The other day I wrote about how I spotted a feeling of overwhelm that turned out to have very little to do with all the things I had on my plate, and a very lot to do with how I was relating to thought in that moment.
You can catch up with it here, if you missed it:
Giles P Croft
Which paints the notion of boundaries in a bit of a different light, doesn’t it?
Because if an overwhelmed feeling is a reflection of overwhelmed thought (the two are indivisible), then surely these boundaries we’re encouraged to set need to be in that domain, don’t they – in thought?
🤔
Ego overwhelm
It reminds me of a time I got a bit carried away on social media, spending a whole day not setting boundaries, suffering the consequences, and then learning from them, to have a totally different experience the next day.
But the boundary that got set wasn’t anything to do with me making a conscious decision to do less. Which goes against the grain of what we’re taught, doesn’t it?
Here’s what happened…
One day someone with a huge following on LinkedIn posted something fairly comprehensive on the topic of burnout and it got approximately twelve billion responses.
He actually posted it while I was on there so I got the first comment in (Ego Achievement Unlocked 📦🔓✌🏻) and then stuck around to see what others were saying.
There was a lot of everybody agreeing with everyone else, yes-it’s-terrible-what-do-we-do sort of thing, so I replied to a lot of comments, inviting people to explore the principles behind how-we-burnout, a little more deeply.
At first it was fun, all pretty gentle and curious, but then it started to ruin my day.
The comments kept coming, I kept replying, the notifications kept piling up, conversations kept going on in various comment-threads… and all of a sudden hours and hours had gone by and the work I had planned for the day wasn’t getting done.
And when I did turn my attention towards the day’s work, I kept getting pulled back in by those seductive little red badges on the app icon. (And I should report that ego felt great—sated—whenever I did.)
And in this kind of overwhelm lie the seeds of burnout.
We get pulled in all sorts of different directions, we say yes to pretty much all of them (because it looks like we have to; or it feels good to), we lose our train of thought, we leave things half-completed, we get to the end of the day and we’re just surrounded by a huge mess… which it looks like we have to carry on dealing with, the next day, because that’s the state of mind we’re in, right there in that moment.
Just like me, the other night, with my attention on all the overwhelmed thinking:
Thought comes first
It’s not so much what’s going on that’s the problem—I don’t know if you’d noticed, but opportunities to be overloaded with tasks are everywhere! 😆—it’s allowing our focus to be drawn away from reality by the mind and what it’s saying about what’s going on.
📦🗣️: “Hey! This is important to me. You need to reply to that. This person needs putting straight. You need to help them. Oh look, another notification, let’s see what’s behind it.”
Honestly, I saw this as a useful learning exercise.
I was aware of what was going on, of how my focus was being pulled, most of the times that I paused for breath, and I thought, Nah, sod it, let’s keep going, it’s more fun than what I had planned anyway and I haven’t done anything like this for a while.
You could say I willingly took the consequences.
But it’s important to see the primacy of thought here. It comes before all else. It’s the source of our overwhelmed feelings.
➤ 100% of our feelings come from (the Principle of) Thought
➤ 0% of our feelings come from our circumstances
A different experience
The next day had the potential to be even worse, because I had all the missed work to catch up on, and as soon as I checked my phone I discovered that the thread had kept piling on responses in my absence.
I had a bazillion notifications. Comments on my comments were still being made. Questions being asked. Opinions being shared. Misunderstandings to correct.
I could have had the same experience all over again—my mind was coming out with the exact same convincing sounding arguments to engage—but for me it’s a bit like junk food: the idea of it is better than the reality, it seldom satisfies and it usually causes some degree of indigestion!
So it didn’t make sense to let my focus be pulled by ego again.
Thought comes first and behaviour follows belief.
So, faced with the exact same situation, this time I didn’t give the mind’s protestations any credence.
You see, it had its own agenda. The previous day it got several Ego Achievements 📦✌🏻🔓 and it wanted to unlock more and build its stature… which is a very slippery slope indeed.
Knowing where it led, I lost interest in what it had to say, and my actions followed suit, automatically.
A boundary appeared in the world of doing, without me having to lift a finger.
🥳
Giles
Modern life seems designed to overwhelm, work stress and home stress are becoming a constant, and as a result, many of us are experiencing burnout.
But it doesn't have to be like this. Burnout is avoidable, preventable and possible to come back from, as we hear in this 1h50m video masterclass. These are some of the topics covered in this convention-busting, optimistic session:
- The evolution of burnout as a concept, over the years
- Why “good advice” about overwhelm & burnout seldom works
- What to do when your work has programmed you to actively neglect self-care
- Juggling too-many-things in too-little-time
- The difference between overwhelm and overload
- Why burnout does not mean there's anything wrong with you
- A much better strategy than just trying to avoid triggers
- The best way to prevent compassion fatigue
- How to make decisions that will keep you off the slippery slope to burnout