Last night I almost gave up. Nothing was going as I planned.  And I had been working on this skill for a year. It felt like I had never done it before. So, screw it.   

Well, of course it wasn’t great. I’ve taken on a lot. Most things take years to acquire skill. But my mind expects to be an expert today.  

My mind expects this, even though I’m now also trying to redesign my business and work a full-time job. I have three time-intensive hobbies. Oh yeah, and there is that whole I’m looking for a partner and social life thing, that takes up an embarrassing amount of bandwidth.   So, overwhelmed and fell into the same hamster wheel.

Overwhelm is one of the most common things I hear (and personally experience.) Modern culture seems to be awash in it. Most folks feel compelled to be busy. Do more. Be more. Have more.  This will make us successful

We have so much more abundance than our ancient ancestors. They were happy to have found a couple of nuts and not be eaten by a tiger.  And now, we are unhappy that we can’t retire at 21, with a hot spouse, and leisure money to travel to the Maldives every weekend.    

Okay few of us believe that’s what we want. But because we can see all the options available to use. We think we must have it all. When we don’t, we feel like we are failing. It’s hard to see truly what’s important and live through it.

An abundant world is amazing for health and human growth, and terrible for those of us with untrained attentional filters to prioritize, tolerate, and exclude. Our cognitive filters are saturated.

Overwhelm isn’t just stress—it’s what happens when a high-option environment collides with an untrained ability to filter, prioritize, and tolerate exclusion.

Here are some reasons why:

1.      Cognitive Load Overrun
Too many active demands → degraded decision-making [3].  We don’t make good decisions when we are constantly making decisions.

2.      Cognitive Fragmentation (modern problem)
Digital environments fragment attention into shallow loops [6].  Our brains weren’t meant for TikTok Levels of content

3.      Urgency Distortion
Systems create false “now” pressure → collapse of long-term thinking.   

4.      Emotional Non-Willingness
Overwhelm persists because of not tolerating constraint (closing loops, saying no).  We’ve got to put the brakes on our own unwillingness to try it all. Learn to love the slow, daily work of boring

Ultimately, if we continually get overwhelmed, we’ve got to simplify.  We have to realize that certain things take a long time. If you choose a more diffuse strategy, where you have many interests and hobbies, it will take even longer. Either we must accept the even longer road or give up some of the things that bring you joy.

The refusal to pick either path is a surefire way to keep you overwhelmed. But I find when I pick and commit to a strategy, there is freedom.

If you need help with this reach out,

Drew