Over the Overwhelm

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• Stress and Eating Habits
• 7 Energy-Boosting Habits for Career Women
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Full Episode Transcript:

Over the Overwhelm

Hi, welcome to the podcast. Are you over the overwhelm? I would imagine so. I was so over the overwhelm just a couple of years ago and I decided that because I was over the overwhelm I was going to make that happen. So, I’m going to share with you how exactly to make that happen in your life as a busy career woman.

So, what does overwhelm have to do with eating habits and weight loss anyway? It has lots to do with eating habits and weight loss, particularly eating habits. And it has lots to do with career women, so the next 20 minutes or so will be life-changing if you are someone who feels stuck in overwhelm sometimes or oftentimes.

Overwhelm is simply a feeling or emotion in your body. It is created by your thoughts. Something that you are thinking. So, you’ll have a thought about something or maybe even someone and that thought will create the feeling of overwhelm in your body. Overwhelm does not feel good.

So that in itself is enough of a reason to want to be over the overwhelm, right? To get rid of that feeling of overwhelm. Especially if you feel this frequently. I’m sure you’d rather feel other feelings than overwhelm. And overwhelm does not lead to good actions that propel you forward toward your goals. So, it’s really not a useful feeling.

How it has to do with eating habits is that overwhelm can be a source of emotional eating since overwhelm is a feeling/emotion. Your brain wants to get rid of the discomfort of the overwhelm by eating, which can provide that short-term pleasure, that short-term relief of the discomfort of the overwhelm.

How overwhelm also comes into play with eating habits and weight loss is that when you are feeling overwhelm in your body, your brain wants to make easy choices and sort of take the easy way out. So, when it comes to choosing food to eat, your brain is going to want to choose the convenient food which may not be the healthiest food.

Also, because overwhelm doesn’t feel good and your brain likes to avoid discomfort (again think emotional eating), it’ll typically try to counteract the discomfort with some sort of pleasure like something sweet, salty or savory. Typically, those higher calorie foods that aren’t really great for you.

If you feel overwhelmed frequently, it may be leading to poor eating habit choices frequently. And if you’re trying to lose weight, those poor eating habit choices are not going to help with that.

Feeling overwhelmed is also considered to be a high emotional state and when you’re in a high emotional state your intelligence is lessened. Meaning your decision-making and critical thinking is less than it would be if you are not in that high emotional state. That state of feeling overwhelmed.

So, if you’re wanting to be deliberate and make healthier food choices in the moment, being in a state of overwhelm is not going to help.

Also, when you’re feeling overwhelmed, you’re going to be much less likely to make some time for yourself to maybe do things like exercise which can help with weight loss. You may get less sleep because you are trying to do more to make yourself feel less overwhelmed. Poor sleep can contribute to weight gain.

Additionally, when you’re feeling overwhelmed, your body is in a state of stress so cortisol levels (cortisol is a hormone associated with stress) increase, which also leads to weight gain.

The good news is that overwhelm is something that can be decreased simply by making little shifts in your thinking. And I’m going to tell you how to do this in this podcast episode.

The first step is to just decide that you’re going to be over the overwhelm. Just decide that it’s as good as done.

Now of course, it’s not just going to go away 100% immediately. But, if you decide right now that you’re going to be over the overwhelm and believe that to be true, you will have more success with it.

Get a little bit excited about being over the overwhelm. Think about how much lighter you’ll feel. Think about how healthier eating habits will be easier for you. And if you’re trying to lose weight, how decreasing that overwhelm can help you lose weight.

Also, just think about the improvement in how you’ll feel and your quality of life from that. So, get yourself excited and committed, just by telling yourself that you’re going to be over the overwhelm and that’s it.

Okay next, think back to the last time that you felt overwhelmed. What did you feel overwhelmed about? Typically, your answer will be some sort of a situation or maybe even a person.

Let’s just say that it was your work schedule or work tasks last Monday. What were you thinking that then created the feeling of overwhelm? For example, were you thinking “I have so much to do and I don’t think I’m going to finish it”?

