Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - BITESIZE | How to Stop Feeling Overwhelmed | Oliver Burkeman #355

Episode Date: April 20, 2023

Sometimes we can feel overwhelmed by all the things we have to do or want to do, leaving us feeling stressed or anxious.  Feel Better Live More Bitesize is my weekly podcast for your mind, body, and heart. Each week I’ll be featuring inspirational stories and practical tips from some of my former guests. Today’s clip is from episode 260 of the podcast with Oliver Burkeman - journalist and author of the book Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management For Mortals. In this clip, Oliver reveals some of his tips to help us overcome overwhelm, make better choices, and build a meaningful relationship with time.   Thanks to our sponsor http://www.athleticgreens.com/livemore Support the podcast and enjoy Ad-Free episodes. Try FREE for 7 days on Apple Podcasts https://apple.co/feelbetterlivemore. For other podcast platforms go to https://fblm.supercast.com. Show notes and the full podcast are available at drchatterjee.com/260 Follow me on instagram.com/drchatterjee Follow me on facebook.com/DrChatterjee Follow me on twitter.com/drchatterjeeuk   DISCLAIMER: The content in the podcast and on this webpage is not intended to constitute or be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your doctor or other qualified health care provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have heard on the podcast or on my website.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Today's Bite Size episode is brought to you by AG1, a science-driven daily health drink with over 70 essential nutrients to support your overall health. It includes vitamin C and zinc, which helps support a healthy immune system, something that is really important at this time of year. It also contains prebiotics and digestive enzymes that help support your gut health. It's really tasty and has been in my own life for over five years. Until the end of January, AG1 are giving a limited time offer. Usually they offer my listeners a one-year supply of vitamin D and K2 and five free travel packs with their first order. But until the end of January, they are doubling the five free travel packs to

10. And these packs are perfect for keeping in your backpack, office, or car. If you want to take advantage of this limited time offer, all you have to do is go to drinkag1.com forward slash live more. Welcome to Feel Better Live More Bite Size, your weekly dose of positivity and optimism to get you ready for the weekend. Today's clip is from episode 260 of the podcast with Oliver Berkman, author of the wonderful 4,000 Weeks Time Management for Mortals. In this clip, Oliver reveals some of his best tips to help us overcome overwhelm, make better choices and build a meaningful relationship with time. with time. A lot of what we see as doctors these days is related to our collective modern lifestyles. But it's not just about things like food choices or are we moving our bodies? It's actually a lot of this kind of stress and worry over trying to control time that's uncontrollable.

You're trying to meet this bar that you can never meet, that you'll have work-life balance, you'll have mastery over your email inbox. And actually the frustration when you don't have it, A, it leads to a lot of poor lifestyle choices because that sense of frustration, that discomfort needs to be soothed in some way, whether it be with a tub of ice cream or biscuits or booze, or you just can't sleep because you're chronically stressed and thinking and worrying about the future or fretting over the past. So actually really understanding our relationship to time and knowing that you can't control it, I actually think is very very very important for each and every single one of these days it's not just something that's philosophical it's actually

the fabric of our daily lives and when we get it wrong it impacts every moment in our life yeah no that's a really that's a really interesting point the ways in which we try to sort of not feel this discomfort to dull the pain of those things they have impact on us physically because of the sort of narcotic ways that we choose to sort of absolutely it's uh it's it's huge what's really interesting to me is how you came into writing about time and our relationship to time because from the research I've done, it appears that you were keen to learn all these productivity tools and actually get better at managing your time and getting the most out of every ounce of time. You know, tell me a little bit about that journey. And at what point did you realize, actually, I'm playing the wrong game here?

Like, this is actually futile. Yeah, it took a long time to get it through my thick skull, apparently. But one of the things I did was I wrote this column for The Guardian for years, a weekly column on psychology, where one of the things I did was to test out a lot of these kinds of techniques. And that was really useful and interesting. And I'm really glad I had the opportunity. But it was also a little bit enabling of my worst side in a way, right? Here I was thinking that I was one day going to find the perfect set of productivity techniques and time management techniques that was going to make me capable of doing everything and not have to say no to anything and not have to worry that I was letting anybody down and

all of this. And then I had this job where I could justify trying out another 50 new techniques and getting hold of another 20 books or courses on the topic because it was for work. And actually that was really useful in the end, right? You sort of get to a point where you're thinking, well, okay, this is like the hundredth way I've tried to structure my to-do list or organize my day. And it isn't bringing me the thing that I'm trying to get out of it. So maybe, as you say, maybe I'm playing the wrong game here rather than that I just haven't found the right technique. And it's not that these techniques are all rubbish.

It's that if you come at them with what I think a lot of people come at them with, including me then, which is this desire to somehow feel totally on top of time and on top of your life and not to have to make difficult decisions about time anymore because you can just handle everything and really feeling secure about your role in your work and time and all the rest of it. If you think you're going to get that out of them, you're going to fail because what that is ultimately deep down, I think, is a desire to not be limited by time in the way that we all are as humans. It's a desire to to sort of avoid the fact that, yeah, limited time means you have to make tough choices. You have to not do things that would matter. And in order to do other things, you have to neglect certain potential friendships you could be nurturing in order to focus on some other

relationships in your life. You just have to, because we're just finite. And we, and especially me back then, I think, think that a lot of this productivity, time management stuff, and other kinds of personal development advice, we think that they're like a backdoor to get around that. And that just leads to more stress because they're not. that. And that just leads to more stress because they're not. One of the ideas that deeply, deeply resonated with me in the book that's actually helped me make some big life decisions over the past few months is this idea that, yes, we have to get good at saying no to things. But I thought your argument took it one step further because there's this kind of, I guess, underlying premise that we have to get good at saying no, because some things actually are just the wrong things. So actually, let's not even bring them into our life in the first place.

