Why Overwhelm Will Never Help You

It’s no surprise to you that one of the most common emotions we feel as women and mums is overwhelmed. 

Way back in August 2020, when it was announced by the government that childcare was closed for at least 6 weeks, I felt a sea of overwhelm wash over me. 

How on Earth was I going to balance work and solo parenting and my business and not totally drown? 

I remember sitting on the couch, not being able to concentrate on my daughter or what she was saying to me, feeling like I was having an out-of-body experience. I decided to go outside for a walk to start to gather my thoughts. 

Thanks to the self-coaching I do on myself, I was able to fully feel the overwhelm. I really felt physically ill as I walked around the block, again totally distracted from everything around me.

(Sidenote: If you think it’s weird to want to feel an emotion like overwhelm, it’s actually the quickest way out of it.)

Then I told myself, “I can do this. I can 100% do this,” and I believed it.

I’m telling you this because we think that being overwhelmed is an emotion that will actually drive us to get things done. 

We also think we can’t help feeling overwhelmed by the events of the world. 

We can’t help how many kids we have, how much there is to do around the house, or how lazy our spouse is. We can’t help that we have no childcare. We’ll just have to feel overwhelmed the whole time. It’s just the facts of our life, right?

I remember talking to a friend of a friend at a bar before I had kids, and she said to me, “I thought I was overwhelmed when I had a full-time job. Then I realised how overwhelm was when I had my first child. Then I realised I wasn’t at all overwhelmed until I had my second child. Then I truly understood overwhelm.” I nodded along like she was telling me the news. I thought, “OK, so this is what being a mum is like.”

But I have found the opposite can actually be true. Overwhelm is completely optional. We think it keeps us checking our to-do list and rushing here and there, and that if we don’t feel overwhelmed, we’ll drop the ball and get nothing done.  

Instead, being overwhelmed actually leaves us spinning in our heads, always complaining about how busy we are and never taking the real action we want to be taking in our lives. 

Productivity, motivation, drive – these are the kind of emotions that actually help us get things done and go beyond the crappy story we’re telling ourselves about being too busy.

What I teach is that you create your emotions with the thoughts you choose. Most people just wait around for great feelings to come along. They think inspiration, motivation or enthusiasm will just be there one morning when they wake up. In my experience, that very rarely happens.

Would you be able to choose a new feeling other than overwhelmed this week? What would you have to think to feel motivated and productive?

If you need more help generating those emotions, you can also download my free daily planner: Get Everything Done In A Day. I can’t wait to hear what changes for you.