How To Stop Feeling Overwhelmed

0:28Welcome to today's episode of the Mindset Mentor Podcast. 850-9305. Today, we're going to talk about how to stop feeling overwhelmed when shit hits the fan. And you have to understand, we're basically just animals who pay mortgages. That's kind of what we are. And there is a lot happening in the world at all points in time. And with all that's happening in the world, all that's happening in your life, all that's happening with your children, with your business, with your relationships, with your planning for the future, trying to retire, all of those things. It's normal to feel overwhelmed. But I want you to understand this.

1:04It is normal if you do feel overwhelmed, but it is not normal if the feeling of overwhelm holds you back. And so what's interesting about overwhelm is that it's not actually rooted in reality, which is going to kind of confuse some people, but I'll dive into it, okay? Your overwhelm is not rooted in any reality. It's not in the reality of your circumstances. Your circumstances of life are not making you overwhelmed. What's making you overwhelmed is your perception of your circumstances in your life. And today I'm going to teach you just how to understand overwhelm, how it pops up, where it pops up from, and then how to work with it in order to be able to kind of move past it and create the life that you want.

1:51Okay. So the most important thing for you to understand today before I go deeper into it is this. Overwhelm is a state of mind. It is not an objective reality. Now, this is going to be hard for some people to, the concept is kind of hard for some people to grasp because of all of the feelings associated with overwhelm, right? So when you get overwhelmed, you feel stressed, you feel anxiety, you feel sometimes even panic. And those feelings are so intense and they're so visceral inside of the body that they feel like undeniable truth of our situation, but they're not of the reality, the reality of what's going on.

2:31Like if you have a lot to do today and that's now you feel overwhelmed. Well, it's not your to-do list. It's making you feel overwhelmed. It is your story, your narrative, and your perception of your to-do list. It's making you feel overwhelmed. Do you feel stressed in that moment? Yes. Can you feel anxiety around it? Yes. Does it come from reality? No. Oh, damn. What the hell is he talking about? That doesn't make any sense. Let's dive into it. Let's talk about it. It comes from your reaction to reality, not reality itself. And this is extremely, extremely important for you to understand before we go any further, because if you think that it comes from reality, you can never work out of it.

3:12And you're identifying with that actual overwhelm itself. So I'll give you an example for my own life and I'll tell you kind of this whole process of what's going on in my own life right now. Then I'll break down how to work through overwhelm and then I'll talk about my life again and how I worked through a situation. So I'm going to give you an example of my own life, right? Right now, I'm in the process of buying another house that we're going to be moving into. So I'm in the process, if you've ever bought a house before, it sucks. Going through all of the paperwork, all of the underwriters, they want to know everything about everything and And if you have different businesses and different bank accounts from different businesses, they want to know everything.

3:50So it's like five times more paperwork than it was when I bought a house, you know, 10 years ago when I didn't have a business. So on top of buying the house, we're also packing up the house that we live in and we're getting ready to put that house up for rent. I also own another house that's 10 minutes down the road. It's where I am right now. And that's where we record the podcast. That's how it uses a studio and office space. So I'm also getting ready to put this house up for rent. So I have two houses I need to move out of, two houses I need to put up for rent, one house I need to move into, and one house I need to get all of the bank and underwriters and all that information for, right?

4:31Three houses, things all happening, right? On top of that, I'm also still running my current business. We're hiring new people currently right now. My VP of operations is on a phone call right now with four people that are going through the hiring process. So we're growing. I'm also planning and creating four podcast episodes a week, and I have an eight-week old baby. So I'm pretty much the busiest I've ever been in my entire life. And when we found this house, he was four weeks old, and it is not really the right time to move into the house. If I could have delayed this six months, I would have 100 % delayed the six months.

5:06but we found like the best house ever. And that's, I just fell in love with the house and I was like, we've got to have it. So we're 20 minutes closer to town. It backs up to 2000 acres of protected land. So it's literally like this incredible view out the back. And I was like, all right, this is a rare moment. We'll figure it out. And here's what I want to tell you. And I don't want to tell you this of like, I'm not trying to brag in any sort of way. I do not feel any overwhelm at all right now. Did I a few weeks ago? Absolutely. But I'm going to tell you how I worked through it. Okay. So I'm going to use myself as an example because it's not like, oh my gosh, this guy's the mindset mentor.

