79. Worry vs. Overwhelm: How to Stop Them from Draining Your Energy

In Episode 79 of Weight Loss Made Simple, Dr. Stacy Heimburger dives deep into the emotions of worry and overwhelm, exploring how they drain your energy and prevent you from making progress. Learn how these "useless emotions" keep you stuck in unproductive cycles and discover practical strategies to break free. Dr. Heimburger shares her personal tips for managing both emotions, including how to interrupt the worry cycle, overcome the paralysis of overwhelm, and regain control over your mental and physical energy. Tune in for actionable advice to reduce anxiety and stress and start moving forward with confidence today!

Key Takeaways:

• Understand the difference between worry and overwhelm.
• Learn effective strategies to manage both emotions.
• Gain tools to stop these energy-drainers from holding you back.

If you find this episode helpful, share it with a friend or tag Dr. Stacy on social media!

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This episode was produced by The Podcast Teacher: www.ThePodcastTeacher.com.

Transcript

Welcome back to the podcast, everybody! This is Dr. Stacy Heimburger, and I’m your host for today. I want to talk about something that comes up for me a lot. I’m naturally a bit of a nervous, worrying type of person, and I can easily get overwhelmed. I find that these two emotions—specifically worry and overwhelm—are just energy drainers, and they’re really nonproductive. I still remember one of my first coaches telling me that these are what we call “useless emotions,” so I want to talk about them today and share some strategies I’ve found personally that have worked. Hopefully, they’ll help you gain a little more calmness and get some productive energy back into your life by listening to this episode and taking some of these tips.

We all have moments when worry or overwhelm take over. If we’re really paying attention to the energy in our body—just how we feel—both of these emotions can drain us and leave us feeling paralyzed. Unchecked, what they really do is keep us stuck. If we are in the process of trying to be a little bit better, maybe trying to get better control of our health, wellness, self-care, or mindfulness, being stuck is not really the goal. We want to be moving forward.

So, I want to talk about the difference between them because I do think they are very different—and especially different in how we tackle them, how we can manage them. Prolonged worry can really physically take a toll on you. There are studies showing headaches, fatigue, difficulty concentrating—all of these things. That type of worry can lead to a sort of cognitive breakdown, and then it gets really hard to do what we need to do. Overwhelm is also paralyzing, and it can do the same thing.

Worry, I kind of picture like a tornado. I imagine being in the middle of a tornado. It almost makes me think of that scene in Inside Out (if any of you have kids and have watched that movie). It’s a little bit like when anxiety just works the whole emotional platform into a tizzy, and like nothing’s happening, right? Everyone’s kind of on the outside, nothing’s moving, nothing productive is happening, but it’s a whirlwind all the same. This mental cycle—this constant spinning and not going anywhere—is where we’re kind of envisioning worst-case scenarios or obsessing over things that may already have happened, but it’s all very out of our control.

That’s where I find worry and overwhelm to be very different. Worry is always out of our control. We are getting super obsessed about the uncertainty of future events. The political climate right now, for example—this can sort of tap into that for me. It’s weirdly about bad things happening to the kids. It’s just uncertainty about future events, and it doesn’t matter how obscure the possibility is. I think sometimes that even makes it worse. The more unlikely it is to happen, the more it causes concern. But this worry cycle, the reason it starts spinning, is because there’s not an answer. When I’m worrying, I take my normal day and kind of do like, “What’s the worst thing that could happen?” Then I play out the worst-case scenario, like, “What would be the solution? How could I get out of it? If I’m in a car accident, how quickly can I get out of the car?” Whatever my catastrophic brain is coming up with, I try to rationalize a way out.

And that is one way I can sort of stop the worry or concern. But these worry spins, this worry tornado that happens, there’s no solve. The event is usually so unlikely to happen and so out of our control that there literally is no solution. Our brain just starts spinning and spinning because there’s no way out. There’s no rational way to solve it, fix it, or change it because it’s so out of our circle and sphere of control. So, it doesn’t resolve anything, it doesn’t fix anything, and it doesn’t leave us more prepared for whatever might happen. All it does is make us tired, very anxious, and very unproductive.

