For some moments last week I noticed myself having thoughts of overwhelm.
My workload was higher, my calendar was fuller and I had a bigger list of small things to do and to keep organised. In addition to that, the quality of my sleep wasn’t very good so I didn’t have so much energy throughout the day.
In the past I used to think that if these conditions were present together I would for sure be stressed. But there is a difference between having thoughts of overwhelm and being stressed.
I noticed my thoughts speeding up, the mind compiling all the tasks I had to do and then imagining bad-looking scenarios of what would happen in the future if I didn’t do all of them.
That quality of thought is overwhelm. It’s like a mental hurricane that starts as a tinny little swirl of wind that grows with our attention.
If I hadn’t noticed my mind doing that I’d have easily got caught up in it and believed those thoughts were weighted in truth. It would’ve become an embodied experience and I’d think I need to do something about it, perhaps work faster or tell others how crazy this workload is.
That’s being stressed.
Realising the difference between the two is the key to allowing you to come back to your centre faster and continue to perform at a higher level.
And the best news is that, if overwhelm is simply a sped-up, multitasking mind, there’s nothing we need to do in the physical world to deal with a problem of thought. We can simply let the mind calm down on its own.
Having this understanding was really helpful for me to not let the swirl of thoughts escalate to a blown out “stressful situation” last week and as a result of having a quieter mind, I had the mental bandwidth to follow my common sense and deal with the higher work load in an intelligent way.
If you’d like some help navigating something like this, just send me a PM.
Love,
Felipe
P.S This is Luna, she seems to handle overwhelm really well.