5:41He never feels overwhelmed. Of course I do. Of course I feel overwhelmed and stressed and anxious and sad and happy and joy and love and all of those feelings that everybody else does. But when I find myself in like the lower emotions, I just happen to have some tools to get myself out of it. So let me teach you exactly how to get yourself out of it. if you find yourself in overwhelm. One of the most empowering realizations that you'll have in dealing with overwhelm is to realize that you can create distance between yourself and the emotion. And so overwhelm is an emotion. It's how you feel. You can feel stressed around it.

6:18You can feel anxious around it. But if we're just talking about overwhelm, that's an emotion. and what I want you to understand about it is all of this starts with how you talk to yourself about what you're experiencing and so what I want to do is instead of sitting there and finding myself thinking about the house and think about all this stuff I have to do instead of saying to myself I am overwhelmed which is what most people say and that is entirely incorrect you are not overwhelmed you are a human you're not overwhelmed overwhelmed is just a feeling it is just an emotion. So it's switching from I am overwhelmed to I am feeling overwhelmed.

6:58Now this, I get it, doesn't seem like much, but this subtle language change is way bigger than it might seem to you. When you say I am overwhelmed, you are identifying yourself with an emotion, making it part of your identity. And when you make something part of your identity, is really hard to pull yourself away from it. And we will be right back. And now back to the show. So it becomes a state of being that feels permanent and it feels all consuming because it's who you are. You just said it's who you are. I am overwhelmed. So on the other hand, when you say I am feeling overwhelmed, it acknowledges the emotion.

7:43And if you are a logical person, you know that emotions are temporary. They are a temporary experience. Emotions are fleeting. And so when I'm saying I am feeling overwhelmed, okay, well, it's just like a rain cloud coming in. I don't think the rain cloud is going to be here forever because I've seen so many rain clouds come and go over my lifetime. I know it's eventually going to pass. This too shall pass. Well, it's the exact same thing. Overwhelm is a feeling. I am feeling overwhelmed. Okay, well, I've felt a lot of things over my lifetime in my past 38 years of my life. So yeah, that's not a big deal.

8:19Cool. I felt overwhelmed before. So it creates a little bit of space, just a tiny bit of space, a little mental gap between you and the feeling, which then makes it easier for you to recognize that it's just an aspect of your current experience, not your entire identity. The feeling is a feeling. It's not forever. And you know, feelings are not forever. And so if I can distance myself from the feeling, well, then what I can do is I, if I can move away from it, well, then I can see it better. So if I can, you know, if you're trying to see something, like if something's writing in front, right in front of your face, and it's like, if you put your hand right in front of your face right now, it's like really blurry.

8:59But if you move your hand away a little bit, it's much more clear. What I'm trying to do is I'm trying to distance myself a little bit from the emotion so that I can see it better. Because if I can see it better, I can understand it better. If I can understand it better, I can work through it. So this shift in your language is a first step to creating a sense of control over your own life and your emotion. By not fully identifying with overwhelm, you basically open yourself up to the possibility of, hey, maybe I can manage this rather than like, I am all consumed by this feeling of overwhelm. So now we've identified that overwhelm is a feeling.

9:36And then you got to ask yourself, okay, well, where do feelings come from? Have you ever thought about that before? Like, where do your feelings come from? Have you ever thought of it? Well, feelings come from your thoughts. So this is the way you want to think about it. There's a circumstance that happens in your life, whatever the circumstance might be. You have thoughts, and most of the time they immediately pop up and you don't even notice them. Sometimes you notice a story or you talk into yourself, but there's a circumstance and then there's thoughts around that circumstance. And from thoughts, you get feelings.

10:05And from feelings, you get actions. And from actions, you get results. Most of the time, we don't notice the thought. We only notice the feeling. We notice, okay, I feel really anxious right now. Why do I feel so anxious? Well, your brain is working a million miles a minute in the background without you having to think about it. And so it'll, it'll start to think about, okay, well, okay, if I do buy this house, well, then I've got this, this, this, this, this, this, and it's, it just starts to build out the entire runway. And then it goes, oh my God, there's a lot of shit that we got to do. You don't have any time.

