#9: 6 Powerful Questions to Ask Yourself When You're Feeling Overwhelmed
Burnout is a big topic and we’re just scratching the surface in this series of four episodes. In the last episode, one of the topics we explored was managing your stress response. While learning to complete the stress cycle is so important, it’s an incomplete approach to managing and, perhaps more importantly, preventing burnout. There are several other factors at play, including your mindset.
I really love talking about mindset because helping people learn to manage their minds is such a fundamental part of the work I’m lucky to do with my clients.
You’ll recall from Episode 7, I defined burnout as a state of emotional, physical, and mental exhaustion caused by excessive and prolonged stress...like the 324 months from March-December 2020. It’s characterized by three dimensions: overwhelming exhaustion, feelings of cynicism and detachment, and a sense of ineffectiveness and lack of accomplishment.
A simpler way to think about it is that it’s one, two, three strikes you’re burnout!
Lost energy
Lost enthusiasm
Lost confidence
For me, this is a really powerful framework that lends itself well to managing your mind. Specifically, asking yourself some questions. Look: I know that I ask you to ask yourself questions often--but I really mean it. Go ahead and ask yourself these things out loud...and demand an answer from yourself. Right there. In your car. In traffic. Or you know write it down. But really do it.
What types of thinking am I engaged in?
What are the questions I’m asking myself?
What are the thoughts I’m telling myself?
We won’t be able to get to them all today, but if you’re interested in learning more, then check out the School of Midlife in the show notes. You can get on the waitlist for the next enrollment period.
Today, we’ll focus on the questions you ask yourself. You know...beyond, “Good God...this again? Why?”
Okay, so to get started, picture this scenario: You skipped your usual peanut butter toast breakfast...your boss moved your deadline up to midday instead of EOD...and you forgot to wear deodorant...again. Shower aside, what do you do when it all feels like too much? Well first: take a deep breath with your hand over your heart. Maybe even do the 4-7-8 breathing exercise. Then, focus on asking yourself powerful questions.
“What’s a powerful question?” you ask.
A powerful question spurs helpful emotion and, ideally, action, too. Here are a few examples:
“What’s instructive about this?”
“How do I want to think and feel about this situation?”
“How can I create what I want?”
“What’s a productive response in this situation?”
“What are the next three steps I can take to continue moving forward?”
Each of these powerful questions contains two qualities:
First, they have a positive or neutral premise
Second, they encourage your brain to come up with helpful outcomes or thoughts.
This approach gives you power over your life. Instead of thinking things are happening to you, or that your feelings are overwhelming you, you begin to see where you’re able to create greater influence over your life.
Feeling excited yet? Good! Me, too!
Okay, so let’s apply this approach to burnout...specifically, to feeling the dimension of feeling overwhelmed. Here are 6 powerful questions--that give YOU the power--to ask yourself when you’re feeling overwhelmed:
1. What’s Contributing to My Feeling Overwhelmed?
Feeling "overwhelmed" is increasingly common as demands on our attention increase exponentially. It’s not just work and family. It’s being a family cruise director, board member, engaged citizen, now cooking this beautiful organic food, staying connected with friends, always be networking, and reading these important books. Oh, your parents are aging now and need you, too. And are you financially ready to talk about retirement? Also, don’t forget self-care okay!? OKAY!?
Our brains just weren't designed to handle the environment we inhabit. For the vast majority of world history, human life—both culture and biology—was shaped by scarcity.
Food, clothing, shelter, tools, and pretty much everything else had to be farmed or fabricated, at a very high cost in time and energy.
Knowledge was power, and it was hard to come by; for centuries, books had to be copied by hand and were rare and precious.
Even people were scarce: Friends and relatives died young (as late as 1900, life expectancy in the United States was approximately 49 years).