I find this happens to me most often at night when I’m getting ready to go to sleep. All of a sudden, some flash of something horrible happening to the children will pop into my brain. Then my brain wants to figure out how we can prevent it, but there’s literally nothing I can do. It’s so unlikely to happen, so there’s no solve. So, what we can do is just consciously interrupt this cycle and choose to stop it by putting ourselves on what my mentor called a “worry-free diet.” I think I might’ve talked about this in an earlier podcast episode.

The thing about worry is, since these events are so unlikely and out of our control, there’s never going to be a fix. All we can do is say, “I’m not gonna do that anymore. I’m not gonna worry about this.” I find telling myself, “That’s probably not gonna happen,” is actually not helpful to me. So, if that doesn’t feel helpful to you, I get it. I’m with you. I literally just have to kind of scold myself like a child and say, “We don’t worry anymore. We’re not gonna do this.”

There’s never gonna be a rational way to fix this unseen, unlikely event, so all I can do is say, “I can’t worry about that.” If you’re trying to go to sleep and that’s not available to you, one other mind hack or trick is you can write it down and say, “I’ll worry about this tomorrow.” So, we just put it in a notebook, and our brain can just release it for now—and hopefully we never look at that notebook tomorrow. We’re not gonna pick that back up. But we have to give our brain permission to not find the answer. It’s very difficult for fixers like me, right? I like to fix things, so I don’t like when there’s not an answer. But I’m never gonna find one, so I have to give my brain permission to stop considering all the possibilities.

So, what I want you to do is give your brain permission to just stop. And the way we do that is we say, “You know, I just don’t worry anymore. That’s not something I do.” It sounds very easy, and sometimes it really is that easy. Sometimes it takes a little bit more, but we can truly say, “I don’t worry anymore. That’s not something I do.” This worry-free diet, so we can try lots of diets, right? If you’re listening to me, you’ve probably tried a ton. So, we can say, “I’m gonna try this for a week. I’m just not gonna worry this week,” and see if your brain will allow you to just let it go.

We have to consider that worry is just a habit. It’s not a useful emotion that drives us forward. We can choose to stop it and go on a worry-free diet. We just have to consciously interrupt the cycle and choose to stop it. We don’t have to change anything external from us. All this is internal effort of giving our brain permission to not fix it, to just release it, and let it go.

Alright, in contrast, let’s talk about overwhelm for a second. Overwhelm is not just about having too much on our plate. Most of us have a lot on our plate, and I’m not saying we don’t, but what happens is we start to catastrophize how much is on our plate. It’s again about assuming the worst-case scenario. It’s assuming the worst-case scenario, and if you’re not like me and you never do that, God bless you. You don’t need to listen to the rest of this. But if you are like this, overwhelmed thinking like, “Oh my gosh, I have so much to do. I can’t possibly do it all. Not only am I not gonna get my to-do list done, but I have these 85,000 other things that I need to do,” starts to sort of catastrophize our to-do list.

Overwhelm always does. I’ve worked through this model with endless clients. Overwhelm leaves us stuck. We do not get done what we need to do, and it’s kind of like a self-fulfilling prophecy, right? If you’re like, “I have too much to do. I’m never gonna get it done,” and then we get stuck in overwhelm, we’re just spinning in this little overwhelmed circle, and we don’t get anything done. For two days, guess what? We really aren’t gonna get it all done because we’ve wasted two days worrying about not getting it all done instead of just getting some stuff done.

When our brain is overloaded, it gets very hard to prioritize things. I can’t make clear decisions because it’s caught up. It’s the same spinning energy that is keeping us stuck in place. We’re not accomplishing anything on our to-do list. We’re literally just making it worse for ourselves, and we’re kind of getting stuck in survival mode. Then it gets even harder and harder and harder to just start.