10:37You have a newborn baby, all of this stuff. And then what do you notice first? You don't notice all the thoughts you notice. Oh my gosh, I feel stressed about this situation. I feel overwhelmed about it. Right. And so we don't really notice a lot of our thoughts and cognitive behavioral therapy. They call them automatic thoughts. They just kind of pop up. And most of the time, we don't even notice them. So if you don't want to be overwhelmed anymore, what do you think you need to change? Ah, you need to change your thoughts. You need to change how and what you are thinking about the circumstance that life is presenting to you.

11:10I'm not saying that you're not busy. I'm not saying that life isn't hard right now. What I'm saying is that all of life's circumstances will be the same for your entire life. The only thing that you can change is what you think about them. So, you know, if you're really busy right now, well, guess what? You're still going to be busy no matter what you think about it. So you can either get stressed and anxious about it or you can say, all right, maybe I can look at the price of these and I can start to figure this out. I'm not saying that life isn't hard right now if you're going through a lot of shit, But even if it's hard right now, you can have your thoughts be depressing and sad and I'll never get through this.

11:48Or you can be like, I'm going to get through this. I'm going to figure it out. I'm going to make my life better. Okay, so what you can change is what you think about life circumstances. And we can all agree that if you're in a better mental state, you can handle life's challenges better, correct? Yes. Well, that's great. Well, maybe we should change what we're thinking because our feelings are coming from our thoughts. And so like, let's say the original stressed out thought is, oh my God, this is too much to handle. I'm going to mess up and I'm going to regret it. Okay. Well, that's, that's interesting.

12:19So let's reframe that thought. We could say something instead like, okay, this is a big responsibility, but I know I have the resources and I know I have the support to manage it and I've handled difficult situations before. So I know I can do this again. It doesn't change life circumstances. it gives you a different perspective of life circumstances so that you can be in a better state so that hopefully you can handle those circumstances better. And by shifting the thought, you can change the story that's in your mind. The first thought is loaded with self-doubt and it's fear and it naturally leads to feelings of overwhelm.

12:56And most likely if you have those thoughts and those feelings, it's paralysis. I don't know if I can do this and you don't do it, right? The reframe thought that I was talking about acknowledges, yeah, look at this. There's a challenge in front of me, but it also affirms back to you your ability to handle it, which should reduce the intensity of this overwhelm. I can do this. I can figure it out. And so for me, let me just show you how I did this with the house, right? When I had the feelings of overwhelm and I was just sitting there and this is one of the things that I'll recommend. I've said this so many times on the podcast.

13:30Please, if you want to work on yourself, if you want to become better, find more moments of silence. Because all too often, we feel feelings that make us feel uncomfortable, like overwhelmed or stress. And they make us so uncomfortable that what do we want to do? We want to be on our phones. We want to go for a run. We want to just keep ourselves busy so that we don't have to think about it. If you could just please trust me when I tell you this of being in personal development for 19 years, we all need more moments of nothing so that you can process the world better and your life will be better.

14:04So for instance, the house, right? Put an offer on the house. It's accepted. Oh fuck. This is awesome. But at the same time, my life is as busy as it's ever been. And I've got a baby and I've got to move with a baby and I'm not getting enough sleep right now. So the immediate thought is I don't have enough time to do this. And this is like, I didn't even notice this, but I had to take a step back. I noticed the feelings of overwhelm, but I had to take a step back and go, okay, what did, what did my brain just process that I missed? Okay. Well, I was thinking, I don't have enough time to do this.

14:36I'm so damn busy right now. I'm not getting a whole lot of sleep. It's so much paperwork. I hate doing paperwork. Well, if I don't have enough time, then I won't be able to get it done. And if I don't get it done, then I won't get the house, but I really liked the house. but what if I do get the house and then it takes a really long time to get the studio house rented out and it takes a really long time to get my old house rented out and then now I'm going to lose a lot of money because I'm paying three mortgages and no renters and fuck, I don't like losing money for no reason and on and on and on and on and on and on and you can see it's just a slippery slope of shit that's what it gets down to, right?

