Latest / Wanzology / Feeling Overwhelmed
Transcript
- Feeling Overwhelmed La la la la la la la la. La la la la la la la. Welcome to your Wednesday and, another episode of WANZOLOGY!!! I am your host, The Wanz, nd I want to welcome you to another episode of WANZOLOGY. Hope you're doing well. Um, there’s a lot going on, you don't think so? Wow!!! You must have the blessed life because almost everyone I run into has a lot going on. It doesn't matter if you're on or off social media, it doesn't matter if you're politically active or not, you have your life that you live, right? So, I wanted to talk a little bit about when life gets really, really busy. And I mean busy in the sense that you've only got two hands, but you've got like five things you've got to hold. Busy in the sense you have one place to be, but you can only be there for a couple minutes because you have three other places that you need to be right after. Busy in the sense of, you just don't feel like you have very much control over your life. It can be scary. Being overwhelmed is not good and for me, my feelings of being overwhelmed are completely and totally future driven. What's gonna happen? What could happen? These are the things that freak me out the most, not knowing what's gonna happen but imagining what could happen. Do you find yourself anticipating what's going to happen? How far in the future do you anticipate? Minutes? Hours? Days? Months? Years? I said in a prior episode that time is a construct, a construct created by man. Now, it's kind of imaginary in the sense that we don't really notice what's going on with time. We just check in every once in a while, to see what time it is. How long has it been? How long until? These are, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but both of those are mind traps. Meaning, if you are too far forward living in the future, you miss what's going on right now in front of you. If you spend a lot of time trying to repair the past or go back and fix something, you’re not paying attention to what's going on in front of you. I've often quoted the mantra that comes from Ferris Bueller's day off: “Life moves pretty fast. If you don't look around once in a while, you could miss it.” That doesn't mean looking in the past and looking into the future. That just means, where are you? What are you doing? Right now. Right now, I'm sitting in my studio, talking to you. What are you doing? Driving in a car? Walking your walk out for some exercise? Maybe you're passing time at work? Maybe you're cleaning house, it doesn't matter what you're doing. Humans love to challenge themselves. They love to challenge themselves to do as many things as possible at the same time. Why? Because it saves time. That's what we tell ourselves “If I can do this while I'm doing that, I can kick two birds with one stone.”, no. What you're doing is you're dividing your capabilities and the more you divide your capabilities, your attention, the less quality you're going to get from either one of those things you're trying to do. I mean, think about this for a second. Have you ever tried to thread a needle? Threading a needle is not easy. For most people, it is just really, really hard. I've kind of given up on it because my poor old eyes can't see that well, but you know, when you're focusing on that little hair that's hanging off of the thread and that little hole and you're trying to get your depth perception, correct, the amount of force to push it forward through the hole…missed. So, you gotta do it all over again. It can be frustrating after a little while. So many tries, each one a failure. How long do you go until you just say, “Screw it, I'm not gonna do that!”. But while you're focusing on that little, teeny hole and that little, tiny hair, you totally miss everything else that's going on around you. Everything. That's focus. That's the opposite of multitasking. When you're focused on just one thing and that one thing only. Now what would happen if instead of trying to do one thing for five minutes, you did one thing, and then another thing, and then another thing, and then another thing, and lastly, another thing. Each one of those things you did for one minute. So in that same period of time, you could possibly get five things done rather than one. Sounds intriguing, doesn't it? Humans do this all the time. You really just don't think about it. I mean, it's pretty easy when you're driving the car to also be fiddling for a station or rewinding a song or heaven forbid, you'd be texting while trying to find a number to call or adjusting a mirror or looking around, “Oh look, there's that cool looking Lamborghini!” We do it all the time. We do it all the time and we don't get overwhelmed. So, what happens when we get overwhelmed? I have a theory called time compression. Time compression works like this, you can have a certain amount of time to finish a certain amount of things and when one of those things takes longer to do than you anticipate and then it compresses how much time you have to do the other things. So, in the course of a day, say, you wanted to make sure that you got the car washed, you picked up the kids from school, and you took something out of the freezer to the thaw to cook for dinner, and on the way to getting the car washed, you get held up because there was a three car accident and you were held up. Well, that made you late to pick up the kids, and because you didn't think about it, because you didn't think you'd be gone that long, you didn't take something out of the freezer, sooooo you're dialing up Dominoes!! Ha-ha-ha-ha! Time compression is a real thing! When it starts ‘feeling’ like you don't have enough time to do something, or some things. Time compression is an enemy, and I say that because it plays tricks on a mind, well, my mind. Maybe you can relate, but I'm just sharing with you how I've processed this. Time compression fools me into thinking I have less time than I actually have, so I feel like I have to rush, I have to hurry. When in actuality, when I don't do that, I'm accepting that there may be things that I don't get done. Does the world stop revolving because I didn't get stuff done? Nope. Does time stop because I didn't get stuff done? Nope. When I was younger, there was a there was a commercial on television that ran a lot. It was trying to get people of color, brothers and sisters, black folk to go to college and the tagline of the commercial was, “A mind is a terrible thing to waste.” When I got to college, that phrase had to be changed for me because of all the things that my mind put me through, and I was known to say, “Be careful because the mind is a terrible thing!”, and it is!! Inside the four inches between our ears, we live a very conflicted life. Sometimes we are brilliant in problem solving. We are wonderful with our compassion. We are spectacular with our bravery