3.9 Getting out of Overwhelm

The Mindful Academy - Episode 3.9 Highlights

Overcoming Faculty Overwhelm: A Deeper Dive

Greetings, Mindful Community!

In the newest episode (3.9) of the Mindful Academy, I talked about the intricacies of faculty overwhelm. Last episode(3.8), I identified four faculty frustrations, and today, I’m tackling the beast of overwhelm.

Check-in with Your Emotions

Feeling overwhelmed is common, but how do you respond? Anger, shutdown, hyperdrive? It is sooo important to identify your emotional response and give it a name, in order to pave the way for effective coping strategies.

If you want help and pointers for identifying the emotions you’re experiencing in the moment, I recommend the “How We Feel” app on both Google and Apple. 

Ground Yourself in the Present Moment

For those drowning in anxiety and stress, I have a quick grounding exercise. Two minutes, five senses - a powerful tool to pull yourself back from the whirlwind of overwhelming thoughts.

Craft Your Speciality, Avoid Overwhelm

In academia, the pressure to excel in various roles can be exhausting. There is a remedy: identify your specialty, your superpower, and align your work accordingly. Less overwhelm, more intentional steering.

Saying yes to every opportunity may not be the best strategy. I advise putting your hand up for tasks that align with your strengths and contribute to your fulfillment. It's about focusing on your strengths and doubling down on them.

Get in Touch!

Need more insights or want to discuss your faculty frustrations? Reach out to me at jennifer@jenniferaskey.com or connect on LinkedIn and Instagram.

Episode Details

Transcript

Transcript Episode 3.9 Getting out of overwhelm

 Hello everybody and welcome to episode 3.9 of the mindful Academy. Last episode 3.8 I presented four basic flavors of faculty frustration that I see in my one on one work with professors and other academic professionals. Those were overwhelmed frustration with success metrics, interpersonal circumstances and interrupt personal circumstances. Today I'd like to talk a little bit more about the first element that element of overwhelm. And I'm going to talk to you about some ways to handle the physical and mental stress of overwhelm and some basic strategies for avoiding it in the first place. And I'll start with a little caveat, I took notes for this episode A few days ago, and upon reflection, I realized that a lot of what I'm planning to talk about focuses on managing anxiety and maybe anxiety is not your response to feeling overwhelmed, maybe your responses anger, maybe your responses to shut down. Maybe your response is to you know, go into hyperdrive work mode. So with that caveat, I will talk a bit about managing anxiety but before I get there, let's talk about checking in with your emotional response to feeling overwhelmed. And I you know, I coach probably 15 people a week, sometimes more, sometimes less depending on my schedule. And I would say that at least half of those conversations involve my client feeling overwhelmed with work and family obligations in one way or another. So this morning, I had frustration and I had disappointment and I had anger all of those emotions can come up when you feel pulled in multiple directions. So the first thing to do is identify what is it that I am feeling? And I know that that might sound super simplistic, but being able to put a word to your emotion and really identify what it is, is a building block of emotional intelligence, and it actually helps us cope with that emotion. So I believe it was Britney Brown, who said that most people in the West in North America have a hard time differentiating their emotions beyond mad, sad, glad. And it's my hope for you that you can differentiate beyond that, and glad they are. One way to do that is to really practice. What is naming what it is that you're feeling? Because mad encompasses a lot like it's a negative emotion. It's high energy but there are other negative emotions that are low energy, there are neutral emotions that are blood there are positive emotions that are high and low energy. And I think that it is important when you're feeling overwhelmed. When you feel like your to do list is too long. Or the job requires too much to investigate. What's my automatic sort of default mode response to this feeling? What what is the feeling and what does it lead me to do? So, if you get angry when you're overwhelmed does that anger happen at work? Do you take it home? Do you take it out on yourself? If you shut down does that mean you withdraw and work harder or you withdraw and you stop working? Do you go into planning mode? Do you search for a life raft that will get you out of this situation? I have clients who have a lot of clients who are looking either at leaving the academy or getting a different job in the academy. They want to change institutions change locations, and I love partnering on career moves with people one of the things I look at is are you just looking for a life raft to escape a crappy situation? And it's okay to look for a life raft to get to escape a crappy situation. But let's get a handle on what's going on in this situation and what your response is to it. So that whatever that default pattern is that you have isn't something that you take into the next gig, whether that's your next academic job or another career altogether. So figuring out what your emotions look like and what you call them and like the next level of this is figuring out where they live in your body where you feel them in your body. All of that is really good data to help you make decisions about how to steer your own life and actions. And I say that locating where you feel the emotion in your body is sort of the next level. Because it took me years literally from the first time somebody said figure out where you feel that in your body. From when I first heard that to when I actually could identify Oh, this is where I feel it in my body. Oh, it's probably seven years. And maybe my level of disconnect with my body is greater or lesser than yours. But I know for a lot of academics. We walk around like heads on sticks, and so our connection to our body is fraught and we don't think of our body as a site of knowledge. So maybe you can identify butterflies in your stomach. For me, it was this incredibly tight feeling in my throat that I eventually came to associate with my fear or frustration around being able to speak my truth and being taken seriously. Right? So identifying your emotions, naming them and locating them is an amazing tool and I'm opening up my phone now I probably should have done this before I got on the podcast but I want to tell you one of the tools that that you can use it's super easy and free to beef up your emotional vocabulary. So you can say okay, I'm feeling overwhelmed. What flavor is that feeling for me? Is it a positive or negative feeling? Is it a high energy or low energy feeling? What does it lead me to do? It's an app called I think it's just called How you feeling? And it is the reason I recommend it is because it is I believe it's Gail Yes. Yeah, the How you feeling or how we feel research study is part of Yale's research team at Yale. I'm sorry, I should have looked this up first. How we feel and think is what it's called. The icon in the App Store is a little multicolored heart. And I will link that in the show notes and we'll just forget that I blabbed for a bit about something that I haven't looked at. So let me move on to what I ended up focusing on when I was thinking about overwhelm, which is anxiety. And that's in part because it's one of my responses to things that I'm feeling anxious is one of my responses to anxiety and also I run into it a lot. So for example, when I feel overwhelmed, when an anxious person feels overwhelmed, they feel that that sense of overwhelm is coming from external sources. Maybe it's compounded by internal standards, for example, or internal deadlines and goals. But the overwhelm feels like it's coming at you and you might notice it as a tight feeling in your chest or of buzzy feeling in your head or a queasiness in your stomach or something like that. And maybe you label it anxious or scattered or those are the two words that come to my mind. But how we're feeling app has lots of words that you can focus in on like, Oh, it's a positive emotion, but it's low energy and you go to this quadrant you like Well, that's a good word. I like that, right? So it gives us practice in being specific about how we're feeling. So if you're feeling that sort of scattered, dispersed, anxious busyness you'll want to ground yourself in the present moment. I think of a lot of overwhelm energy as energy that radiates out in a million different directions. Because that's where you feel all of your obligations residing, they reside in a million different directions. And so your brain and your body and your energy are just wow shooting out in 100 different ways. So, to combat that sense of unpleasantness and being pulled. You want to ground yourself in the here and now.

