What procrastination and overwhelm really need

How are you today?

Productivity experts say to break big tasks into little pieces. Work the 25 minute pomodoro method! But what if you can’t even get yourself to sit down and do the task? What if you are an expert in avoidance mode?

What if breaking it down into little tasks makes you imagine that you yourself are breaking down? Or the idea of working in short spurts fills you with a nebulous horror?

We can’t do all of these practical and logical tasks when we are still in the thick of overwhelm. Our brains don’t work like that. We are emotion-driven creatures; we generate emotion on a regular basis, on a moment by moment basis, all range of emotions – and this is normal! All emotions are normal for us to feel – anger, fear, despair, joy, love, loneliness, grief. 

Emotions are so misunderstood in our lives, because they feel uncontrollable, so we work to suppress, escape, control them. When really all they want is to be seen, to be heard, to be felt. 

And the reason we want to feel, hear and see them – is so they stop making our life veer off course on such a regular persistent basis. 

It’s not that we are pessimistic people, or lazy, or procrastinators. None of these are concepts I buy into because when we look at why we delay, why we leave things to the last minute, why we get totally overwhelmed by the tasks we need to, there is always, always, always emotion driving our behaviour.

When we examine the feelings that are stopping us take action – when we deeply look at what is really going on for us, then we can actually work through those feelings – and that’s when we can get ourselves into a position where we can naturally get things done. We naturally turn into the most productive and efficient versions of ourselves. No life hacks required.

What stops us is that, firstly, we may not even be aware we are having feelings, and secondly, most of us haven’t grown up in a way where working with our emotions feels comfortable and possible.

When fear strikes – many of us might try to escape from it, shutting down until it goes away or forcing ourselves to try to overcome it.

When anger strikes – we might try to control what’s happening in our world, the people or situations. Or we might fall into endless loops of rage in our head.

When despair or loneliness strikes we might try to become overly busy so we don’t ever stop to really experience our sad tender hearts, or we might just slump into mists of melancholy and just sit it out until it lifts.

Emotions are meant to be felt. Emotions are containers of information, they share with us our unmet needs, they communicate to us on a deep level what we need more of in our lives. 

Emotions want to be seen, felt and heard – but for many of us sitting with a feeling feels so alien and so uncomfortable we’d rather escape them by going on social media, or with food, or to try and reason with our feelings by talking it through, or maybe by totally disconnecting from our feelings and thinking there are none there. 

We often don’t look at our deeper emotions, because we have this idea that to open that door, is to open the flood gates, and then it will unleash too much emotion.

But the thing to know, too, is that when we don’t look at emotions – when we try to keep them out of our vision – they’re always pushing us to come back in, and then they start to control how we behave on a daily basis. They start to control how we make decisions, what we don’t do and what we do, and how we do it. 

It’s like not fixing a tiny rip in our clothes. The more we go about our lives, the more that tiny rip will start to tear, and tear more, and then we try to move differently just so that we can try and stop the growing tear from getting bigger.

When we look at emotion, when we stop and say – you know what,  I can see you, I can look at you, I can be with you, often the sensation of the emotion can rise. It can feel like a wave coming up in our body as we start to give it the attention it wants. And then it will start to reduce, it will go up, and go down. It will go up, and go down. 

When we look at emotion we want to be very gentle and tender with ourselves. I am not in the practice of throwing ourselves in at the deep end with coercion or force. Locking yourself in a dark room and ‘feeling the fear’. For me that doesn’t benefit our whole being and help us build a more positive, trusting and loving relationship with ourselves. 

So what do we do?

Here’s what we can offer our overwhelm instead:

1. Connect with your body & take a regulating breath

Our bodies will always guide us towards regulation, ease and calm if we know how to read them and take care of them. When we have this rush of emotion that feels too much, it pushes our nervous system into dysregulation and into our emergency survival-state. 

That’s why being overwhelmed feels so awful. We are getting stress chemicals pumped into our body, and our bodies are mobilizing for an emergency – when in fact it’s just too much emotion we are feeling.

So we want to connect to our bodies, we want to guide our bodies and brains out of this emergency state.

One easy and simple way is to do a regulating breath to turn on our parasympathetic nervous system (the rest and digest function that will calm us down).

