The Cold, Hard Truth: You're Overwhelmed Because You Want to Be

Interesting and probably true for many.

For me, just having to go to work early and commit myself to do required tasks for 8-9 hours, five days a week does make me tired in the evenings. and less inclined to want to tidy the house or just do stuff/go somewhere than someone who does not work. I tend to just watch tv or engage on the forum or something in the evenings. The weekends I get up late, catch up on sleep, do the essential tasks etc.

I did not watch the video but the article makes no mention of this factor. You may have the leisure time but you do not feel it as thus due to tiredness, feeling stressed about pressure at work etc. Your basically done for the day. you just want to switch off.

Now I wonder, do people who do more physical work in their job feel less tired because they have become more physically fit and able to take it?

My job is mainly mentally taxing with a just a few physical tasks so I'm not that fit. I go home feeling mentally tired and have no desire to rush about because of that.

Seems to me that if someone has never been overwhelmed, they can consider themselves very fortunate. The guy that wrote that seems to have been privileged and has no clue what it's like. I've been literally overwhelmed twice. It's horrible and not as simple as "a little too much to do" to be comfy.

Overwhelmed isn't just a little too much to do. It's having several priority one issues hit you at one time when you don't have the means to fix them. You might never get overwhelmed when it's a lot of little aspects of your life that heap up. When all important aspects of your life, job, relationship, housing, money are collapsing at one time, though, you lose the ability to focus and that's when overwhelmed happens. To say it's the person's own fault is self-sanctifying twaddle.

I was getting hit so hard once from so many directions for so long that I actually went into analysis paralysis. It took everything I had in me to pull out of it. None of what happened was my "fault". It was just a coincidental series of events that were very ill timed for me.

I think the thing about being overwhelmed is not that it is a person's fault. I think it's how they handle it that is the deciding factor.

I haven't been overwhelmed since I started working for myself. Before that, I was a workaholic. Now I don't make excuses that I don't have enough time. I simply want to do something or I don't want to do something and having 30-40 or more hrs free time every week is what I want.

I somewhat disagree with what's presented in that article because all that came to my mind while reading it were single moms and the entrepreneur who's currently suffering from a backlash over good intentions: A Company Copes With Backlash Against the Raise That Roared

I get the feeling that people take overwhelmed as meaning "tired" from doing too much. That's not my take on it. My take is that you have so much to do of equal priority importance that it makes it impossible for you to focus on any one thing. It's hard to do things if you have to split focus - if you have to split it enough ways, you lose all strength of any action.

If you are overwhelmed because you are working too much, that's pitiful. If you're working that much you can afford to outsource some and relieve the situation. Don't have time to iron? There's always someone willing to take it over for a buck an item - or someone that will reorganize closets and drawers or give a few rooms a good cleaning out.