Clutterbug - Real-Life Hacks and Tips to Declutter, Organize and Clean your Home Fast - Overwhelmed? When to PUSH through or PULL back! | Clutterbug Podcast # 195

Episode Date: October 30, 2023

If you are feeling overworked and overwhelmed, it can be hard to know when to push through and work harder, or when to pull back and rest. In today's podcast, we chat about easy ways to identify the difference so you can rest without guilt, and put your nose to the grindstone when it's truly important.    You can find more Clutterbug content here: Website: http://www.clutterbug.me YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@clutterbug TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@clutterbug_me Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/clutterbug_me/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Clutterbug.Me/   #clutterbug #podcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When you're feeling really overwhelmed and you have a lot of things on your plate, how do you know when to push through or when to pull back? Knowing this push, pull and being really able to identify the tasks that are a push and the tasks that are a pull is critical. Hey, Clutterbugs, welcome back to the Clutterbug podcast. I've been saying this a lot lately. I am feeling so overwhelmed. I have a lot on my plate. This is what I do. And I think a lot of this has to do definitely with ADHD, but also this is a learned behavior from my childhood. But I like to take on new challenges. I like to

always be doing something that feels fresh and exciting. And when I kind of manage that thing, or the new thing becomes sort of mundane, I've kind of created a habit out of. it or no longer feels hard and life starts feeling easy. Instead of just enjoying that moment, I like to toss another plate on top of my spinning plates. You know, I don't know why this is. And I wish I would stop. But also, this has added up to a lot of amazing things in my life. If you've been listening or watching my YouTube videos, you know I, when it comes to my business, I'm always like, well, okay, I'm going to do videos and then I'm going to do books and then I'm going to add on a podcast and then I'm going to add on a TV show and then I'm going to add on shorts and then I'm going to add on, you know, just always growing, which is amazing. That's part of things. But also in my personal life, I like to keep tossing things on top. Like, let's move. Let's renovate parts of the house. You know what? I want to become a medical first responder and volunteer every weekend in my free time. Like, What is wrong with you?

So with this type of personality, maybe you can't relate. Maybe it's just me bonga don'tgongs over here. But even if you don't have this type of personality, I guarantee there are times in your life where you feel there's more on your plate than you can carry. There's more going on in your life than you can handle. And you're feeling very stressed and overwhelmed about how you're going to get it all done. And that's what I want to talk about with you today, mostly because I feel this way. And being able to identify, when do we take a break so we don't get burnt out?

When do we push through to the other side? Because maybe these are short things that we just need to get through in our lives. And when do we kind of do something in the middle? How do we know? Is this task a push or a push? pull. Is it a time to work or is it a time to rest? And I think talking about rest is important in general because if you grew up like I did, and I think this is maybe a universal issue, we really see rest as a reward. So we get to take a break when the work is done. And we've been taught

this since we were little kids. Even in school, you can go play at recess when you get all your work done. You can go watch TV when you've done all your chores. We get to take a break when the workload is done. But as grownups, the work is never done. Our to-do list is never ending. There's always other things that can be done. So does that mean we never get to take a break? Like what is the rules here? Somebody tell me what is enough to take a break and what is not. And I think that's something I'm definitely struggling with now and when is it like this is good enough and when do we push through so we're going to talk about some things that I do to identify the difference and maybe this can be helpful or beneficial for you too my husband's upstairs right now he's like doing renovations in my sunroom so you're

probably here a saw some hammering we're just going with this right now because now is the time where I have a half an hour to record a podcast and also I feel very just inspired to talk about this right now because I spent the last half an hour going through my calendar looking for time, looking for a spare moment of time where I could do tasks that I know I need to get done. And tomorrow I'm out of town all day for work and most of the evening. So I'm gone. And then when I get home, I need to make a pot of chili because I'm organizing my stepfathers celebration of life and I have to prepare food. And then Sunday morning, or Saturday morning, I get up and I'm gone all day touring universities with my daughter. And then Saturday, as soon as

that's done, we're rushing, rushing to my mom's house because my brother's down for the celebration of life. And we're doing the planning and the finishing touches for his celebration, which is Sunday. And it's all day, Sunday. And then Monday, I have meetings first thing and videos to record and a new employee who's starting. And so I'm looking at all these things. And so I'm looking at all these things. and I'm trying to find a moment where I can clean the house, do a load of laundry, record a podcast. I'm looking for like, I'm not even thinking of when is Cass going to stop. It's like, when am I going to make dinner in this? When am I going to have time to do anything that are like the basic-y type things in the next few days?

When all I really want more than anything in the world is a nap. friends can you relate to this is there a point where you're like i can't stop or everything's going to fall apart i they're like if i stop working and running right now something's going to fail or even while i'm resting i'm just going to be thinking about all the work that needs to be done and it's not going to be restful rest it's going to feel i'm going to feel guilty and i'm just going to be wasting time and then have more work to do at the end. And this is a situation that isn't all the time for me. But lately, I've just taken off, I've bitten off more than I can chew if I'm being totally honest. So, okay, how do I identify? Can I take a break? That's really what we're

looking at. Can you take a break right now? Can you have the entire weekend to lay in bed and watch movies. Can you just call in, stick to work and take a day off, or do you need to push through? Or can we go somewhere in the middle? And I can only use myself as an example, but hopefully, like, you can pick some things up here. But right now, if I take a break and I don't do one of the things on the list, the big things, so make the food for the celebration of life, or I don't do a podcast or I don't do a video or I don't go out of town for this work job. That's bad for me. That makes more work for tomorrow's cast, next week's cast, and there are consequences to that.