The regulating breath is simply a very short inhale and a long exhale. And you repeat over and over until you feel that sensation of urgency and emergency has gone. 

2. Get curious about how we feel

When you sense overwhelm, it helps to be curious about what this is feeling like for us. We can ask ourselves – 

• What does your overwhelm look like?
• What does your overwhelm do to you when you’re in it?  Do you work a lot, sleep a lot, get rageful, search for life-long holidays online? 
• Does that feeling of overwhelm slow you down or speed you up?
• What are its qualities? 
• Does it start blaming and judging you or other people for its existence?

We want to do this because we want to start disconnecting from the external stimuli and start to focus on how it’s feeling. Because if we can work on how it’s feeling for us – rather than everything on the outside – we actually get the chance to work with and then move out of overwhelm.

We can then ask ourselves:

• How am I actually feeling? What feelings are showing up here?
• Can you get curious about why you are feeling the way that you are? 
• What feels like it’s at stake by feeling like this? 

When I followed my feelings about a recent spate of overwhelm, here’s what I came up with: 

I am feeling fear, no, actually, terror. I am feeling terror about not getting everything done that I want to get done.

So here I am being curious with myself:

Why am I feeling terror?

If I don’t get everything done, it will cause massive consequences for my work, and jeopardize my work.

OK, and what happens if my work is jeopardized?

Maybe I’ll lose this opportunity and it will really affect my family. 

3. Dig deeper

This is where we can really get to the heart of why this is feeling too much for us. And get to the root of the issue.

I then asked myself:  Have there been times when I have lost work opportunities because I couldn’t get things done in time?

Yes there have, not many but a couple of times things didn’t pan out, and that was terrifying for me. 

Well, that makes sense then doesn’t it – why I am terrified? There is this impending sense of doom. 

My emotions are trying to alert me to some possible future danger. In a simplistic, but inelegant way, they are trying to protect me.

The thing is, though, that the emotions coming up around this are preventing me from getting it done! Which may sound illogical, it may sound like faulty wiring, but it’s not. 

Our emotions are there to guide us, and when we know how to hear what they have to say, it will show us where we need support, and where we need to offer ourselves support. 

We want to pay attention to our feelings so we can give us the deeper support we really need.

4. Offer empathy 

Humans are a lot more logical than we sometimes think or feel. If we are feeling overwhelmed there is a good reason. Case closed. When we follow the feelings we have that have shown up in this bubble of overwhelm, and we follow why we feel like we do, there are always big, valid reasons. 

When we are feeling a rush of emotions, especially big ones like fear and despair, panic and anxiety, we want to take them seriously. We want to offer them a lot of empathy. We want to say – oh, this is tough! To feel all of this! It’s so tough to hold these big, uncomfortable emotions in my body. I am having a hard time with this.

When someone else comes along to us and offers a lot of deep tender and genuine empathy it can feel like an incredibly soothing balm to our wounded soul. When someone understands what we are carrying, they understand why we feel the way that we do, it is just what our emotions want. 

So in this situation I give myself a ton of empathy. I say to myself – you know what, even though this work just looks like a bunch of emails and small tasks, it actually feels like a huge deal to me because it’s reminding me of times when work opportunities fell through and it created jeopardy in my life for myself and my family.

It makes sense I feel overwhelmed! It makes sense I have panic and fear and despair showing up here. Oh Di, love! I am going to support you through this.  

5. Validation 

Offering our emotions and the experiences we are having empathy is like giving them a gigantic hug. It doesn’t take them away, but it stops the fight that we are having with them. It shows them that they can relax, stop shouting at us, and just be there. We’ll allow them to be there, and that is the first step towards releasing them. 

There are no unnecessary emotions expressing meaningless things. Everything has a purpose, everything requires space, and by not invalidating ourselves we give our emotions space to be felt. 

Sometimes you share your anguish with another person and they say – oh, I completely get that! That makes so much sense that you feel like that. 

That validation feels so soothing, right? So we offer that validation to ourselves! That’s how we build more support for ourselves around our emotions. 

So much of our struggle with ourselves is this voice inside of us that is judging and invalidating our experiences. 