But you go one step further and go, actually, no, it's not just about saying no to things that you don't want to do and don't nourish you. You've actually also got to say no to things that you do want to do. Yeah, totally. I think there's always going to be more things that feel like they matter because the world is full of countless opportunities and countless people suffering who need our help and countless good causes and countless interesting places to visit. All of these, there's just an endless amount. So why on earth would you ever expect that you could fit all of the ones that you cared about into your life? But we do. I mean, we do expect that sort of chronically. I think that is actually another

of these examples of something that is really liberating because you can see that you don't have to fight to somehow make time for everything that matters, that that's kind of a futile quest. You just have to make time for some things that matter and let it go, that it's not going to be everything. Once we put the limits on our time, and now actually time is limited, within that constraint, I think we can flourish and I guess be more creative. I totally, totally agree. And I think in creativity, it's often a matter of bringing in those constraints. And then sometimes in our daily time, it's just a matter of seeing that the constraints are there in a sort of non-negotiable way, whether we like it or not. And I think, yes, I think when we do the opposite to that,

which is either try to sort of get over all constraints or to behave as if there aren't any constraints. It can feel it's the more comfortable path at first sometimes, but it leads nowhere good because it is so out of touch with reality that that's when you're going to apportion your time wrongly because you're going to think, well, first of all, I'll answer a hundred emails before I get around to what really matters to me today. Well, if that's because you think you've got more time than you have, if you understood that you didn't, you might switch those two things around, spend the first part of the day on the thing that you cared about the most. That's just one example. But it's just a way of acting that respects the constraints that you're already in. I guess what you're talking about, certainly to me, is intentionality, about living an intentional life, like understanding

that we're making choices all the time and actually many of us are making choices that we don't even realise we're making. Yeah, I think this goes to the heart of it for me because it's tempting to think that in a book like this that I'm saying, why don't you live a limited life? Like, why don't you decide to live in a way that is finite instead of limitless?

And it's like, no, the point is you already are doing every day, whether you like it or not. You already are making something like a choice to sacrifice all sorts of things in favor of other things. That's already happening. The choice we have is whether to do that consciously or not. You are always choosing. It wouldn't be the case if you had eternal life, if you were limitless, if you were infinite, because then there'd always be more time to try everything and to do everything. But because we're not, because we're finite, every choice you make is a choice not to do something else with that little portion of your finite time. We can't be free of that situation. But the freedom we can aspire to is the freedom of making those decisions consciously and seeing like, okay,

I've decided that this matters more than this for today. And it's not because that other thing doesn't matter. It's because I've got to make a choice. I know there will be people listening right now at this minute who are struggling and think at some point I'm going to, yeah, at this point, work-life balance is going to be nailed. But that's a myth, isn't it? I think it is. I think that what work-life balance, it sounds so lovely, but it tends to end up meaning in people's lives is that they feel the pressure to sort of be 100% perfect at work and 100% perfect in life outside work and that starts to become impossible because like 100 plus 100 is 200 and and so i think that it's an especially vicious kind of pressure because it comes wrapped in this notion of like work-life balance is just a lovely thing and actually

struggling to achieve it is a is an awful thing to do because it is basically impossible i think and and i think so and people are holding themselves under the guise of seeking more calm and balance in their lives. They're actually holding themselves to quite a cruel standard that they could maybe just ease up on a bit. And what would that look like? Well, it might, for example, look like a kind of a seasonal approach to imbalance it might look like saying if you're a young adult early in your career something to be said for you know going all in on your career for a while if you are the parents of young children you may have to do a certain amount of work of course but like also go easy on yourself and if you can find a way to sort of do the minimum required for a while. Don't feel bad about that because you've got this very important thing going on in life outside work.

It's always this thing about not making the difficulties of being human worse by adding in this standard that you hold yourself to that actually nobody could ever reach. See what's real in terms of the amount of time you have, and then in terms of the limitations of control that you have over that time. Come back down to earth in terms of what you can reasonably ask of yourself. And then from that firm foundation, absolutely be incredibly ambitious for your work or incredibly ambitious for your family or whatever it is you want to do, or don't be if that's not your style, but just do it from this position of like being in touch with reality and not endlessly berating yourself and beating yourself up for not being able to sort of evade the terms and conditions of being human.

Many people these days are struggling. They feel a chronic state of overwhelm they feel that they don't have enough time to get all the things done that they think they need to get done and i wonder with all your kind of years of writing and just wisdom from you know being immersed in this topic do you have any kind of final thoughts or words to share with people one way to think about this is just to sort of ask yourself how you might do today differently if you really knew and believed that you definitely weren't going to get all the things done that you were hoping to get done in the day and might you in that situation make at least a little bit of time now today for something that you know you really care about rather than telling yourself that that's coming down the pike, that you're going to get all this other stuff out of the way first and then you're going to have time for that. think I mean it, that the only sort of time management technique worth its salt is like step one, choose something that you know matters to you. Step two, figure out when today or this

week you're going to give it at least like 20 minutes of your time. And then there is no step three because like, yes, some other things are not going to get done. And that was always the case. And only this time you will have spent some time nurturing that relationship that matters to you or starting to write that screenplay you've been thinking about for a decade or million other things. But like, I think people know more than they always necessarily realize they know what matters to them. And it really ultimately is just a matter of making a little bit of time for those things here and now.

Hope you enjoyed that bite-sized clip. Hope you have a wonderful weekend. And I'll be back next week with my long-form conversational Wednesday and the latest episode of Bite Science next Friday.