Why You're Overwhelmed (It's Not What You Think): The Prioritization Problem Nobody Talks About | Out of Overwhelm Ep. 1

You don't have a time management problem. You have a prioritization problem — and once you see it, you can't unsee it.

In this episode — and the kickoff of the Out of Overwhelm series — nervous system coach Anne Jones breaks down why high-achieving women feel perpetually behind, even when they're working harder than ever. Using real client stories and a personal experience navigating a family health crisis, Anne reveals how treating everything like an emergency is quietly draining your energy, focus, and sense of self.

If you've ever thought "I just need to get through this week" — this one's for you.

You'll learn:

• Why overwhelm is a prioritization problem, not a lack of discipline
• How your nervous system creates urgency where there is none
• What it actually means to abandon yourself
• Three reflection questions to help you choose what deserves your energy — without guilt

📩 Join my list to get on the Out of Overwhelm Masterclass priority list: https://link.annejonescoaching.ca/subscribe

Next week: Why Rest Isn't Working

You know what to do. You're not confused about the plan. You're just not there when life gets loud.

This show is for the high-achieving woman who can still function, still perform, still hold everything together — and still feel like she's quietly disappearing on herself in the process.

Here, we talk about the real reason you fall off (it's not discipline), what's actually happening in your body when you override, override, override, and how to stop starting over every Monday.

You don't have a discipline problem. You're disappearing on yourself. And that's a nervous system problem — one you can actually change.

I'm Anne Jones — nervous system coach, former RMT, and certified fitness coach of 16+ years. I'll help you build the kind of steady, grounded capacity that holds when life stops cooperating.

No hustle. No perfect conditions. No performing your way through another week.

Just honest conversation, practical tools, and a way back to yourself.

Start here:

• Free Guide: The High-Achiever's Guide to Losing Fat Without Obsessing Over Food or Workouts: [https://www.annejonescoaching.ca/free-guide-your-body-your-way]

• Deeper support + essays: Join my Substack: [https://annejonesfit.substack.com/]

Work with me:

• Website: [https://www.annejonescoaching.ca/]

Connect With Me:

• Instagram: [@an...