Very real consequences to that. Now, any of these things that are on your plate, there are a few options that we have. Can we delegate some of these? in my case, there is nothing I can delegate because all the people that I would delegate like the cooking to already have jobs for the celebration of life as well. And there's nobody else that I can kind of give the food that I'm making too because they're all making different kinds of food. So or doing some other really important thing for this event. So I can't delegate that. And I can't delegate. I can't delegate like the podcast. I can't have somebody else record the podcast as my voice. I can't have somebody

else make a video is my face. I can't have somebody else go to these meetings in the U.S. because, again, it's my face. So I'm really left at a critical junction here of, well, these things have to get done and these I would call pushes. Because they have deadlines and because those deadlines are not adjustable and because I cannot delegate these things I have to push through because it, it, they just have to get done. But there are lots of things that then I can look at and say I choose rest instead of those. Like I choose rest instead of cooking. I can order takeout for the next few days. I choose rest instead of cleaning. Can I just let it get dirty? Or can I delegate it to my kids knowing that they're going to do an absolutely crap job? Right. But it's

okay, because done good-ish, done not terrible, is better than me having to do it myself and be exhausted and also it not being done at all. So this is a great way that I can choose rest in these times. Push the things that matter and let go of the things that don't. And so I'm throwing this out there to you because I absolutely want you to look at your own sense of overwhelm and think what can be pushed, what do I push through and what can I let go? And I also want to talk about something called active rest. And I did an entire podcast on this, so I know we've talked about this in the past, but active rest is this beautiful middle ground. It's this lovely place where we are still being productive, but in a very relaxing way, a way that

recharges our mind and kind of feels like it isn't, you know, this anxiety-inducing run that we have to do. So active rest can actually be more rejuvenating than just laying on the couch doing nothing. If you're in burnout mode, So you are physically, emotionally, spiritually, like all the parts of you are absolutely exhausted. You need to just do the nothing, friends. It's like medicine. Your body is in critical condition. You're running on fumes.

You are completely empty. You are feeling so exhausted. You are feeling so overwhelmed. you probably have a tension headache. You don't know where to start. You're guzzling coffee. When you're in burnout mode, maybe you're very emotional. You find yourself bursting into tears over nothing. There is no push through for you. There is no push through for you. You need complete rest. So that's a cue, right? Your body, your mind, everything is saying, I can, take anything else. And pushing through is going to break something. You need medicine of complete rest.

It's prescribed to you. It's fine. You can't, this isn't about laziness. This is that you are in burnout and you have to rest. Now, if you feel like you're approaching burnout, but you're not quite there, so you're not bursting into tears over nothing and you're not feeling like a tension headache. You're not feeling like, you know, completely panicked. You're just in like, wow, I got way too much to do. But I don't know where to start. And this is feeling very frustrated. Frustrating. This is when we can identify those push through tasks. What are the tasks that if I do rest now, because I'm not at a critical burnout yet, if I do like, if I, if I, if I, if I just rest, what's going to make life worse tomorrow. You know? Like how am I screwing the pooch down the road? How am I, is this making the

situation worse? And the great thing is laundry, dishes, all of those things. While yes, it's making things moderately worse if you're resting instead of doing those things and putting them off. This isn't like irreversible damage bad. You just got to to work a little harder to scrub the goo off the dishes tomorrow or the next day. So that's not, this is not what I mean by like those things, those things we can rest on or those things we can delegate. It's those critical, I have a deadline. I have to pay this bill or it's going to be late and I'm going to have to pay a late fee or, you know, I have to get this done for my boss because this is the deadline. And if I don't, I'm going to get in trouble, potentially even get fired over.

we push through for those. We push for those. You have contractors coming. This is my husband upstairs. We have contractors coming to paint my son's room on Thursday. Everything needs to be done. The construction, the drywall, the mudding, the sanding, ready for those contractors because they have other clients after us. And if we're not ready for them, we don't get to use them because they've had so many days allotted to us. It's not like we can say, hey, can you start next the following week instead? They're booked. We can't do that. That's not an option so that we have to push through to get that done, which means my husband's going to be not sleeping. He's going to be staying up late. He has to get that done. But he doesn't have to coach every hockey game with the kids. He has an assistant coach

who can take over. He doesn't have to make dinner. He doesn't have to do the running around. He doesn't have to do the grocery shopping. He doesn't have to cut the grass this week. There are things that he can let go of so he can still get that downtime that he needs. So when to push and when to rest. And then when to do the middle stuff, which is the active rest. Dudes, dudes, big dudes to lots. The active rest are those times where we can shut our brain off and do a task mindlessly, but at a slow pace. We're doing the thing we got to get done, but at a slow, leisurely pace that doesn't feel frantic. And these tasks can be light cleaning, light dishes, maybe even riding around on the riding mower, right, while listening to a great audio book or watching a show on your tablet with

your headphones while you're cutting the grass. Don't run over anybody. But yeah it's still it's just it feels very similar to laying on the couch watching a show but you're standing watching the show while slowly washing a dish or wiping a counter leisurely this is active rest you're still being active you're still being mildly productive but you're resting at the same time. So that's the middle zone. And being able to identify where you are and look at the tasks differently and identify like, this is critical. This is a push through. This is a got to get done. And these are like, don't have to get done. These are things I can delegate. And these are things that I can do in an active resting state. So I'm sharing this with you today. It's a quick little

podcast. Maybe it's rambly. I didn't write a script or anything. We're just, we're just going with it because I'm right now in it. I'm in the, the trenches. And I'm looking at what I need to push through, what I can rest on and where I can do the things in the middle. And I'm finding this way of looking at it very helpful for me. So hopefully you find it helpful for you as well. Thank you so very much for joining me today on this weird podcast. I hope you got something done. I hope you were using this time, like, active resting, just hearing me complain about my life while you're also putting away laundry or doing dishes or doing whatever it is that you do. Um, yeah, that is all. Thank you guys so much and I'll see you next time.