OVERWHELMED

Well it’s the last day of the year ladies and gentlemen. Obviously, this is a time for reflection on the past year and a time to look ahead to the next year. With everything I’ve gone through this year, 2020 is going to have to try extra hard to be worse than 2019. But 2019 wasn’t all bad. I finally went to Italy. Something I’ve wanted to do since I first read about the history that took place there and saw pictures of the Colosseum and Pompeii. I solidified a lot of friendships as we went through hardships together and fixed a couple of bad habits.

But something I think I am going to concentrate on next year is my tendency to overwhelm myself. I say yes to too many people. I try to do to much and I fill to much of my time with promises and expectations. When this happens I look at my schedule and I just start to back out of things. I get so overwhelmed that priorities get fuzzy and I compromise on the things that are actually important. But everything isn’t always black and white. This will last; this wont. This is worth my time; this isn’t. Sometimes you wholeheartedly think something will last and then it still falls apart. So how do we choose?

Yesterday, I got really overwhelmed with everything I’d promised people I would do, with chores I needed to run and expectations I was trying to make for myself. And the problem isn’t that I say yes when I don’t want too. The problem is that I want to do EVERYTHING! And see EVERYONE. I simultaneously want to teach myself Spanish, finish writing my book, and go to Six Flags with my friends. But I end up exhausting myself. And the next day I’m both frustrated with myself for not writing and choosing Six Flags and excited about the memories I made.

So yesterday, after realizing that yes, I was overwhelmed. I did a quick google search on how to become un-overwhelmed. I found one article that said, if you’re overwhelmed, cut something out.

Then I started thinking about everything I needed to do. How my time was planned out to the minute for the next few days and I just couldn’t think of what could be put aside. It was all IMPORTANT.

Something I’ve learned about myself in my 28 years of life is that I’m extremely visual. As soon as everything is on paper right in front of me, it imprints on my memory. In list form or just trying to remember, it gets all jumbled. Like I’m trying to make sense of what I need to do through a fog. But as soon as I slap it on a page in some organized form, bam, I’ve got it forever.

So, knowing this about myself, I decided to create a Mind map of the things that were overwhelming me. What this turned into was a map of things people were asking of me (usually my time) and errands I needed to run (also time users). Looking at the mind map. I instantly realized there were things I had no way around, however, other things, with a quick conversation could be solved. Things I was maybe overwhelming myself with, when I didn’t need to be at all. So that’s what I did, shuffled some things around. And in about fifteen minutes, I felt a lot better.

So for this next year, I think I’m going to focus on this. I know that I get overwhelmed easily because I try to do to much. But this over promising compromises my abilities in other areas.

If you find yourself becoming overwhelmed frequently, how do you learn? How do you process information? Use that to trick you brain into relaxing. My brain starts freaking out at a long list but at a mind map, it goes okay this isn’t so bad. Now that may seem a little crazy, but we are all a LITTLE crazy. It just takes practice to manage.

(The link to the above mentioned article will not attach here for some reason. Google ’12 things to remember when you are feeling overwhelmed’ if you are curious.)