Or were you may be thinking something like, “My boss is going to fire me if I don’t get all this work done on time”? Only you know what the thought was, and if you can’t recall exactly, take your best guess.

What you’re going to do next is poke holes in this thought. That just means seeing if this thought is really 100% true. Our brain likes to believe the thought is 100% true, but almost always, it’s not.

Even if it were 100% true, thinking it is still creating a feeling of overwhelm, which is not going to be a helpful emotion.

When people feel overwhelmed, they also tend to just sit in this emotion and don’t move from there. It’s very easy to just be engulfed in this feeling of overwhelm and feel stuck. Like I said, it’s a high emotional state, so your ability to make decisions and critically think lessons. So it’s very easy to just feel stuck in it.

So, you poke holes in the thought that led to the feeling of overwhelm in your body. You ask yourself is this thought 100% true. You’ll generally find that it’s not. But even if you feel that it is 100% true, you could still do the next step.

The next step is going to be thinking of a little bit of a shift in this thought that creates a different feeling than overwhelm. A little bit better feeling than overwhelm. It doesn’t have to be a positive feeling or emotion, but even if it’s just an emotion that is more neutral. Neutral meaning not heavily negative or positive. So, the feeling of acceptance can be more of a neutral feeling. Maybe erring on the side of more positive.

Let’s do an example up until this step. We’re going to take that thought “my boss is going to fire me if I don’t get all this work done on time.” Is this 100% true? Can you guarantee that your boss will fire you if you don’t get all the work done on time?

If the answer is no, sometimes that we’ll just help you feel better and less overwhelmed. But then you can go a step further and think of a little bit of a shift in that thought that creates a better feeling than overwhelm.

Maybe something like “My boss may not be happy if I don’t get all this work done on time, but even if I don’t, I know I did good quality work.”

And when you have a thought like that, doesn’t that feel so much better? And if you were to name that feeling that that thought creates, it might be something like acceptance or it may be something like confidence, confidence that you know you’re going to do good quality work even if it doesn’t all get done on time.

And when you are able to tackle the tasks with the thought and feeling like this, you’re going to be less likely to go to the break room and eat the brownies because of the overwhelm right? You’re going to be more likely to be able to make better eating habit decisions for that day because you’re not feeling so stressed and overwhelmed and in this heightened state where you feel like you can’t even think.

You’ll be able to do your work and keep your personal goals in mind throughout the day. You may even find that you do have time to go for that 15-minute walk to Enjoy nature and move your body.

You’ll probably be able to sleep better. You’ll most likely remember to stay hydrated throughout the day while you’re doing the work. Those things can all help with weight loss. They also help you feel good and feel healthier. Despite the circumstance of the workload or the work schedule.

Because you’re not having a thought that the circumstance is terrible and overwhelming. You’re not feeling completely overwhelmed.

And once you start getting into the habit of just noticing when you’re in that feeling of overwhelm and asking yourself what thought you’re having that’s making you feel overwhelmed, you’ll gain that awareness that the overwhelm isn’t really created by the busy work schedule. It’s created from your thought that you’re having about that busy work schedule.

So, once you see that it’s your thought that’s creating the feeling of overwhelm, you’ll have so much more control over the overwhelm. And then you can actually get over the overwhelm. First you take that thought and poke holes at it by asking if it’s 100% true.

You then shift that thought a little bit, or reframe the thought, you may have heard that term. But make sure that you also believe what you shifted to.

For example, if you had the thought “I have so much work to do today,” and that’s creating a feeling of overwhelm for you, you don’t want to shift that thought to “I have no work to do today,” if that’s not true.

But here are a few examples of what you can shift that to that will create a better feeling, not a feeling of overwhelm. You can shift that to “I have work to do today.” Just removing “so much” from the sentence, makes it feel better, right?

When you think a thought “I have work to do today” instead of I have so much work to do today, it’ll create a feeling that’s different than overwhelm, a feeling that feels better than overwhelm.

You could also shift the thought to “I have so much work to do today, but I know I can handle it all.” This thought might create a feeling of confidence, assuredness, or even faith. Faith in yourself that you’ll get it done.

