlight the need for emotional self-care and stress reduction.
Behavioral Changes: Overwhelm can lead to withdrawal from social activities, changes in eating habits, increased sensitivity, and exhaustion. Recognizing these behavioral changes can prompt the adoption of coping strategies and self-care practices to manage overwhelm effectively.

See How To Recognize When You Are Feeling Overwhelmed for a deeper drilldown into signs and symptoms of feeling overwhelmed.

What’s the Wrong Response to Feeling Overwhelmed?

Our typical response to feeling overwhelmed by increasing workloads is to double down on our efforts, often resorting to working longer hours and pushing ourselves harder.

Instead of taking a step back to examine why we feel this way and finding a more sustainable approach, we tend to dive deeper into the same patterns of behavior.

For example, let’s look at Lisa, who works at a tech company that recently went public. She’s juggling multiple projects and constantly worries about missing important emails. To cope, she starts waking up at 4 AM to get a head start on her work.

Similarly, Michael, a senior leader at a late-stage start-up, feels the weight of an ever-expanding to-do list. He believes that waking up early to tackle tasks is the solution, even though it feels like he’s trying to climb out of an ever-deepening hole.

Sarah, a co-founder of a growing startup, is also caught in the overwhelm trap as her company scales.

While it’s true that some high-profile executives like Apple’s Tim Cook wake up incredibly early to manage their responsibilities, most of us don’t have the same level of demands on our time.

Despite this, we still fall into the habit of overworking and early rising as a response to our feelings of overwhelm, often without questioning whether it’s the most effective or sustainable approach.

How To Deal with Overwhelm?

When we feel overwhelmed, it’s often because the world’s complexity has outpaced our ability to effectively deal with it.

It’s NOT a matter of intelligence but rather how well we can comprehend and navigate this complex world.

It’s like trying to juggle too many balls at once. Even the smartest juggler can’t keep them all in the air if there are simply too many to handle.

Like so many things in life, the key comes down to how we make sense of the world and how we operate in it.

Minimize and keep things simple.

To keep things simple, the main idea is to create a morning routine that helps you feel strong, rejuvenate yourself when you transition between major activities or tasks, and make sure you fill don’t overload your plate of things to do.

And to make sure that you do more of what gives you energy, and less of what takes it away.

Remember that both people and things can be catalysts or drains.

With that in mind, let’s take a wide-angle lens approach to nailing how to deal with the challenge of overwhelm.

8 Smart Strategies to Deal with Constantly Feeling Overwhelmed

Implementing these approaches empowers you to regain control, minimize stress, and focus on what truly matters in both your personal and professional life.

To conquer overwhelm, adopt these eight key strategies.

As always, remember to keep Bruce Lee’s quote in mind as you work through the strategies:

“Absorb what is useful, discard what is not, add what is uniquely your own.” — Bruce Lee

Here are 8 key strategies for dealing with feeling overwhelm:

Win Your Morning: You need a morning routine to start your day from a place of strength, energy, and focus. Establish a morning routine to start your day with strength, energy, and focus. This sets the tone for a proactive and purposeful day, ensuring you begin with intent rather than chaos.
Find Your Transition Rejuvenation Moments: “Transition Rejuvenation Moments” involve inserting a brief pause between two significant activities to refresh your mind and body. Insert short breaks between major activities to refresh your mind and body. These moments help sharpen your focus and intentionality, making you more effective and present in your actions.
Find the Main Culprit of Your Overwhelm: This is about regaining control and reducing your overwhelming stress. Figure out what’s causing most of your overwhelm, ask that magic question, and then take action, whether it’s finishing what you can, breaking it down, seeking help, or renegotiating. Identify the primary source of your overwhelm by asking yourself what one or two things, if magically removed, would alleviate 80% of your stress. Take action, whether it’s completing, breaking down, seeking help, or renegotiating tasks to regain control and reduce stress.
Build Boundaries Around Your Time and Workload: Establishing boundaries on your time and workload is like building a protective fence around your productivity. You can do this by employing tactics such as “time boxing,” where you allocate specific hours to work on tasks or projects, ensuring you don’t let them bleed into your entire day. Set boundaries by “time boxing” tasks, leaving the office at a specific time, and saying “no” to work that doesn’t align with your priorities. This protects your productivity and well-being.
Create a “No” List: Safeguard your time and energy by declining activities that don’t align with your preferences and values. Replace unwanted commitments with activities that bring you joy and relaxation. Healthy boundaries are crucial for your overall well-being.
Challenge Your Perfectionism: Embrace the 80/20 rule (Pareto Principle) and recognize when “good” is indeed “good enough.” Don’t let perfectionism turn small tasks into overwhelming endeavors. Progress over perfection is key to reducing stress.
Outsource or Delegate the Tasks that Drain You: Focus on activities that align with your strengths and delegate or outsource the rest. This not only saves time but also ensures tasks are handled efficiently.
Challenge Your Assumptions: Identify and question hidden assumptions that contribute to feeling overwhelmed. These “Big Assumptions” may not be absolute truths and can keep you stuck in unproductive patterns. Debunking these beliefs broadens your perspective and reduces overwhelm.

