Overwhelm is Optional
The podcast for big-hearted, highly-driven professionals who want their life back. Welcome to the Overwhelm is Optional podcast where each week we find ways to gently rebel against the nonsense that overwhelm and exhaustion are just the price you pay to have the life you want. Heidi Marke is a Coach, Teacher, Podcaster & Author. Thank you to purpleplanet.com for the music.
Overwhelm is Optional
Overwhelm is Optional: Reading an extract to you with Rosie, Nutmeg and Kangarooby
This week I invite you to settle back and enjoy being read to from my book Overwhelm is Optional - with my Cavalier spaniels, Rosie, Nutmeg and Kanagarooby.
Feel seen and understood because it's not just you.
Please consider buying my book and sharing it. Available on Amazon.
The One Minute Marke - get my free one minute audio for immediate relief from overwhelm.
The podcast for big-hearted, highly driven, professionals who want their life back. Welcome to the Overwhelm is Optional podcast where each week we find ways to gently rebel against the nonsense that overwhelm and exhaustion are just the price you pay to have the life you want.
Heidi Marke is a Coach, Teacher, Podcaster & Author
Having managed to embarrassingly and painfully burn out losing her once-loved and hard-worked-for career, confidence, health and financial stability - whilst prioritising her selfcare (yes, really!) she now quietly leads The Gentle Rebellion - inviting you to gently, but firmly, rebel against the idea that to have the life you want you to have to push through overwhelm and exhaustion. You don’t.
To find out more about my work please visit:
You can buy my book here:
Please note some episodes and show notes contain affiliate links for people and products I love and have used myself. I may earn from qualifying purchases. As...
Hello, welcome to this week's episode. It's a little bit of a different one, because what I did was record part of my book with the dogs and put it on YouTube, because I'm really aware that the dogs have quite a soothing effect on people and I just thought please hop over to my YouTube channel where you can get the extracts without the intro and the outro. However, if you just you're here already, don't worry about it. Just settle back and enjoy having part of my book read to you and just imagine that the dogs are there with you. In fact, you won't need to imagine that much, because I have to stop and talk to them every now and again. And if you just heard that beeping in the background, that is the puppy kangaroo bee messing around with one of her toys. So enjoy this week's episode. I hope that it does what's intended to do, which is the following being read to can be incredibly soothing. Having the dogs there just makes it like being at home with me in some kind of nice way, I hope. But most importantly, the words from my book are designed to make you feel seen, seen, so you know it's not just you, and hopefully that relief will allow your nervous system to reset. Allow you to have more self compassion, get to know yourself more, get to love yourself more, get to accept yourself more. It is not just you. Overwhelm has an incredibly damaging effect on so many of us who are highly driven, big hearted, want to live full lives. So I'm sharing these words with you. If you want to buy the book, just hop over to Amazon. Overwhelm is optional. Heidi, mark, I'd be really grateful if you would buy it and share it, because I know the words within it, which were very carefully chosen. I've removed anything superfluous. There's a lot of space created by reading it and being with it. I know that those words, when they resonate, are very powerful, because feeling seen and not alone is such a relief. Enjoy, welcome to the Gentle Rebellion where overwhelm is optional.
Speaker 1:From my book Overwhelm is Optional, Part 1. It's not you. It's not you, it's overwhelm. You are perfect and a work in progress. The work is to let go of the belief that there's anything fundamentally wrong with you. You are not a self-improvement project. You are not a problem to be solved. You do not need to overwork, pushing yourself through the heavy, life-crushing fog of overwhelm into exhaustion, to have what you want. You do not want too much and there is no secretly written deal with the universe that, to have the life you want, you have to put up with overwhelm. It's not you, it's overwhelm. Your struggle to think straight, your frustration with never getting around to doing the things you really want to do, the aches and pains in your body, even though you've hardly moved it today. Settle down, sweetie. Good girl, just reading. Good girl, good girl.