A lot of strategies for grounding yourself in the present moment. Come from meditation and mindfulness, and Dialectical Behavioral Therapy and cognitive behavioral therapy. So I'll introduce you to one right here right now. So if you're not feeling anxious and dispersed, you don't need to do this. If, however, it would help you in the moment right now to just take two minutes to land where you are, so that you can move on to the next thing. This is something you can do with your eyes open or closed in the moment, takes two minutes. Okay. And as with a lot of grounding strategies, I find it helps to take two or three long breaths with even longer exhales and have your feet planted on the ground. So you begin by inhaling for a count of three and exhaling for accounted six just in your mind. And you do a few of these cycles. Just a couple and your brain is still probably pinging in 100 different directions. That's fine. Then after you slow your breathing down a bit gonna return to normal press, but you're going to steer your focus. And the first thing you're going to focus on is what you can learn. So I'm in an apartment in an urban environment and it snowed like crazy the last two days. So actually what I can hear out there is the sound of tire spinning on ice. And if I focus my hearing a bit more I can hear more st sound but I can pull my hearing in closer. Can I hear my own breath? I think I can hear the hum of the rain light. Right? So just send your hearing out and then bring it in closer. Can you hear your heartbeat? Can you hear your exhale and then switch your focus to what you can touch. Maybe it's an object in your hands or the fabric on your body. Maybe it's what you're seated or standing on. Sometimes I would do this when I was at walking my dog and her leash had this nice silky grainy texture to focusing on what you can touch. Then we identify what we can smell so what are you smelling? Cologne lotion, something cooking trees or grass or car exhaust are not much right the neutral scent of your office and then do the same thing with your sense of taste. Maybe you can still taste in your mouth the last thing you ate or drink to face or just the neutral, familiar taste of you. Just notice that you have a tongue you have taste buds. What are they? And then you turn your focus to your sense of sight and even with your eyes closed. You can focus on your sense of sight. Right Can you tell through closed eyes whether it's night or day? Natural light, artificial light if you're doing this while your eyes are open, pick one thing to focus on carefully. Just notice that object in as much loving detail as you can. And then once you've once you've cycled through your five senses, try for 30 seconds or so to hold your focus on all five of your senses at once. When I do this as a grounding exercise, I silently sort of recite for myself and hearing and touching. Blank. I'm smelling. I'm tasting I'm seeing and by bringing yourself in and inhabiting all five of your senses in the present moment. You're offering up to your mind and your body a pretty powerful pathway out of the what if Hurry up. When will it get done energy of overwhelm and this whole grounding exercise takes no more than two minutes and can be a huge energy shift in your day. Any type of somatic practice where your body and your mind are occupied with the same thing can you produce similar grounding effects. So yoga Tai Chi, pilates, all of those can be really powerful grounding practices. If when you're doing them, you are really focused on Oh, I'm moving this part of my body here. I'm breathing this way. And you're you're concentrating on the postures and then movements rather than sort of going through the motions with your body but your head is like planning dinner or something. There are strategies that rely less on your body to ground you and more on your rational life. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy asks us to focus on the moment by writing down all of our overwhelming thoughts and then offering rational written responses to them. The reason I tend to the reason I suggest doing somatic practices is because for you and for me, you spend enough time in your head I don't think that grounding yourself and getting connected should be homework and sometimes cognitive behavioral therapy feels like filling out worksheets and homework. And so I encourage those of us who spend all sorts of time in our head to get out of being 100% caught up in your own thoughts and investigating your thoughts and digging deeper into your thoughts and moving towards physical action and awareness of the fact that you're okay at this moment in time as opposed to what's coming up next, which we need to be worried about. But there are practices that you can include that any of us can incorporate into our day that just pull us back in from the centrifugal force of overwhelm. But you want to avoid the spiraling feeling of overwhelm in the first place, right? Of course you do. And this is where the intentional careers design strategies that I work on with my clients come in. So in the academy in higher education and in other knowledge intensive industries. You are often expected to be or it feels like you are expected to be master of all trades. You are an expert in teaching you are an expert in your research or creative production. You are an expert leader and volunteer and committee member. How very exhausting, right. One way to work against the tide of overwhelm in your work is to identify and define