How to Stop Feeling Overwhelmed by Work and Life

There’s a lot coming at you, every day, every hour. That’s a fact. And while we may think overwhelm is just an inevitable fact of life, it doesn’t have to be. In this piece, we’ll explore why we feel this way, why it’s not our fault, and what we can do about it—besides putting rocks in our pockets and walking into the sea.

Everyone seems to be experiencing the big O lately.

Not that O. I mean Overwhelm.

If someone asked me to define overwhelm, I’d probably say something like, “Feeling like you have too much to do, deliver, write, finish…” and then I’d walk right over to my couch and lie down.

But in fact, that’s not really what the word “overwhelm” means. What it actually means is: “To bury or drown beneath a huge mass.”

As in, to be overwhelmed by…an avalanche. An ocean wave. Perhaps a large bear.

Of course, most of us are not contending with such issues on a daily basis. Our experience of overwhelm is less about contending with one thing, than with everything—and not once in a while, but all the time. It’s not sustainable. And, it’s not your fault.

Repeat After Me: Overwhelm Is Not My Fault

Feeling overwhelmed by work, or with your life is not a failure on your part, nor is it a reason to feel embarrassed or ashamed. The feeling is not only real; it’s a universal and troubling trend.

The 2022 Stress in America study found that among the 72 percent of people who experienced some health impacts due to stress, 33 percent of them reported feeling overwhelmed.

In the largest known study of stress levels in the UK, The Mental Health Foundation found that 74 percent felt so stressed they have been overwhelmed or unable to cope.

Licensed therapist and anti-capitalist coach Maegan Megginson says we cannot talk about feeling overwhelmed without considering the larger forces at play. “We have been conditioned to respond to life in a way that leads to widespread chronic overwhelm. We believe this is the only way to be successful, valued, loved.”

Blaming ourselves doesn’t help: Shame shuts us down and dysregulates the nervous system, leaving us unable to cope. “Only when we can get clear with what we actually want can we make decisions that align with the kind of life we want,” says Megginson.

The risks of Being, and Staying, Overwhelmed

• Burnout (Hint: passion can’t cure burnout or reverse it)
• Feeling out of control of your life.
• Believing this is how it always will be.
• Giving in to all of it and putting off your own goals and dreams until the world stops moving (it won’t).

To be clear: There IS too much going on. That’s not changing anytime soon.

My intention is not to convince you that you’re “not” overwhelmed, but to remind you that you do have a say in what you pay attention to, what you take on, what you say yes—and no—to.

Just because the world is overwhelming doesn’t mean we have to feel that way all the time. What we can do is start to ask some critical questions.

Stop Feeling Overwhelmed with These 3 Questions

You can’t just switch off the world or wave a wand to make overwhelm disappear. But if you’re willing to answer these questions honestly, you may cut through the chaos with some newfound clarity.

Question #1: What specifically am I feeling overwhelmed by?

One of the risks of piling everything into one big pile of “overwhelm” is that we then let all those issues off the hook; we refer to them as one “huge mass.” But they’re not. And our perspective changes when we stop and single them out.

My friend Ilise Benun, the Marketing Mentor, helps freelancers and solopreneurs turn their skills into sustainable businesses. The problem, she says, isn’t that there’s a lot going on, but that we allow the discussion to end there.

“It’s the way we often talk about fear,” she says. “We’ll say I can’t do ‘x’ because I’m afraid, and then we leave it at that! Do we ever ask what we’re overwhelmed by? Not always.”

Ilise uses the metaphor of a smorgasbord, which gives you an entire spread of things to choose from. “You actually don’t need everything there,” she says. “You only need to figure out what will be useful to you.”

Try This Instead:

Name it. Try writing it out — my favorite method for seeing the patterns and the thoughts laid bare.

PROMPT #1: What is overwhelming me right now? Make a list, dump it out, enumerate all the ways and then just look at it, without judgment or criticism. It’s a lot.

PROMPT 2: Why would I do that? On that list are no doubt a ton of obligations—and a few “shoulds.” Ask yourself, what if that item or issue had to make a case for itself? What if rather than innocent until proven guilty, every one of them was guilty of sucking time, unless it can prove otherwise?

For Ilise, the key deciding factor is whether or not this option helps her get closer to where she wants to go.

Does she always know specifically where she wants to be? No, but she has a general sense of direction, and so she can feel it when a request or opportunity feels misaligned.

Remember, the smorgasbord can’t “tell” you what you should eat. It’s job is to overwhelm you with options. It’s your job to choose. And choosing is a great skill to have. Limits are not all bad. For example, limits can actually help spark creativity.

Question #2: How clear am I being with other people?

Who said it? Oprah maybe? We teach people how to treat us. So while yes, we are encultured to be compliant, to work harder, to get more done, the fact is, we do play a role in providing our own “manuals.”

If you’re the one who always says yes, always stays late, never says no, then you may very well end up with a lot of unpaid, thankless work to deal with. Maybe the people who gave it to you are insensitive. Or, maybe you never spoke up and asked for what you wanted. Maybe both.

You don’t have to have a big confrontation. How do you move a river? A pebble at a time. As you create stronger boundaries to defend the things you actually need and want to focus on, your behavior will reflect it, and, well, you may cease to be as available as you once were.

Try This Instead:

PROMPT: What will I look back on and wish I had done more of, 20, 30 years from now? It may seem dark, but fact is, time is limited, and what you care about matters. Your life and your time matter.

“Today is all we’ve got,” Ilise says. “What are you going to do?”

Question #3: How clear am I being with myself?

I used to hate when people asked me what I want. I don’t know! Anything is fine. Yeah, no it’s not. But I was afraid to claim what I wanted, and figured I’d take whatever came along. There’s a difference between being open-minded and being…rudderless with no vision or purpose. And rudderless sucked.

I’ve found this with my client work, too. If a client doesn’t know why they’re sharing or selling or speaking, it’s really hard to apply any of the tactics of doing it well.

What helped them, and me, is walking through a values exercise. Think you “already know” what your values are? That’s what I thought too! The process I use is powerful. It’s language-driven (not big-idea driven), and helps you get real granular about it in ways we rarely do.

When I was developing my new self-paced program, which helps people let go of old baggage and rewrite their rules I knew I had to include a module on values, for this very reason.

Try This Instead:

PROMPT: Write about a time when someone impressed you. Maybe it was a job interview, or a date. Or you observed someone’s behavior and they didn’t know you were watching. Set the scene. What happened? What did they do? What did you do? Give yourself 5 minutes.

…What you just did was use a story to get at a truth about your values. Through that perspective, what other insights does that give you into your own life?

If you liked this exercise, and this approach to gaining insight into what makes you tick, you’ll LOVE my new program, Breakthrough.