Speaker 1:You're stuck in your head overthinking everything. You're overwhelmed by shoulds and oughts. You've been rehearsing the same conversation for days or nights. You're awake at 4am being thought-bombed by fake emergencies. You know your life is great and that you should feel grateful, but it doesn't feel that way to you. You put on a suit of armour to get through your day in the belief that you just need to toughen up. You spend a lot of time. Please don't destroy the basket. Good girl, just settle down. Good girl, good girl, nutmeg. Good girl, rosie. Do what Rosie's doing. Rosie's asleep. Do what Rosie's doing. Yeah, good girl, thank you.
Speaker 1:You spend a lot of your time and energy coping with your life. You push your poor brain to focus until it hurts like it's bruised. You're exhausted but can't switch off. You think there's something wrong with you and compare yourself to others who seem to cope better and enjoy their life more than you. You think you want too much and if you downsized your dreams you wouldn't feel overwhelmed. Your day is focused on getting through your whack-a-mole to-do list. You have an invisible and never-ending get better at list. You're clinging to the belief that when you achieve this next thing, all your stress will magically disappear. You believe that if you were only more organised, everything would be magically okay.
Speaker 1:You move so fast through your day that you bump into things and are surprised by how many bruises you have. You have inconvenient tear leakage that takes you by surprise and threatens your hard-worked-for professional position. You can't hear your partner through the noise in your head. You seem to have forgotten how to have fun. You get stuck in cycles of procrastination even though you have no time. When you get time to yourself, you don't know what to do with it. You feel guilty for taking time off and spend the whole time thinking about all the things you should be doing. You're always waiting for a calmer time so that you can do that thing and feel that way, but it never happens not really. Or when it does, you long for it to be longer or miss it, because your mind is travelling through space and time faster than you can get it to stay with you in the calmer time and better feeling.
Speaker 1:You've created a life that is just really hard work to hold together. You've created a life you don't feel at home in. You've created a life you don't feel at home in. This is not the life you intended to create. None of these are character flaws, all sides weaknesses. See part one it's not you, it's over.
Speaker 1:Well, you do not need to wait until you've cleared your to-do list, earned some ease, improved yourself enough to deserve it, can afford to go part-time, have paid that debt, have got that promotion, have grown your business to that size, have moved house, downsized, shrunk your dreams into something that requires less of you retirement. There is no pot of ease at the end of your to-do list. That feeling that you want, that you think you'll get when you've finished this and done that and achieved that next goal. You already know that's a trap. The bad news is there is no pot of ease at the end of your to-do list. The good news is there is no pot of ease at the end of your to-do list.
Speaker 1:Everything you do is so you can feel more at ease, more at home in your life, safe, satisfied, content, happy, loved. You can't get that feeling by pushing through overwhelm, because overwhelm prevents you from thinking straight. Oi, destroyer of baskets, good girl. Good girl, the basket's fine, it doesn't need eating, it doesn't need chewing. Thank you very much, good girl. Good girl. You can't get that feeling by pushing through overwhelm, because overwhelm prevents you from thinking straight. It hides all the easier ways, the more fun ways. It causes you to react too fast and make decisions as if you were swatting flies. It causes you to make mistakes. It causes you to snap at people. Then you have more stuff to deal with, more problems to solve, more mistakes to fix and more people to apologise to. Pushing to think straight through overwhelm just causes even more overwhelm. You can't get that feeling by treating your body like a slave either.
Speaker 1:Pushing yourself to exhaustion as if it doesn't matter how you feel as long as you keep the to-do list working, is a nonsense. You matter. How you are in the world matters. You are the centre of your life. Only you can live your life fully If you give away your precious time, energy and attention to your to-do list. Your to-do list becomes your life. Likewise, pushing yourself to exhaustion, putting your own needs last to keep other people happy, is a nonsense too. Those who love you would never want you to do this. Those who love you find you easier to be around when you're the relaxed, happy version of yourself. Those who love you are inspired when you feel at home in yourself. When you stop pushing yourself as if you don't matter, you give others permission to treat themselves with more kindness and respect. How you are in the world matters, even when you think no one notices.