Transcript

Speaker 0:07

You don't have a time management problem. You have a prioritization problem. And today I want to show you why that distinction changes everything. Okay, before we get into today's episode, I just want to address something. I just like to call things out, and you may have noticed this too. So as you probably know, I exited my fitness coaching business in February, and as a result, this podcast has an identity problem. So if you found me through fitness or through the graphics, you're still seeing Muscles and Mindset Revolution. If you are subscribed on your podcast app, it says Back to You, 'cause I changed it to Back to You. And if you've listened to recent episodes, I've been saying Back to You on air, 'cause that's my new brand. That is my signature program. That's my thing. I now help women come back to themselves and stop abandoning themselves. So depending on where you're coming from, you may be wondering if you're even in the right place, and you are, I promise. But I want to be honest about what's going on. So as you know, the truth is this podcast, this show has been evolving alongside me and my work. And for a while, I was figuring out what it was actually meant to be, who I am helping, and I kept outgrowing the container that I'd put it in. And instead of addressing it directly, I just kept going and hoped that, the content would carry with it, which it totally did, but I don't want to be confusing. So here's where we're landing, okay? This show, this podcast, even when it was about fitness and muscles and nutrition, has always been about helping women come back to themselves, their attention, their energy, their focus, their time, their lives. That has never changed, and it's not changing now. What is changing is that I am getting every day more and more clear and intentional about how I do that, and I want this podcast and this show to reflect that very clearly, instead of the beautiful chaotic mess that it's been behind the scenes, which I'm always, want to be honest about. That's how these things come out, right? So consider this a soft reintroduction. Same me, more focused, and honestly, more myself than I have ever been talking to you in my AirPods. I'm so glad that you're here. Now let's get into it And so this morning, it just came to me this morning, I was like, I love Back To You. I love the idea. I love the term. That is my method that I've created in my six-week course. But I don't want it to be confused, the podcast and the course, right? So I was like, "What am I going to rename this podcast?" And I was like, I really like The Self-Led Woman, but it was taken. I really like Choose You, but there's some other podcast called that. And then I finally landed, I was like, you know what? This is The Anne Jones Show. And I'm, you know... My, my fearful brain is like, "Nobody's googling Anne Jones." But then it's like, if, if you know me and you're looking for my podcast, then you are. This is what you're looking for. And I think that's all of what I teach, right? It's like coming back to yourself. I also think, to be honest, like, it's such a, it's such a flex, you know? Like, Oprah didn't name her show. It was the freaking Oprah Winfrey Show. So it's a manifestation that, this is what you were looking for. So welcome to The Anne Jones Show. Let's get into it. Okay, I am bringing you along on something super exciting. For the next five weeks, we're doing something very intentional. I've created a series called Out of Overwhelm, OOO. So there are going to be five topics. The first one this week is Why You Feel Behind All the Time, this episode. Next week will be Why Rest Isn't Working. Week three, The Hidden Cost of Being the Reliable or Capable One. Week four, Why Everything Feels Urgent in Your Body. And week five will be The Overwhelm Loop that Keeps Pulling You Back In. And at the end of the five weeks, I'm going to invite you to my masterclass called Out of Overwhelm, and the details are coming soon, so make sure you're on my email list so that you are, so you can get on the priority waitlist. I want to share this story about one of my clients and how she literally got out of overwhelm in our 12 weeks of working together. But really, she started feeling different in two to three weeks. She has a family. She has a career she loves. She and her husband also own a business together outside of her career. She's finishing her master's degree, and from the outside, on paper, she's doing so well. She's living the dream, right? But internally, she was carrying a low-grade hum of anxiety. I'm behind. I should be further along right now." In our first session together in March, she described her inner voice as like, "If I can just fit in one more thing, if I can just keep going. What's another 20 minutes, you know, doing this thing? What's another 30 minutes?" She thought, she was thinking that this was encouragement for herself, but it was actually taking her away from everything that actually mattered, everything that she really wanted. Like, she was getting lost in busy work, as all my clients do, right, as I used to, as I sometimes still do. Working on her job, doing things for other people, things that were not the things that she you know, values and says that she wants to be doing. So she came in to working with me wanting to stop believing that productivity equals doing well, because she's just produced so much stuff. And what she told me she actually wanted was to be able to make decisions from a place of being grounded as opposed to making decisions from a place of anxiety, fear, or overwhelm. After two to three weeks, she said, "I feel calmer. I feel less frantic." And then this is the part that I love. She described asking herself for the first time, "Do I really need to be doing this right now?" Which is what we're gonna talk about today. But also, I want to mention as well that she also shared with me, because we did somatic work together, as I do with my one-on-one clients, that when she asked, started asking herself, Do I really need to be doing this thing right now with this sense of urgency?" She noticed how her body, particularly her stomach muscles, stopped clenching all the time. She lost that tension. Her, literally, digestion improved. On her evening walks that she was taking, like, just to tick the box, she started actually noticing the things around her instead of running through tomorrow's to-do list in her head. The word that she used to describe who she was becoming at that time was steady. And then her transformation, what she shared with me after our 12 weeks was, "Wow, I am settled. I feel good. I feel positive." It's like