What to do when overwhelm strikes
One of the most common struggles I see creatives having and hear from my clients is overwhelm. Creative work involves so many different skills to learn and so many things to do, and there’s a plethora of advice out there contradicting each other.
Add to that all of your own ideas and inspirations and you have the recipe for a nice and big bout of overwhelm making it really hard to move forward.
When there’s so much to do, where do you even begin?
Too many ideas, too much advice, too much to do
We all know the feeling of overwhelm, don’t we? There’s just too much. It can strike when you’re about to start something new, you realise you’re standing in front of a mountain and climbing it seems impossible.
Or it strikes when you’re in the messy middle of a project, when you’re trying to handle 15 things at once while trying to remember all the advice you read and you also just had a great new idea.
I have gotten overwhelmed in the process of writing my novel many times. It’s such a huge project, writing a book, that each step feels tiny and the whole road way too long. But I also get overwhelmed whenever I pile on too much on my plate and I try to do it all.
Overwhelm happens when we’re trying to keep too much in our grip at once. And what we really need to do is put down some of the things so we can focus on just the essential.
Now, Later, Maybe, Never
An exercise I like to do when I’m overwhelmed is what I call the Now, Later, Maybe, Never exercise. The reason behind overwhelm is often the feeling that you have to do everything and your have to do it right now.
Here’s a secret: you don’t. Actually, you can’t, so it doesn’t matter if you want to or feel like you have to - it’s beyond possibility.
So what we have to do is divide the things into what you’re actually going to do now, and what you aren’t.
Write everything down. All your ideas, the things you think you should do, the work you have ahead of you. Write it down on a piece of paper.
Make four columns. Take a new paper and divide it into four parts. Name them Now, Later, Maybe and Never.
Arrange your tasks. The ideas you like but aren’t sure of, you put in Maybe. The advice you keep hearing but really don’t want to do can go in Never. And the things you actually want to do, you divide between Now and Later.
The goal here is to not have everything in the Now column, so if you feel you’ve put too much there give the list another consideration. Just one item can be well enough as a start.
Focus on one step and forget everything else
When we’re overwhelmed, we often have the feeling that we don’t want to forget all the things we’re trying to keep track of.
But I encourage forgetting. Writing things down is a way to record everything you want to do, that allows you to forget about them until it’s the right time. Just save the list and revisit it now and then.
Take what you wrote in your Now column and make it your whole focus. If you feel the need, you can order the tasks in the Later column too so you have a rough plan how you’ll move forward after this phase.
It’s okay to go slow and simple
Creating something takes time. Sometimes longer than we would like it to do. Would I have liked to finish my novel in a year? Sure. But that’s not the way I write, and it’s not realistic when considering everything else in my life. So instead, it is taking me a couple of years. And that’s okay.
We don’t have to do everything the “experts” say we should do. Neither do we have to be done quickly - because if we’re honest with ourselves, what does it really matter if it takes a little longer?
It’s okay to go slower and to do less. It doesn’t make you less of a creative. In fact, you’ll likely create better when you don’t have to battle overwhelm every step of the way.
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