15:16It's not going anywhere good And I didn't even really notice the thoughts. I just noticed the feeling of overwhelm. So I was like, okay, if there's a reality where everything goes wrong, there has to be a reality where everything goes right. You know, these thoughts, whether or not that they're rational, they generate a cascade of emotions that make us feel overwhelmed. And what we have to realize is it is a protection mechanism. It is a protect. Look at how amazing my brain is that it immediately goes, oh my God, this is going to make us uncomfortable. Let's shut it down so that Rob doesn't injure himself or hurt himself or whatever it might be.

15:56But I'm not going to injure or hurt myself from buying a house. So it doesn't really make a whole lot of sense. It makes sense 100 ,000 years ago for us to have that protection mechanism. And sometimes it makes sense for us to have that protection mechanism now, but it didn't in this circumstance. So I was able to distance myself from the feeling of overwhelm. I am not overwhelmed, but I'm feeling overwhelmed. and has benefits at certain times, but it cannot run the show. So like I said a minute ago, if there's a reality where everything goes wrong, which is where most of our thoughts usually go to, right?

16:26Then there also must be a reality where everything goes right. But we don't focus on that one, do we? No. Well, we need to open ourselves up to the reality of everything going right. And so what I said to myself, as I noticed this, this cascade of emotions and thoughts, and I'm journaling and I'm finding quiet time for myself, is I just wrote down, what if everything works out perfectly? And it was funny, I wrote it down and the feeling in my body was like, it was like my shoulders dropped and I was like, wow, this could be amazing. Like I could move into this house and I could wake up every morning.

17:02Like I said, the funny thing, I've been telling my wife since we've been dating for over 10 years now, I've been telling her, I've been working my entire life to have a really good coffee view. That's all I want. I just want a really good coffee view, right? And so when we go to places and we travel, I always try to find a place, a really good view so I can have my coffee there. And so I've told her this for years. I just want a really good coffee view. And so this house has this amazing view out the back. And I started thinking to myself, oh my God, what, how different would I feel every single morning to wake up and watch the sunrise over 2000 acres of just hills and no houses and protected space.

17:38And what would it be like? And what would it feel like? and how more inspired would I be to create great content when I have that view? I started thinking that. What was really interesting is I didn't make myself think that. I asked myself a different question and it opened up a whole other side of me that was kind of closed off. What if everything works out perfectly? What if I don't have to be afraid? What if life is on my side and all of this is going to challenge me, but it also at the same time is going to make me better? and I'll be able to make better content. I'll be able to feel better.

18:13I'll be able to raise my family within a beautiful house with neighbors closer versus far away like they are right now. And so what happens was I was thinking about what could go wrong. And when you think about what could go wrong, you close yourself off to all other opportunities. But when you ask yourself what could go right and you start thinking about it, you open yourself up to new ideas, to new possibilities, to new opportunities. and you're now able to see something that you couldn't see before. And what I really want you to understand from this episode is that your thoughts change your perception.

18:47And my perception when I was in the state of overwhelm was so closed off and it was so scary and it was so, please don't fuck this up for your life. And then when I thought to myself, what if it goes perfectly, it opened up to a whole other perception and thoughts started coming in. And then my body started calming down more. I started getting more excited versus being more in a state of fear. And so what I want you to understand is that you can't identify yourself with overwhelm. You have to understand that it is a feeling and your feelings come from your thoughts and your thoughts come from your perception of a circumstance.

19:20And so if I'm feeling overwhelmed, well, then maybe I just trace it back and I start to ask myself better questions and have better thoughts around the circumstance. And from there, it opens up a completely different perception of reality that I had closed myself off to. and so that is how you change your thoughts and just open yourself up to changing yourself and stopping the feeling of being overwhelmed so that's what i got for you for today's episode if you love this episode please share it on your instagram stories tag me in at rob dial jr r-o-b-d-i-a-l-j-r the only way this podcast grows is from you guys sharing it so if you would share it i would greatly greatly appreciate it so that we could impact more people's lives i feel like there are many more people who need to hear this type of stuff so if you would share it i would greatly appreciate from the bottom of my heart.

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20:33Once again, mindsetmentor.com. And it is the most affordable that I could possibly make it for everybody. It is less than a dollar a day. So if you want to learn more about it, there's a video on the website that explains it. And with that, I'm going to leave the same way I leave you every single episode, make it your mission to make somebody else's day better. I appreciate you and I hope that you have an amazing day.