reinforcing this really wonderful, beautiful transformation instead of, "I feel off. Push through. Just keep going. If you get it done, you'll feel better, and then you can take a break." And her calendar didn't empty. it's not like I told her to quit her job or she got a full-time nanny or, anything like that. Her life stayed full. In fact, it is pretty much, her commitments and everything are exactly the same. Her work is still demanding. Her family still needs her. She got better at delegating and putting things in containers, but she stopped treating every demand and request like an emergency. So, she has the same full life, but she is a completely different woman inside of it. And actually, if this is resonating, I did an episode in January, I think, or February, because I had another client who, when she came in to work with me, she told me she literally could not make it past a Wednesday. she could crush a fitness program, nutrition protocols until Wednesday, and then sh- she could never make it back a Wednesday until we started working together, and now she is... gained strength. She lost weight. She does not fear food anymore, and she, it doesn't matter what day it is, right? And that's what I want to impress upon you. I can link that episode in the show notes as well if this, not getting past Wednesday" language is speaking to you. So if you're anything like my clients and the previous version of me, most women think that they are overwhelmed because they have too much to do. There's just too much to do, life be lifing. While that is, there is something to that, because I do think that, adulting is real. But the expectations of women in particular are more ridiculous than they've ever been. Like, the standards to which we are expected to hold, and then we decide for ourselves, right? If we're hustling for someone else's expectation or standard, then yeah, it's always gonna feel like you're never doing enough. But even my clients and my previous self, the expectations that we set for ourselves can be absurd. And women have a tendency to take over responsibility for things. I do see it in my clients all the time. I saw it in my client who I was just speaking about at the beginning of the episode. So these high-functioning women are actually overwhelmed because everything feels like it deserves the same amount of urgency, attention, energy, and guilt. And when we prioritize everything, we prioritize nothing. This is not a time management problem. A time hack isn't gonna help you. Because time management asks, How do I just fit it all in?" Prioritization asks you, "What is actually allowed to take up my life right now?" That gives you agency. And it's not your fault, 'cause nobody has taught you how to choose what matters without making you feel like you're failing someone else, or yourself. But usually we choose ourselves, right? That is what abandoning yourself, disappearing on yourself is. I lived an example of this a couple weeks ago. So two weeks ago, my ridiculously healthy 75-year-old mom, you would never know my mom is 75, she is a rock star. She just very suddenly got, a really nasty case of bacterial pneumonia and was hospitalized, like, so fast. And my sister and brother-in-law had just flown in from Napa, and they were visiting, and I was supposed to, like, deliver them to go see my parents. And then we were debating about, how long is she gonna be in the hospital? Like, should we go? And of course, I did. But that was a real sense of urgency. that was an incident, an instance where I literally dropped everything the next day. My husband took family leave, which I didn't even know that was a thing 'cause we've never taken advantage of it. I dropped everything. I, we went there, and I had to delegate and prioritize. I delegated getting groceries and making dinner to my brother-in-law, who was, happy to help with those things. I was very direct and specific with him, which he and my sister appreciated. My aunt also got sick while I was there, and she also lives there, and I was trying to help her out, so I was, like, getting her groceries and getting her prescriptions, and she had some, other things that she needed help with, and I had to tell her no. I was at the hospital, all, you know, in the morning, and then all afternoons. And then, by the fourth day that I was there, I had a full day of client calls, and I had been like, "Oh, it's okay. I'll go see my mom in the morning." And then, by Tuesday, I was like, "I have to cancel my clients," which is I hate it, and I see my clients every week. My one-on-one clients are every single week or every other week. Like, there's not an I only have three days a week to work at the best of times, so there's very little wiggle room. So if you can relate to having a calendar with a small amount of childcare and very little wiggle room, very little time to have your career, that is me, okay? And I had to make the decision to cancel my full day of client calls, which I hate to do because I love my clients. I love the consistency, the reliability of showing up for them. My brain hated it, right? And I had to coach myself around it because Really, my clients, were great. Some of them were even, relieved. They needed another week of integration. But my brain had the old f- had a fear, has an old fear of being seen as flaky or unreliable. Like, the, the things that I used to do in my 20s, when I was working as a full-time fitness instructor and registered massage therapist, like taking clients at all hours on all days, never canceling a patient. I never, I never... I a patient, like, once 'cause Sophie and I had stomach flu. I- that was, like, extra at that point, but I, I have this old fear of being flaky or unreliable. But being in calls all day w- when my mom being alone in the hospital and me being distracted and wishing I was with her and knowing that I had so many things to do, you know, to help my dad and take care of her, it wouldn't have served anyone. I wouldn't have showed up most presently for my clients. I wasn't showing up for my parents. So it wouldn't have served anyone, and this is what I mean when I talk about coming back to yourself because, you know, sometimes often the socially acceptable thing to do is to push through. Usually, the socially acceptable thing, the expected thing is to push through. But pushing through is not always in line with your values. It's not always in line with who you want to be on that day. And on that day, I wanted to be a daughter. I wanted to be present. I also want to be a good coach. I want to model what I would want my client to do in that situation. And sometimes, you know, who I am and who