Speaker 1:Overwhelm is a trickster and it's time to take it more seriously. Deal with the overwhelm first, and what you want will follow. Look at the list of things that are in your way of having the feeling of ease you crave. They are either all too far away retirement impossible, finishing your to-do list or require you to be somebody other than you are self-improvement list, downsizing your dreams. So I'll say it again overwhelm is a trickster. You can't have a life you feel at home in by pushing through overwhelm. Overwhelm hides the easier ways for you to live your life, your way To have a life you feel at home in, by pushing through overwhelm. Overwhelm hides the easier ways for you to live your life, your way, to have the ease you want. You're going to have to try a different way. Ease equals more at home in your life, safe, satisfied, content, happy, loved. Deal with the overwhelm first, and your way will be revealed to you. Overwhelm is your guide.
Speaker 1:All those signs and symptoms of overwhelm are course corrections, an opportunity to see things differently. Noticing them completely neutrally is a powerful step and probably enough. Right now, what you want is the opposite of the feelings. You're utterly fed up with how gaps are a trap. Every time things ease up a bit holidays, evenings, if you're lucky, and weekends, maybe at least part of them allows you to patch yourself up and get back into the fray. Every time you think you've found a solution. Sleep hygiene, diet hacks, productivity hacks and things are better for a while just adds to the trap. This is why you keep going around in circles until you can't anymore. But that's burnout and, if possible, best avoided as a very expensive mistake.
Speaker 1:Overwhelm is not the deal you make with the universe to have a full life. Overwhelm is not the deal you make with the universe to have a full life. You can't martyr yourself in order to deserve the life you long for. You get the life you long for by being yourself. Being yourself is how your dreams come true. Overwhelm is optional. It takes new skills, new habits and new perspectives to make it optional, but it's worth it. It takes commitment, but you don't have to do it alone. A full life does not mean overloaded. You worked hard so you could live your full adventure. You made sacrifices so you could have more freedom, more choice over how you spend your time and more money to allow you to do the things you dreamt of doing. Now you have a full schedule and an overloaded mind instead.
Speaker 1:Overwhelm is inevitable. It comes from overusing your mind and overloading your nervous system. It comes from allowing the mind to be the boss. It comes from not understanding that the mind is constantly on the lookout for bears. It comes from ignoring the signals from your body as inconvenient. It comes from treating the body as an inconvenient way to transport the mind around to get things done. It comes from treating the body like a series of problems to be solved instead of loving it as the incredible, magical thing it is. It comes from disconnecting from your heart. It comes from believing that it's dangerous to follow your heart. It comes from toughening up, shutting down the heart and refusing to listen to the body like the old friend. It indeed is. Good girls, you're going to need to control your attention so that your body and heart can weigh in on the navigation. The mind on its own is just not that good at navigating you into your full adventure.
Speaker 1:The way you were taught to create a successful life only gets you so far. Keeping your head down and working hard works. It's how you created your successful life. But feeling at home in that life, feeling successful, that's a whole nother level that you weren't taught how to reach for. And the life you created that old pushing breaking yourself way is really hard to maintain because it requires the same energy and effort it took to create it. It's built of the wrong stuff. It's time to do things differently.
Speaker 1:You want to feel at home in your life, at home in yourself. You're fed up of waiting. You're fed up of feeling like a child in the back of the car asking are we there yet? You want to feel successful. You didn't work this hard to work this hard. You want your full adventure. If you didn't, you would have settled by now. You'd have stopped fighting to have what you want. You'd have stopped being a struggling rebel. But something in you keeps whispering I want more than this. You want your life back. Now, please, and before anyone realises just how close to breaking you sometimes feel, because you want to keep your hard-won professional respect and, quite frankly, it's none of anyone's damn business that you're screaming inside For more resources to help you gently rebel.