and courage. And then there's the other side of that coin, we’re the opposite of all those things. Our mind is our best friend and our worst enemy. It will encourage us to take a chance, and at the same time, have us considering what failure looks like, how much pain is involved. Now, here's the thing that most people don't realize, most people don't realize that it is possible to control your thoughts. It is possible to notice what you're thinking without acting on what you're thinking. And this leads me to the solution to feeling overwhelmed. Feeling overwhelmed is nothing more than your mind putting all these little things or all these tasks or all these expectations in one spot at the same time, then adds the pressure of you ‘have to’ do this. You ‘have to’, you ‘must’ do these things, when in actuality, you don't. You don't have to do any of them. You don't have to do all of them. You don't have to do just the ones in the middle and the one on the end, but what you do have to do is decide, and this is where the power comes in. How do you eat a pizza? You order a pizza from Pizza Hut or Domino's, it comes to you and you open up the box and it's already cut into slices and you pick up a slice and you do what? Take a bite. You don't pick up the whole pizza, you pick up a slice, and you take a bite, chew, swallow. Take another bite, chew, swallow, maybe have some liquid to help wash it down, and you repeat this until the slice is gone, and depending on your level of hunger, you can pick up another slice, and repeat that process, or not. But the point is, what came to you as a whole pizza pie, nice circle or square or whatever, once you eat a slice or two, well, there's less of it. Now, can you imagine taking that kind of thought path with what you have to do? What tasks you're trying to accomplish? Feeling overwhelmed is nothing more than feeling like everything is happening all at once. Since time is a human construct, is it possible that you could slow time down? Yes, it is. It is possible, and what's really funny is that time doesn't actually do anything. It just is, as the saying goes. “Time waits for no man”, (or woman, or anything else, for that matter). It's always moving forward but we as humans, because we control the construct of time, we can manipulate our perception of time. Earlier I said, you have one thing, and you have five minutes to do it in. But what if you took one thing, and another thing, and another thing, and another thing, and another thing, and did five things a minute for each, and now you've done five things when you could have done one thing for five minutes. Now, it, it may be tough to get your mind around, but nobody said that it had to be complicated. Nobody said that it had to be intense, whatever these ‘things’ are. Here's the perfect example, most people have a dishwasher, and in that dishwasher, when the dishes are done, you gotta put them away. So where do you start? Plates? Bowls? Cups? I don't know about you, but I usually leave the silverware for last. And the question I pose to myself is, “How much time does it take me to put away each thing?”, and then, “Can I put away the silverware in less time than it took me to do any one of the others? Can I put away all the knives, spoons, forks? Can I put all that stuff away in less time than it took me to put away all the cups? Or all the saucers? Or all the bowls?” So see what I did there? I paid attention to how long ‘something’ takes to do. If you have four bowls, three knives, two forks, and whatever, you kind of have an idea of how long it'll take to put these things away. And the nice little game is, it seemed like it took this much to put all the plates and saucers away. It seemed like it took this much to put all the coffee cups away, seems like this much time it took to put the bowls away. Okay, I kind of understand how long that was for each of them. Now, got all the silverware and ready, set, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding!!! And when you're done, did it feel like you took less time to put away the silverware than it took you to put away any one of the other things? That little process, that little perception of time exercise can be applicable to almost everything that is going on or will be going on in your life. So, when you're feeling overwhelmed, my suggestion is first Once you recognize that you're being overwhelmed or you feel overwhelmed, stop. Just step to the side of whatever flow of ‘traffic’ you're in, in your head, step to the side and take a couple of deep breaths. Taking a couple of deep breaths, just to get yourself a little less activated. So that you have a clear evaluation of what are the things that you'd ‘like’ to do, and notice I said, ‘liked’ to do. I didn't say ‘had’ to do. When you change your perception of tasks, instead of ‘have tos’, you say ‘get to’ or ‘would like to’, it takes a hell of a lot of pressure off of you ‘TO do’! Once you have a few of them organized, not all of them, just a couple. You can step back into whatever you stepped out of and focus on those two things and then move on. Now you can have them in groups of threes, you can have them in groups of twelves, you can have them in groups of one. The point is, the prep work involves stepping out of that overwhelmed feeling and calming yourself enough that you can better evaluate what the hell you're doing. Feeling overwhelmed is nothing more than your brain overloading what it thinks you're capable of. Too many things, not enough time. Too many hands, too many plates to keep in the air. Not enough time, too many places to be. But remember, “The mind is a terrible thing!”, that you control!! And if you can control your mind, you can control your perception of time. So, next time that you're feeling “Oh my God!!”, and you're all stressed out, take three to five really deep breaths, maybe with your eyes closed very slowly, and then go back to what you were thinking right before you took those breaths, then just pick one, one thing, because one thing will always lead to another. Nobody does just one thing and then that's it. That's not how humans work. Try it, try it with something simple and the thing that you have to remember is you control your mind. I'd be really interested to hear what happens…what happens if you try this look up WANZLOLOGY on Instagram and it doesn't matter what's posted there, leave a comment or send a message saying, “I tried your little mind experiment and this is what happened…”, I’d really love to hear how it goes. If you're feeling overwhelmed, don't worry, you're going to get through it. Think about it, you felt like this before, you already know what to do and especially, you know what NOT to do!! That's the benefit of experience. Cool. I'm out. I will see you next week. Please do your best to take care of each other because each other is all we got!! Ciao for now.