Have you ever felt overwhelmed?
If you haven’t, you’re doing better than me. Just the other day, I was spinning so many plates it felt like my brain was on fire (and not in a good way).
I pushed away from my desk, stood up, walked out of my office and paced the hallway. If I happened to snatch a couple starburst for some kind of sugar rush, don’t judge me. And that was a good day.
Other days, I have felt so overwhelmed I had mental images of shoving everything off my desk into the floor, setting it all on fire then walking out the door. At which point, I would beg to be taken into the witness protection program, move to Tahiti, change my name and hair then set up a beachside hut selling seashell necklaces to tourists (steel drum music in background and frozen margs in my mini-fridge).
I’ve put a lot of thought into this. Can you tell?
An overwhelm analogy I have found helpful and shared with my patients/clients is focused on a canoe.
Imagine you are sitting in a canoe in the middle of a vast lake. In the canoe with you are boxes of various sizes and weights. As you glance down, you notice your feet are underwater and there is more water coming into the canoe, sloshing around your ankles. If you don’t do something fast, you and your canoe will be submerged, headed to the bottom of the lake.
(Does that drowning sensation feel familiar? As if you’re trying to fight your way to the surface but someone has you by the ankle?)
The boxes in your canoe represent all the various responsibilities/tasks/expectations in your life. Your choice is throw some overboard or drown. Here’s the good news: they all float and you have a long-handled net snapped into the canoe with you to use at any time you wish to retrieve them.
So, you toss out the boxes that can wait and the boxes that aren’t that important right now. You do that to survive. Once you’ve had time to manage the more important and time-contingent ones, then you unsnap your net, reach out to retrieve a few of the floating boxes and plop them back into the canoe.
You can deal with them now. And you’re alive to do it.
Is your canoe taking on water? Do you feel it sloshing around your ankles? What boxes can you toss overboard for awhile? They’ll be there when you’re ready to pull them back in.