Another example of a shift for that thought is “This work isn’t a problem. I’ve done it before.” Doesn’t that make it feel so much more doable?

Okay, let’s do something a little bit more specific to eating habits and weight loss. Let’s just say that you’ve decided that you want to lose 30 pounds. You start thinking about the things that you think you might have to do to lose 30 pounds. And maybe you’re starting to feel overwhelmed. You don’t know where to start. You fear that you might have to eliminate all the foods that you enjoy. You fear that you might have to exercise vigorously for an hour every day and you hate exercise.

Isolate the thought that is causing the overwhelm first. It might be something like “There’s just so much and I don’t know where to start.” By the way, this is the advantage of working you and I working together in a coach-client relationship. Everything feels very doable. It’s not overwhelming and you have guidance until you learn how to do it on your own, and it becomes habit.

So we’ll take that thought, “There’s just so much and I don’t know where to start,” and let’s just pretend that that’s creating that feeling of overwhelm in you. That feeling of overwhelm is making it so that you don’t even want to start. It’s forming all this resistance in your brain because of that thought. And then you’re stuck in that overwhelm and not moving forward. So that’s why we want to get out of this feeling of overwhelm.

First, like I mentioned earlier, I recommend trying to poke some holes in this thought if you can. So you can ask yourself is this 100% true? Is it possible that maybe you do know where to start? If you were to take your best guess.

Or if you were to decide to pick one small thing to start with and go from there. Because often, it’s that first step that is the hardest. After that, you find that it’s much easier. It’s just that resistance that our brain has for doing something new or different. That resistance makes it feel impossible sometimes to get started.

So sometimes just poking some holes in that original thought that was causing the feeling of overwhelm can make you feel better. Because it brings awareness to the fact that that thought is not necessarily 100% true.

The next thing you’ll do is to shift that thought. It can be something like “All I need to do is just pick one little thing to start with.”

Now, whatever thought you shift to, just make sure that that feels at least partially true to you. Because if it doesn’t, you’ll have a hard time feeling a better feeling. You’re just going to feel like you don’t believe it.

So, if you shift to a thought that you do not believe one bit, that’s just going to create a feeling of disbelief.

Now maybe disbelief feels a little bit better than feeling overwhelmed, but disbelief isn’t necessarily going to help you take the actions that will bring you closer to your goals.

Therefore, you really want to try to shift the original thought to something that is at least partially believable to you. That way, it creates a feeling other than overwhelm and other than disbelief.

Make sense?

So, with the thought “All I need to do is just pick one little thing to start with,” what feeling do you think that might create in your body? Something certainly better than overwhelm, right? Maybe something like capable or confidence.

Do you think the thought all I need to do is just pick one little thing to start with and that makes you feel capable, what do you think will end up happening? You’ll probably end up taking action by picking one little thing to start with and going from there.

Rather than having that thought “There’s just so much and I don’t know where to start”, causing a feeling of overwhelm, causing you to just sit in overwhelm not actually take action. And if you don’t take action then of course you’re not going to get the eating habit or weight loss results that you want.

So, give it a try. If you need help with eating habits and weight loss, whether it be your thoughts, feelings, or actions, that’s where I can help you. We work on all of it in a very doable, non-overwhelming way, so that you become the person who no longer has bad eating habits, who loves her eating habits and who loses weight naturally, if weight loss is a goal.

And if you don’t have a goal of weight loss, we just work on the eating habit portion of it, making sure that you are feeding your body really well. And you’re eating for the reasons you want to be eating. You’re not causing any negative results with what, how much, or why you’re eating.

You’re developing eating habits that will provide lifelong benefits and can even fight disease and prolong your life.

If you want to find out more about how I can help you specifically, let’s meet via zoom or on the phone, for a free consult. I’ll take the time to listen and ask questions about where you’re currently at and where you want to be, and then I’ll tell you precisely how we can get you there together. And then you decide if you want to make that happen. Easy as that.

So, schedule your free consult at https://katemjohnston.com/consult.

Thanks for listening in, and I’ll talk with you next week.