your specialty speciality your superpower and see how much of your regular work life you can mold to fit into the contours of that speciality. So, here's one way to approach that question. You know, what is my speciality? What's my superpower? So are you a people person? When you think of work, do you primarily think of interacting with people in some way and working together? With others having an impact on others learning from teaching to collaborating with? Are you an ideas person or an action person? Right. So within one of those zones people ideas action. Are you in in front kind of person or behind the scenes kind of person? For example, if you're a people person and an in the front kind of person, so maybe an extrovert, what kinds of work come naturally to you. Does this mean common presentations over solo written pieces, large lectures, public lectures outside of the university, running workshops, chairing meetings, supervising groups of students and TAs. Right maybe that fits how you want to work as a people person who likes being in the front. So how much of your work can you steer in that direction? What if you're an ideas person, and behind the scenes you can also be an ideas person and in front. These are just examples right? If you're an ideas person, and a behind the scenes person, so maybe a bit more introverted, that might mean that you want to be on the editorial board. You want to take in submissions and sort and evaluate. You want to maybe participate at the beginning of a process and then turn it over to other people to do the implementation and cheerleading and getting people on board. But you want to be there when the ideas are sparked. And you want to contribute to that. If you're an action person, these people action people in front that's maybe what we think of as the traditional leader. You know, the general in front of the the group saying follow me, this is where we're going. Let's get it done. Energy, go, go go. That's one way of being an action oriented person. The behind the scenes action oriented person is creating the systems for things to get done is polishing and finishing off documents and making sure that accuracy and rigor is taken care of so that what gets produced is of the highest quality. So knowing whether your people focused ideas focused or action focused by default, and knowing whether your default identification brings you to the front or behind the scenes or some combination, working with that awareness. And then looking at all of the opportunities and the obligations that come with your job and saying, Alright, I cannot do it all. Nobody does it all. I certainly can't do it all today. But if I do the things that I'm good at, and that come naturally to me, I double down on those and commit to doing those. Well. How much of my job Can that take care of? Right? Maybe I don't have to be department chair committee chair. But I can contribute in this way that's easier for me more natural for me. What I find when I talk to people about their work is that people are socialized especially women are socialized to say yes. Oh, we needed a volunteer for this. We need somebody to head up this project. We need somebody to run this program. We need somebody to chair this committee, and people put up their hands because they want to be good citizens, which is great. I'm all for good citizenship. But oftentimes people put up their hands for things that don't really suit them. They put up their hands because they want to contribute they want things to run smoothly. They know that they can do that work, but they don't love it. It doesn't come naturally to them. Or it's one thing too many, which also happens. So recognizing that you're not going to be all things for all people. You're not going to be everybody's cup of tea. But can you say all right, in the in the plethora of things I could do. I will say yes to these sorts of things because they fit the way I work. And I will further narrow them down. I think oh I'll say yes to these things. That continue to contribute to my definition of success and fulfillment. There are always times when you're going to have to step up and do things that you don't feel suited for or don't have time for or don't want to do. But if you can volunteer less to take on things that don't suit you that aren't absolutely necessary that aren't going to drain you and focus on the things that energize you because they work with your natural tendencies. You slowly but surely build a professional practice. That includes less overwhelmed and more intentional steering. Nuts a lot of what happens in coaching is sort of a recognition of taking a step back and examining where your natural preferences are. And then focusing in on how to use those more effectively in guiding your career so that you don't always feel like a tsunami of demands from other people or crashing in on you. So, whether you need to ground in the moment or plan so that you don't find yourself swept up by overwhelm. I hope today has offered you a couple good insights. If you want more information if you want to talk about your own overwhelm or your particular flavor of faculty frustration, get in touch Jennifer at Jennifer askey.com. You can find me at Jennifer underscore Askey on LinkedIn and at Jennifer Askey coat. Jennifer underscore Askey on Instagram and Jennifer Askey coach on LinkedIn. I'm there every day looking to talk to people and help you have a more fulfilling career. Thanks for being here with me. I will be talking to you soon. Bye