See 8 Smart Strategies to Conquer Overwhelm and Lead a More Balanced Life for a deeper dive into each strategy.

5 Mindset Shifts to Deal with Constantly Feeling Overwhelmed

We covered a lot of ground, but now I want to hit pause, take a deep breath, and then look out from the balcony view.

Your mindset and your outlook or worldview set the stage for everything you do.

While we’ve already hit on some of these ideas, I want to take the time to wallow in each one these mindset strategy a bit deeper. The more you wallow the more you’ll gain a deeper understanding and appreciation for just how powerful they really are.

Shifting your mindset from feeling overwhelmed to effective involves several key mindset shifts:

Challenge “Big Assumptions”: Identify and question deeply ingrained beliefs or assumptions that influence your behavior. By bringing these assumptions to conscious awareness and examining their validity, you can overcome self-imposed limitations and make positive changes in your life.
Recognize When “Good” Is “Good Enough”: Understand that perfection is not always necessary. Use the 80/20 rule to determine when further effort doesn’t provide significant additional value. Focus on achieving high quality through iterations, experiments, and learning from others.
Don’t Make Things Bigger Than They Are: Avoid letting small tasks or minor details pile up in your mind. Address them promptly to reduce mental clutter and the “zegarnik effect,” which adds to your mental load.
Embrace “When Less is More”: Simplify and prioritize your tasks by identifying the vital few activities that have the most significant impact on your goals. Concentrate your efforts on these essential tasks, eliminate or delegate non-essential ones, and achieve better outcomes with less effort.
Follow Your Energy: Pay attention to your gut feelings and energy levels. They can guide you toward tasks and activities that align with your growth and greatness, helping you make effective choices.

By applying these strategies, you can shift your mindset from being overwhelmed to becoming more effective in managing your tasks and achieving your goals.

See 5 Mindset Shifts to Go from Feeling Overwhelmed to Feeling Effective.

Begin Your Journey of Mastering Overwhelm

I want to leave you with an idea that can help you practice and implement all we’ve covered:

“Focus on what you control and let the rest go.”

That is perhaps one of the most important dilemmas to manage for life because the more you grow, the more you can take on, and it’s a game of finding your firm foundation while flexing what you are capable of.

Feeling overwhelmed is a universal challenge in our fast-paced, information-driven world.

But it’s not an insurmountable obstacle.

By understanding the roots of overwhelm, recognizing its symptoms, and embracing practical strategies, you can regain control, find your balance, and live a more purposeful life. Remember that you are not alone in this journey.

Many have faced and conquered overwhelm before you, and you too can emerge stronger, wiser, and better equipped to navigate the complexities of modern life.

The key is to start small, persistently apply the techniques that resonate with you, and never underestimate the transformative power of simple yet deliberate choices.

Overwhelm may knock on your door, but with the right tools and mindset, you can choose whether or not to invite it in.

Your path to a more peaceful, fulfilling, and intentional life begins with taking the first step. So, breathe deeply, prioritize wisely, and forge ahead with the confidence that you can overcome overwhelm and embrace the life you desire.

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