I want to be is to push through in a different context. The thing is, when we don't have a level of discernment and we always default to taking the request, doing the thing, taking it on, pushing through It's not always, it's not always of service or heading in the direction that we want to be. That is what abandoning yourself is, is abandoning yourself just because the request comes in, just to push through, just because you're f- afraid of disappointing someone, right? As it would've been in my situation. But in that situation on that day, that was being most true to myself, was canceling that day of calls. All That, that is almost never, ever the other, the case, unless I'm, like, truly sick. The real point is when there's a real emergency, we know, right? Like, there's no question. I have to go be with my people. We drop everything and we go care for our people. The problem is most of us aren't only using crisis mode in crisis. That was the other thing I was reminded of on that week when I was there, was like, "Oh, I remember living like this all the time." Okay. Hear me say that. Many of my clients when they come to work with me, they are living in the way that I was in a crazy week when I was caretaking and my mom was in hospital. My clients are living like that, like, all the time. Can you relate to that? We're using crisis mode when there is no crisis. We're using crisis mode on laundry, and texts, and emails, and projects, and other people's expectations, and doing things that we don't wanna do, and the parent advisory council, and l- everything. And when we treat everything with that emergency hospitalization level urgency, we burn through all of our attention, our bandwidth, our energy and time as if we have an unlimited supply. And where does the deficit come from? You. It comes from you. Your capacity, your human needs, eating, sleeping, exercising, relaxing, resting. So that week really reminded me, like, I remember driving to the hospital, like, feeling in my body, I'm okay right now, I'm okay right now. I'm doing this. I can do this. And oh, right, this is why I don't do this. I don't act like this all the time. Who I can be in a crisis and who I choose to be on a regular basis in my intentional life are no longer the same woman as they once were. Here's another example for you. Right after that, so this had all happened, right? I came home on our 10th anniversary. I came home from that visit, hospitalization visit, came home on our 10th wedding anniversary. The next day my daughter was going to a sleepaway camp, and my husband had the weekend off. He's usually on call 24/7. So he had it off, so my brain is like, Space. Oh my God, what if we wash every piece of fabric in the house? What if we organize all the things?" Now, if you know me, I use laundry as an example all the time because I think it's an easy trap. And the trap isn't laundry. Sometimes laundry is laundry. But the trap is believing that laundry is the thing that needs to be done when you have the opportunity of time. The trap is believing that laundry deserves the same level of attention and urgency as my sweet husband. And even though I teach this, I still went through this process, right? And I clocked it, 'cause that's what we do, is we regulate, we catch it in the micro moment, and come back to ourselves. Oh, right, what are my actual... what do I actually want to say yes to on this free Saturday I have with my husband, our anniversary weekend? Well, actually it was, I want to move my body, I want to prep for my Back to You Monday call, which I was so excited about, and I needed to, 'cause we were going away the next night. And I wanted time with my husband. Everything else was a no. Not because I'm a dirty A-hole who doesn't do their laundry, but because that was prioritization. And then I feel I leave that day, that night, I go to bed feeling like, oh, I did what I, I, I desired today. I was who I wanted to be today. That is not failure. That is prioritization. That is coming back to you. That is putting yourself first. Most women don't struggle because they don't care. They don't care about themselves, their body, their nutrition, their fitness, their mental health. I know that you care. They struggle because they care about everything. Family matters. Work matters. Health matters. Your marriage, you're supposed to prioritize your marriage. You're supposed to prioritize social connections and friendships, your house, your peace matters, your future matters. Oh my God, are you future planning? Of course, you want all of it. But you can value many things and still not prioritize them all, all at the same time, because that's where overwhelm lives. Overwhelm, I often say with clients, can show up with too many blessings at once. And of course, it can show up as hard things, too. But The problem is that often they feel the same. So then this is where overwhelm lives. So here are some reflection questions for you. here are the things I invite you to reflect on: what deserves my best energy right now? What gets good enough? And what can get delayed, delegated, or released? Reflect on those three questions. Prioritization is not about caring less. It is not about being lazy. In fact, I think it's the opposite of lazy because it is being more intentional and decisive with your time, focus, energy, and attention. It is about telling the truth about what gets to receive your full energy in this season. You cannot execute a calm plan from a chaotic state. If your body is in urgency, your calendar just becomes another weapon. So we always wanna address state first, regulate first, and then choose, and then plan. What would you choose to do today if you stopped trying to prove that you could hold everything, that you could do it all and be a superhero? You don't have a time management problem. You don't have a discipline problem. You have a prioritization problem. You have a being unapologetically clear about what you want problem. So next week, we're gonna talk about why rest isn't working for you. Everyone's telling you to rest and relax. That's not working for you, and I promise you, it is not what you think. If this landed for you, get on my email list so that you can get on the priority list for the Out of Overwhelm Masterclass. It's coming. I'm putting my heart into it, and it is going to be worth showing up for live. The link for that is in my show notes. Make sure that you are on my email list, and I will email the details very soon. thank you for being here. Please join me next week for this Out of Overwhelm series. Share this with a friend who you have been seeing as overwhelmed, and I will see you next week.