This kind of scarcity still rules the world's poorest regions. But in the developed world, hundreds of millions of us now face the bizarre problem of surfeit. And somehow the cost of time and energy hasn’t necessarily gone down, we’ve just made it different. Our access and ease fill time in a different way. If you can just read an important book on your Kindle, why can’t you read another and another? Even our downtime we fill with the ideas of self-care that we access. On Instagram and the internet. Let me see how Gwyneth suggests I care for myself...
Yet our brains, instincts, and socialized behavior are still geared to an environment of lack.
The result? Feeling overwhelmed—on an unprecedented scale.
2. In What Ways Am I Actually Busy?
By now you probably know that there’s no such thing as multitasking; the human brain can tend to only one thing at a time. No matter how many times your children try to test this theory. So can we all agree to strike this quality from job postings and cover letters? Can we? Yes? Good.
Most of us judge how busy we are by how much we have to do. Whew--I swear it was a badge of honor back when I was in college. I still see it now, too. The Busy Olympics. The access we have to worthy ways to spend time exacerbates this contest. We see this in the phenomenon and discussion of over-scheduling and over-extending our kids, too. The earlier they can start padding that college application the better! It’s a cycle that’s tough to break.
When there are too many things to do, we think we're busy, but we can feel busy when there isn't that much to do, too. Look, I’ve got TWO WHOLE SEASONS OF VIRGIN RIVER TO WATCH. Conversely, we can feel relaxed even when there's a lot going on. This means that the states of "busy" and "not busy" aren't defined by how many actual things there are to do--they’re just an interpretation, not fact.
3. What’s the Priority Here?
We, humans, are the only creatures in nature that are so extra about always being “on.”
We want the sun to shine all night, and when it doesn't, we create cities that never sleep. Not complaining about all-night delis, though.
We chase continuous energetic and emotional highs through everything from big parties to illegal substances.
But we need the downtime...the space between...the darkness. They’re the necessary complements that support our growth.
4. How Might I Better Manage My Energy?
As a society, we’re hyper-focused on time management. But there are two big problems with this approach.
The first problem is that after a certain number of hours fatigue inevitably sets in. After that, you make more mistakes, you get into more conflict with co-workers, you're less creative, and you're less efficient.
The second problem is that time is finite, and most of us don't have any of it left to invest. Our dance cards are full. For example, in an effort to get more done, one of the first things we're willing to sacrifice is sleep. Ugh. This ain’t it, yo.
We need to stop trying to manage our time and start managing our energy.
5. Where Are the Energy Suckers In My Life?
Energy Suckers (a.k.a., the Debbie Downers). These are the people who find the cloud around every silver lining. If you can't cut them out of your life entirely, turn your interactions with them into a game. When my neighbor says, "I hate this rain!" I say, "Oh I love it! ? It means I don't have to wash my car!"
6. What Would It Take for Me to Just Say No?
Most people claim they give in to sudden requests because they hate letting others down. Usually, though, this need is more about ourselves...about a need to feel needed.
If we take a hard look at ourselves, we might see that we unwittingly encourage--or definitely don’t discourage--people to come to us for every little thing.
Interruptions can also be a welcome distraction. Faced with an unpleasant task, we're more than happy to turn our attention elsewhere.
Finally, we often don't say no because of simple disorganization. On a choppy and shapeless day, we handle disruption immediately because we figure, if not now, when?
While it's important to be reasonably accessible to the people you live and work with, you don't want to spend most of your waking hours in helper mode at the expense of completing your own critical tasks. You need to prioritize requests. Otherwise, you get trapped in a whirlwind of distraction where you start many things and finish nothing. I know you know this feeling. By the way, “The Helper” Archetype is just one of several that we explore further in relation to our power and burnout. If you recognize yourself as The Helper and want to change your patterns so that you can avoid or overcome burnout, then get on the waitlist to enroll inside the School of Midlife.
Speaking of saying “no,” next week we’ll be focused on setting boundaries. Until then, just know that to create better, more powerful thoughts that can support you in managing burnout, you’ll want to ask yourself better, more powerful questions. Really...ask them! This is foundational to developing a stronger mindset to help you overcome and, ideally, prevent burnout.
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