Overwhelm and freeze are two different words but they feel like the same to me. When I’m overwhelmed, I just can’t get myself to do anything as if I’m frozen in space and time. Any action feels like the wrong action to take, and even if I get the ball rolling I keep looking at all the distance I have to roll to finish which freezes me even further.
I feel powerless against the overwhelming force that pressures me, telling me “YOU NEED TO DO ALL OF THIS!”. When I remember my days of inaction I remember overwhelm a lot, so it makes sense that much of the results from the Procrastination Quiz reveal that people are Overwhelmed Procrastinators.
The approach I could take here is to talk about how you can deal with the overwhelm. But if I just told you that, I think I’m helping you be more reactive to overwhelm. Don’t get me wrong, that’s not a bad skill to have. It’s just that I would rather have you be proactive about removing reasons to feel overwhelmed.
I think we get overwhelmed because of two primary reasons and one secondary reason.
ASAP
When we have 100 things to do, or when our one thing to do requires 100 steps, we fall into this unconscious contract with ourselves that say “thou shalt do all of this as soon as possible”. As ridiculous as this might sound to your unconscious, there is no real reason why everything needs to be done as soon as possible.
Of course, there are deadlines and factors that make urgency an actual issue. Sometimes we DO have to do a lot of things in a short amount of time. The thing is, we extend this line of thought to do EVERYTHING as soon as possible because our value systems typically tend to reward fast execution time and throughput.
Moreover, yes — sometimes some things have to be done by a certain time. But does it really HAVEto be? What I mean is, will it bend the space-time continuum and make the universe collapse if we fail to do a task by a certain time?
We avoid this possibility like the plague and would do anything to avoid this situation. But unfortunately, the more reasons you have to avoid something the more you fall into participating in a strong binary that makes life a black-or-white win-or-lose game.
Outside of this need to comply to deadlines and that thought habit sticking, another common reason to feel overwhelmed is because…
Default to Idle
We want to go to a state where we’re DONE with things to do. We want to clean our plate and be DONE. We want to be able to FINALLY relax. Whew! All the ducks are in order, the mailbox is empty, dishes are drying, we just would love to be in that state.
Don’t get me wrong, I love being in that state too. My entire life was a list of things to complete before I can be happy. Graduate high school! Go to college! Go to army! Get married! Get a job! Get a green card! Get a citizenship! But I realized that happiness still wouldn’t come because there would always be the next thing to do.
Even if I get to a state of being done with things and I can idle, there is always the next thing to do. So when do I finally get done with everything? Well, I would have to die.
Do I live to die? Or is the purpose of life to simulate dying? Because that was what I was doing with my life unconsciously.
I want to finish things fast so that I can go to idling as soon as possible. When there are so many things to do, it makes me bite my nail because I can tell that I won’t be able to go idle for the next few days. And I downplay it with words but boy, that feels fucking horrible.
Viewing life as something that can only be savored in rest and peace gives us too little opportunities to live. Life is a series of days where we get to live it. By seeing life as a continuous opportunity to do things, some things we like and some things we don’t like, we get a more realistic representation of life and we get to take tasks as an ordinary element of life like eating or sleeping.
ADHD
The last piece that makes overwhelm an unwelcome participant in your life: neurodiversity, and particularly ADHD. Turns out, when your brain is spicy in a certain way you literally cannot space things out. Sometimes you don’t even need a 100 things to overwhelm you, your brain will just look at one thing to do and go “GAAAHHH!!!!!”.
We have options. Some ADHDers have great success with medication. Some ADHDers optimize their life around their brain patterns to take care of a lot of things with great hyperfocus then take a big break to recover. The fact that there is no one way for ADHD and action to exist means one core message I want to tell you: even if you have ADHD and a lot of things to do, you deserve to be happy.
Finding happiness is worthwhile regardless of your neurodiversity. When you are happy with yourself then it doesn’t matter how many tasks you have at hand. But on the way to finding happiness you can work with your brain as a partner on finding a good way to get things done together.
(by the way, the title is a cheat code in the classic game Starcraft lol)
Whether you’re able to catch overwhelm prior to it happening or not, you can get to a state of doing things effortlessly. Let’s talk about how to get to doing things in my workshop at 3PM on May 30th, 2025 at Valley Hot Yoga in Woodland Hills, CA!
