Hello and welcome to Five Minutes in Nature with me Liz Scott and I'm out and about every day in March listening to nature's wisdom and it's a sunny day today,
There's blue sky,
It feels very spring-like,
The birds are going for it in the trees,
I don't know if you can hear them behind me,
It's a really super day and as I'm walking slowly with my dog,
Yes I'm out with my dog again,
He's the old man Buzz,
Buzz Lightyear he's called,
We go out for a very slow sniff and a walk with him,
I have plenty of time to reflect and one of the things I was reflecting on today is really helpful to me and I'm hoping it'll be helpful for you,
It's just to reflect on the difference between overwhelm and overload,
That's what I want to look at today and they're two different things but you might use them interchangeably as words,
Overwhelm and overload but they are two very different things,
So let me just give you an illustration,
A little while ago I was going to go for a saxophone lesson on a Monday morning,
I play the saxophone and I go maybe once every other week to get a saxophone lesson and it was a Monday morning when I woke up and I looked at my diary for the week and I just saw these meetings I had coming up and appointments and I just felt like I've put too much in my diary and I've got emails to write and then I saw I had a saxophone lesson on that Monday morning and I was like oh why did I book a saxophone lesson in,
It's an hour there,
It's half an hour,
Half an hour to drive there,
Half an hour back,
That's two hours out of my day,
You know I could use those two hours doing something much more productive than my saxophone lesson and I drove there and all the way there I was chuntering in my head,
Berating myself for making this saxophone lesson appointment and thinking I should have changed it and why do I do the saxophone,
I haven't practiced and I'm no good at it and I was,
I was,
I don't know if you ever have those moments,
Oh my goodness,
I was giving myself a really hard time as I drove to my saxophone lesson,
Anyway,
Had the saxophone lesson,
Came out and drove home and I was very very aware that something had changed and I was like oh what's different and I realized that my mind had lost this angry berating voice telling me off and telling me I was no good and how hopeless I was,
It'd gone,
That voice had gone and in its place there was just peace,
So I'd gone from feeling really really uptight to feeling really chilled and then when I got home I looked at my diary and it looked completely different and of course nothing had changed in my diary,
I had the same amount of appointments,
Same number of emails to write,
The only difference was that I was now two hours later in my day to start on all my work appointments and yet now as I looked at my work appointments I felt really chilled,
I felt really happy,
I felt as though I could take on the world and it was no longer a sense of I've got too much on and what am I going to do and why am I doing this and this sort of sense of constriction and overwhelm which would just swamp me at times,
Instead I just got on and I made a list and I did what I needed to do and and I found a way through it,
So what had happened because in essence you would think that with two hours taken out of my day I would come back and be even more agitated because I had less time to do exactly the same amount of things but I didn't,
You see overwhelm is when we are in agitated thinking,
Overwhelm is a mood state,
It's a feeling,
Overwhelm doesn't tell us about what we've got to do in our diary,
The feeling of overwhelm is just a signal letting us know that our minds are unsettled and busy,
Now overload is a very different matter,
Overload I can have too much to do be very settled in my thinking and realize that I've overloaded myself with too much to do but I don't feel overwhelmed,
Can you see the difference,
Overwhelm I might have less to do but I just have a lot of agitated thinking,
Overload I have actually put too much in my diary,
I am doing too much but from a clear head I can make good decisions so next time you feel a sense of overwhelm or you feel that you've got too much to do just check with yourself are you feeling overwhelmed or are you actually overloaded and if you're overwhelmed that's a message for you to slow down,
Settle your mind and look back to your resourcefulness before taking the next step
