Too much to deal with

I’ve been reading, researching and thinking a lot about overwhelm.

Overwhelm means to bury or drown beneath a huge mass of something. And frequently ... it’s our work and responsibilities!

When you see the usage of a word over time, it’s interesting to note when it started, peaked and what it is doing today.

Overwhelm as a word was at its peak in the 1800s. Use tapered off in the early to mid 1900s and the word has experienced a great resurgence of use since 2019. 

I wonder why?!

The Cambridge Dictionary says overwhelm is a verb, of force. To defeat someone or something by using a lot of force.

Alternatively, the emotion defines overwhelm as to cause someone to feel sudden, strong emotion.

At its simplest, overwhelm means to have ‘too much to deal with’.

We’ve all experienced this - a time when things felt ‘too much’.

Rather than just ‘sucking it up buttercup’, ‘soldiering on’ or ‘pushing on through’ in a war with our overwhelm, I think we can do something different...

My book ‘Argh!: Too much information, not enough brain’ is out.

I hope it helps you outsmart overwhelm from some different perspectives.

Back-to-back is bad to worse

If the view is ‘full of colour’ when you look at your diary or schedule, you could be in the back-to-back brigade who don’t get a break. 

The scheduling - and acceptance - of a day of meetings running one into the other, is tiring, inefficient and distracting. 

This Forbes article by Bruce Rogers talks more about how our brains needs a break. 

Our ability to focus lessens as the day goes on and the cognitive load of no, or few, breaks doesn’t serve us either. 

Microsoft recently made changes to their deep down default settings in Outlook for appointment durations and scheduling. You can customize them further for your own preferences and well-being. 

This is in an effort to reduce the rotten fatigue that results from a back-to-back schedule. 

But it also takes individual, leadership and cultural shifts on ‘how we do things around here’ to bring an end to the back-to-back-badge-of-busy. 

Here’s how I roll: 
- Finish early. 
- Schedule breaks
- Block out time. 
- Protect the boundaries. 
- Model better behaviours. 

There are clear ways for us to adopt to get from bad-to-better in the breaks-for-brain game. 

What are you doing to break the back-to-back?

Your brain loves closed captioning

It seems captioning has taken off among the non-hearing impaired — and for good reason! 

The subtitles on that film or series you’re watching 
- help boost retention 
- improve comprehension 
and 
- help fill the gaps when someone talks over the dialogue! 

It’s proving effective for people learning a new language, for children building their reading skills and can lift levels of engagement in those with conditions such as Autism Spectrum Disorder, ADHD and Mild Cognitive Impairment. 

For many other reasons too, this mixed mode of taking in information is booming. 

We know people love watching a YouTube video with the sound off and taking in the captions. It’s booming elsewhere on TVs and screens the world over. 

Are you a subtitles fan? 

Read more about the boom in this article.

Beware of zombie overload

You know those ‘big days’: back-to-back meetings, little time for a break, lunch disappears and zero quiet time to finish things before the day is done!

Sleep. Wake. Do it again tomorrow. 

A reason for zombie-like feelings is overload. And not just of our diary or schedule, but of our minds too. 

Were these brains of ours ever designed for this huge quantity of information we insist on shoving in there? 

It’s a big black hole; information in different formats, styles, themes and categories, a challenge to process, store and retrieve. Not unlike the junk draw every kitchen has! 

Here’s how to fight the zombie feeling and win: Pre-emptive strikes. 

That’s is, do something BEFORE you feel overloaded. 

This. 
Empty your brain:
- write notes 
- capture thoughts
- jot ideas
- list worries
- catch outcomes 

...and most of all, stop trying to soak it all up. That’s exactly where zombies like to hang out - in damp, crowded, messy corners of the mind - where there’s too much junk and not enough space.

Your cognitive load is your business. That zombie feeling will come if you let it. 

Strike back. Unload as you go. Die zombie die. 

6 ways we’re overloaded

We know what overloads and overwhelms us: information, overwork, deadlines, social issues, politics, uncertainty. 

While we need to keep a handle on managing our own overload, it’s important to consider others and how we might be overloading them...accidentally or unknowingly.  

Here’s how we overload:
1. Meetings are too long
2. Focusing on the work for too long
3. One person speaking for too long. 

These are about the pressure and expectation we have of ATTENTION. There’s no break and pressure piles up with no relief or release. 


And then there’s:
4. Rambling, unstructured information 
5. Too much context or background 
6. Lengthy presentation packs. 

These are about the quantity and types of INFORMATION. We expect we can keep processing, analyzing, digesting and synthesizing information... endlessly. 

All 6 of these overloads are “too much”: too much unreleased pressure and too much wrestling with information. 

Combined, they lead to the reduced engagement, slowed progress and increased confusion of overload. And exhaustion. 

Take each in turn and use it as a kind of gate, filter or checklist. 

We can’t expect others to ‘just deal with’ what we haven’t considered, constrained or refined.