Dealing with Overwhelm (Unpublished)

Dealing with Overwhelm (Unpublished)
by Joshua Millburn
Throughout my thirty years on this earth, I have struggled with one emotion more than
any other: the feeling of overwhelm. That changed this year though.
Until this year, I was overwhelmed by my job. I was overwhelmed by the amount
of email in my inbox. I was overwhelmed just thinking about hitting the gym in the
evening. I was overwhelmed by the Internet. I was overwhelmed by my smartphone. I
was overwhelmed by the phone calls and emails and text messages and instant messages
and BlackBerry Messenger messages and Twitter updates and Facebook statuses and all
the millions of discrete bits of info hurled in my direction every day.
I became neurotic—I was overwhelmed, so I worried about everything. What if I
don’t respond to that email today? What if I don’t return that voicemail in time? What if
I fail? What if he doesn’t like me? What if she stops loving me? What if, what if, what if...
Overwhelm is a heartless bitch who makes us doubt ourselves into oblivion. And
it’s easy to let her into our lives. Overwhelm seems like the natural reaction to the
barrage of information with which we’re faced every day of our lives. Everybody else is
doing her, why shouldn’t I give it a whirl too? But there is a way to have an amicable
separation from overwhelm, a way to deny her access to your life.
Minimalism allowed me to deal with overwhelm in ways I never thought possible.
Minimalism taught me we don’t get overwhelmed by the million bits of information
whizzing at us at all hours of the day; rather, we get overwhelmed because of those
million bits. In other words, the reason we get overwhelmed is because there is too
much going on in our lives. The overwhelm is a warning sign.
I finally realized that this year. I realized that overwhelm was there to help me,
not hurt me. She was standing over my shoulder saying, “hey, dummy, you’re trying to
do too many things,” and “hey, stupid, you have too much crap in you life,” and “hey,
you idiot, yeah, you, don’t you realize that what you’re doing isn’t that important?”
Overwhelm was actually there to help me, to get me on the right track, to make
me feel the pain of accepting too many unnecessary responsibilities, the pain of
accepting too much superfluous stuff in my life, the pain of the status quo. Once I
realized this I was able to get rid of my old routine, to develop habits I loved instead of
meaningless, tedious tasks that filled up my day, to focus on doing important things and
live a more meaningful life.
This year, I quickly whittled away anything that wasn’t important in my life. No
more “to do” list. No more daily emails. No more TV. No more Internet at home. No
more unneeded bills. No more unnecessary phone calls. No more clocks (no more time).
Now I focus on what’s important to me: my relationships, my health, my passion,
growing as individual, and contributing to others in a meaningful way.
At first, I thought people wouldn’t understand me, I thought that my friends and
family would reject my change, I thought they would be offended when I didn’t respond
to their emails within 24 hours, when I didn’t call them back within an hour, when I
didn’t conform to the status quo of my yesteryear, but I discovered that the important
people in my life respected my newfound lifestyle, my newfound underwhelm, my
calmer, more focused life. Once I set the expectation with them, they respected my
decision—the people who really matter did. Some of these people even began
implementing aspects of my lifestyle into their daily rituals, experiencing a new life, a
more fulfilling life, a life of underwhelm.