• I shouldn’t feel like this!
• I am too old for this, I should know how to deal with this already!
• It’s so stupid to still feel like this

If we are feeling something then it doesn’t matter what we think about that feeling, we are still feeling it. If we can skip all the judgments about that feeling and just get straight to supporting ourselves in that feeling – we gain so much more time and are so much more effective! 

6. Tenderness and support

When we learn to stay with ourselves through the waves of emotion, we give ourselves the kind of deep support that our emotions are so desperately craving. 

When I am feeling all of this mess of fear, anger, despair and sadness I put my hand on my heart and immediately offer myself some physical support through touch.

I talk myself through how it feels, to hold so much emotion in my body.

I give myself deep empathy and understanding.

I validate my feelings.

I allow my feelings.

And by putting my hand on my heart, and giving myself some physical touch (for more than 30 seconds) I start to release some oxytocin, which stops the release of the stress hormone cortisol. 

So often when we are in the midst of being overwhelmed, we feel alone. Like we are the only ones struggling in the way that we are. But we are not alone. Whatever other people present as their experiences and lives, however they feel about what they’re doing, this is often hidden from obvious view.

The reality is that most people struggle with their emotional reactions. Most people don’t know how to walk through the emotions that we feel every day with a sense of calm, trust and loving support. 

We aren’t alone in our struggles, and the sooner we see that we aren’t broken, stressed or people doing it all wrong – we are humans having feelings – the more we can offer ourselves the deepest levels of support possible. 

When we stay with ourselves through all of our feelings, and give ourselves the support that we seek, the emotions have the chance to start to dissipate. Sometimes it happens all at once, sometimes it takes time, a few hours,a few days. Depending on how long we have been carrying these feelings. 

Regardless of how long it takes, when we are gentle but committed, emotions will release when we have given our emotions the space that they need to be seen, felt and heard, they move through us. 

It’s then we have the chance to feel lighter, more clear headed, more free and expansive. 

That’s when we can get to work and tackle whatever comes to us on the road ahead. That’s when we access the part of our brain that is AMAZING at doing tasks, planning, coming up with ideas, and feeling confident in ourselves.

Just like we have a part of our brains that deals with unsafety and threats (our Survival Brain) and a part of our brains that deals with emotion (our Emotional Brain) we also have a part of our brain that is awesome at doing, planning and being generally our most authentic and awesome ourselves. It’s called our Executive Brain, and when we are in it we like ourselves and we like other people – and we are incredibly productive.

In our Executive Brain, we don’t need to force ourselves through tasks that feel difficult. We don’t need to push, control or shame ourselves into doing. In order to get into our Executive Brain, we need instead to tend to ourselves, work with our overwhelm and our emotions, take care of what is pushing us into dysregulation – so that we can get to this brain state where things are naturally effortless.

We all have the ability to access our Executive Brains, where confidence, ideas, a sense of possibility and freedom exists. The challenging part for many of us is that we are so caught up in not knowing how to work with our emotions and this has led to a dysregulated nervous system so that accessing our Executive Brain is an infrequent occurrence.

Some of us have had nervous systems so acutley trained to be constantly dysregulated that we never access our Executive Brains.

But the amazing thing about our brains is we can learn to rewire our responses to our emotions and our constant survival brain activation – our brains can be rewired at any age so that we live more regularly in our Executive Brain.

When we learn how to soothe and calm our nervous systems, when we aren’t being pulled into the urgency of our Survival Brains, and learn to tend to, and work with, the emotions we are carrying – we get to this place naturally and effortlessly.

We get to be that person we dream of – that person we know we are deep down if we could just leave behind the stress, overwhelm, anger, fear, sadness, loneliness or despair.

When we learn how our brains actually work, and what they actually need, this brain state becomes a familiar place we land in, and our lives change naturally for the better.

No force or cajoling, or productivity techniques required.

I would love to know if these ideas and this guidance resonate with you. If overwhelm and procrastination is something that you feel challenged by.

And, of course, if you’d like my assistance in working with any of these issues, if you’d like me to guide you on this rewiring process, and have my unconditional and deeply empathic support, feel free to ask about my coaching and upcoming courses.

I’m always happy to answer questions – it’s always wonderful to hear from you.

Sending you much love,

Diana