#290| The One Question That Tells You If You're Dealing With Stress or Real Overwhelm [Overwhelm, People Pleasing, Productivity, Time Management]

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When you listen today, you'll learn the one question that tells you if you're dealing with stress or real overwhelm.
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You're listening to Overwhelmed Working Woman, the podcast that helps you be more calm and more productive by doing less.
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I'm your host, Michelle Gauthier, a former Overwhelmed Working Woman and current life coach.
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On this show, we unpack the stress and pressure that today's Working Woman experiences.
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And in each episode, you'll get a strategy to bring more calm, ease, and relaxation to your life.
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Hi, friend.
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Thanks for joining today.
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Today we're going to talk about the difference and similarities between stress and overwhelm.
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Here's why this actually matters.
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I learned this concept from the book that I have reviewed on here, Brene Brown's Atlas of the Heart, that gives a definition for every feeling.
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Okay, maybe not every feeling, but most of the main feelings.
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And the point of that book, which I totally agree with, is if you can identify the feeling that you're in, you can understand yourself better and take the right action based on the feeling that you're having.
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Stress and overwhelm often get synced together, or we may talk about them at the same time.
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Regarding my coaching, I talk about them as two separate things, but they can feel really similar in the moment.
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When you listen today, you'll learn the real difference between stress and overwhelm and why one of them can be helpful, why the tools that work on stress don't work on overwhelm, no matter how hard you try.
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And one quick question you can ask yourself to know exactly which one you're dealing with.
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Okay, so let's talk first about stress.
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Stress is your body's reaction to a change or a challenge.
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And stress isn't automatically bad.
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For example, if I look at my day today, I had a class that I taught, and that was a stressor, but the stress helped me be really prepared for it and spend a long time putting together a class that I felt was really good.
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And I felt a little stressed because I had a lot of work to finish up, and I also had to pick my daughter up at 4:15 from her golf practice.
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That stress helped me work efficiently and made sure that I left the house on time.
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So stress can be helpful and even motivating.
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Overwhelm is what happens when multiple stressors pile up faster than you can process or recover from them.
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It's not the one class or presentation, it's the presentation.
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Plus, your kid is struggling at school, plus you're hosting company this weekend, plus you're behind on something else at work, plus your house is a mess.
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And none of those are single isolated stressors anymore.
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They're stacking on each other, and that's what turns ordinary stress into overwhelm.
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That distinction changes the way that you should think about it and what you should do because stress responds to pushing through.
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Stress is helpful when you're trying to push through and get something done.
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You can feel stressed about that presentation and still nail it.
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The stress doesn't stop you, it just makes you feel it.
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Overwhelm doesn't work that way.
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You really can't just push through overwhelm the way you push through stress because there's no single thing to push through.
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It's not one obstacle in front of you.
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It's five things pressing in from every direction at once.
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And when you feel overwhelmed, your brain is usually very fuzzy.
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Mine always feels like it's spinning.
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And so it's very hard to have clear thoughts and make a good plan about what to do next.
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When you try to power through overwhelm, what my clients most often report is when they have felt overwhelmed for a week that they have gotten nothing done because they can't think clearly and make a plan and take action on something like you can when you have a stressor.
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If you have the feeling of stress, you might go looking for stress solutions.
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You could have another cup of coffee or tell yourself to just focus and stay up a little bit later to get through your list.
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But there really is no powering through overwhelm like you can do with a single stressor.
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A great question to ask yourself to try to decide which one you're actually in is is this one thing or is this multiple things?
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And if it's one thing and you have stress about that one thing, a little pressure might even help you rise to it and get it done.
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If it's a whole bunch of things landing on you at once and you can't tell which one to tackle first, that's overwhelm.
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And no amount of pushing through is going to fix that.
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The fix isn't more effort, it's fewer things piling up.
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I picture it like if a stress is somebody setting a piece of paper on your desk, that's a to-do.
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Overwhelm is having like 16 pieces of paper flying at your desk and you can't read them fast enough to decide what to do with them and pass them on.
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So if you realize from asking yourself, is this one thing or is this five things?
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And I can't process those five things quickly enough to handle them, you're probably in overwhelm.
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And if that's the case, it's good to just tell yourself, okay, I know what this is.
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This is overwhelm.
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And pushing through overwhelm does not work.
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One when you're in overwhelm is to gently get yourself out of that overwhelm so that you can begin to work on one thing at a time.
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A thought that helps me make that transition is I'm going to figure out the very next thing that I need to do.
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And if I'm too overwhelmed to figure out what that thing is, I just pick any of them.
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So in my example, I said 16 different people put a task on your desk, just grab one of them and say, okay, this is where I'm going to start.
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And when you can get back into that kind of energy, then you're able to have clear thinking.
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Other ideas that you could do is you could get up and take a walk and try to reset your brain, just walk away from the situation for a little while.
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But when you diagnose yourself as being in overwhelm, the first thing to do is to shift into a different feeling because you can't make forward progress when you're in overwhelm.
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If you found yourself nodding along to this episode and thinking, yeah, that's been happening to me, I'd love to help you figure out exactly what's piling up and how to bring it back down to a realistic level that you can deal with.
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You can head to the link in the show notes to set up a free discovery session with me to learn about one on one coaching.
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I would love to talk to you.
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Thank you for listening to the Overwhelmed Working Woman podcast.
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If you want to learn more about my work, head over to my website at MichelleGauthier.com.
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See you next week.