Have you ever said, "I'm overwhelmed?" Consider the possibility that you feel "overwhelmed" because you say you are.
In reality, there's no such thing as "overwhelm." You can show me the items on your to do list. But you can't show me overwhelm.
Rather than having "too much to do," we simply have those things we're doing and those things we are not doing. Nothing in that description contains being "overwhelmed." Simply put, "overwhelmed" occurs when we call what we have to do "overwhelming."
If you doubt this, consider a dog. Imagine a dog saying, "My goodness. I have to walk, sniff, eat, poop and guard the house all day long. I'm so stressed and exhausted. It's just overwhelming."
Yet this is exactly what we do. We look at our to do list, decide that we have "too much to do" and call that overwhelming. We don't have "too much to do." We have exactly what there is to do and nothing more. Some of it we will do and some of it we won't. In reality, we will never have enough time to complete everything. In reality, we will always have exactly the amount of time that we have.
I know this may sound strange. But consider that changing our perception of time may involve nothing more than changing from saying, "I'm overwhelmed" to "I have these things to do."
In a similar context, I have a friend who complained that his boss had "stolen" his time because a meeting that was scheduled for 30 minutes went on for almost two hours. What actually happened, of course, is that the meeting lasted two hours. No theft was involved.
I know that "being overwhelmed" or thinking that your time was "stolen" seem as real as the computer on which you are reading this. But, in reality, there's no such thing as either "overwhelm" or "stolen time." We create those experiences through our language.
So be careful what you say. You will get it.