It stems from this perception of the situation being too much. When we actually start writing down, in manageable steps, what we need to accomplish, the overwhelm goes away. We regain control over our feelings about it because we can see like, “Okay, it’s not as bad as I thought.” And I promise every time I do this exercise with myself or with one of my clients, that’s what happens. We start to write it all down—what actually needs to get done. Because not everything needs to be done right this second, either. But if we don’t have it written down, we’re just letting it roll around in our brain. It gets confusing.

So, it’s not just about prioritizing, but we are unable to prioritize anything if we don’t write it down. So, we have to write it down. Then we start to see, “Okay, I can do these two things today, these two things tomorrow, these two things the next day, and then it’ll be done.” When we break down everything we have to do—even if it takes us four pages to write down all we need to do—our brain immediately gets a better handle on it. It feels a little bit more in control. And that spinning, that overwhelmed, paralyzed feeling starts to go away.

So, the energy of both of these emotions keeps us very drained and very stuck and is not allowing us to proceed or move forward with anything that we need to do or accomplish. For me, like then I don’t get sleep, and it’s a downward spiral after that. But they feel a little bit different. One feels like amped-up energy—anxiety energy. The other feels very heavy, draining, stuck energy. But both of these energies are increasing our cortisol. They’re literally exhausting us, and we are not moving forward with anything that we need to do.

So, two things, right? If we are in worry, which is just a bad habit, we have to let it go. We can’t engage with it like a telemarketer calling. We just say, “No.” Or like a bad ex-boyfriend, just say “No.” We’re not gonna deal with you, okay? That’s how we get rid of worry. When we feel it start creeping in, we remind ourselves, we don’t have to pay attention to that. We do not need to entertain that. We can just be on a worry-free diet and say, “No,” and shut it down.

The opposite technique is what we need to do when we’re feeling super overwhelmed. We absolutely need to engage with it, and we need to write it down. We need to start breaking it down—like, define the truth. What do I really need to get accomplished? What do I really need to get done? What are the things that can be pushed off for a day or a week or a month? What has to get done right now? And just that process of writing it down starts us moving forward.

So, we can journal, right? If it’s worry, we can prove to ourselves that it’s worrying and ask ourselves, “What can I control right now?” The answer is gonna be nothing, and then we’re like, “Okay, well, if I can’t control it, I’m not gonna worry about it.” We can journal in the form of a to-do list. If it’s overwhelmed, what do I actually need to get done?

Externalizing tasks will actually reduce the mental stress of it. Isn’t that fun? Just by writing it down, we’re gonna reduce the mental stress. Then we can prioritize that. We can start deleting and delegating and all those wonderful things I like to do with our task list, but we have to start by writing it down.

So, I hope that this was helpful. That’s what I wanted to talk about—the difference. I think they are both the same in that they are very useless, and that they don’t propel us forward. I think they feel very different, and the strategy to stop them is very different. With worry, we’re gonna feel very anxious, we’re gonna be that orange anxiety tornado that we just need to walk away from and disengage from. We just say, “I’m not gonna deal with you.” Okay? So we’re gonna sort of ignore it, tell it to leave.

The other is a very heavy energy. It’s very paralyzing. It feels like it’s keeping you stuck in the mud, and the way we get rid of that is by absolutely engaging with it. We write everything down, we externalize all those tasks that are running around in our head, and we start like that. Immediately, it makes it one step better, and then we just start plowing through what we need to get done, or we delegate and do all those wonderful things.

So, those emotions are very energy-draining in very opposite ways. But hopefully, these are two very easy, quick, and easy ways to sort of detach and get out of both of those spirals.

Okay, so I hope this has been helpful. Please share this with a friend if it has been, or just like tag me on social and let me know if this has been helpful for you. Until then, I’ll talk to you next week. Bye.