It’s no secret that women are naturally good at relationship, nurturing, giving, tending, and caretaking.  

While giving can be a wonderful, heart-warming experience, the truth is giving too much of our time and energy can be harmful to our physical and emotional health, leading to anxiety, overwhelm and burnout.  

Women often place others first and so the lesson for many of us is to be true to ourselves and to speak up with tactfulness.  

Until the lesson is learned, we will find ourselves again and again in situations where this lesson presents itself.  

Read each of the following statements and mark as “true” or “false” for you. You won’t be scored at the end, but you will have a better sense of whether or not you’re headed for anxiety, overwhelm, or burnout.

Are You Giving It All Away?

  1.    I force myself to do things even when I don’t have the energy to do them.  

  2.    I ignore my body’s “no” signals when I think someone’s needs are greater than mine.  

  3.    Hating conflict, I’ll do whatever it takes to avoid it, which often means doing things I don’t want to do.  

  4.    I feel obligated to answer the phone when it rings even when I really don’t want to.  

  5.    The amount of time I spend listening to others exceeds the amount of time that others listen to me.  

  6.    If I don’t answer all the emails I receive I feel guilty.  

  7.    In order to provide luxuries for my family I work more hours than I want to.  

  8.    I schedule my work time around my clients’ needs rather than around my own.  

  9.    I can’t say no when people in need ask me for money.  

10.    When out to dinner with people who have less money than I do, I feel obligated to pick up the check.  

11.    I volunteer for my place of worship or other organizations even if I don’t really have the time.  

12.    People won’t like me if I say no.  

13.    I’m the person everyone calls when they need help: someone to babysit, chauffeur, or fill in at work.  

14.    My children’s happiness comes before mine. I’ll do whatever it takes to make them happy.  

15.    I have a hard time saying no to my partner because I want him/her to be happy, even if saying yes  

  makes me unhappy.

16.    I feel selfish if I don’t share what I have with others. 

♥

If you answered true more often than false, your challenge is how to be cooperative and nurturing without ignoring your own independence and personal needs. Getting clear on what matters most to you in life and learning to set boundaries will help.

♥ 

Related Posts:

“Help With Overwhelm: Discover What Matters Deeply to You”

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Have you noticed how the news headlines have been particularly gruesome lately?  Social unrest, rioting and looting in England; forced famine in Somalia, where tens of thousands have died and over 500,000 children are starving.

The tragic death of thirty American servicemen in Afghanistan; the S&P downgrade of American credit; stocks plunging on fears of global turmoil; earthquakes, tornadoes, hurricanes.

My husband, a devoted 6:00 evening news fan, surprised me recently by declaring, “I don’t want to see this,” and changing the channel until he found a sitcom to watch.  Lately I find myself wondering, “What is going on in our world?” “How do we not feel overwhelmed by all this?”

Have you also noticed how busy everyone seems today? Many of the people I talk to feel overloaded with commitments and activities, and demands on their time and energy. It seems that there is always too much to do and too little time.

Whenever your stress levels are high it doesn’t take much to tip you over the edge into that most unwelcome state called “overwhelm.” Overwhelm is what we feel when there are lots of things we need to do or problems to solve, we don’t know what to start on first, and we fear that we will never be able to get it all done or restore balance and peace to our lives.

Overwhelm has strong emotional overtones which may include stress, confusion, fear, and/or anxiety. Look in any thesaurus and the synonyms for the word are, well, overwhelming: “overcome, inundate, swamp, bury, overload, overburden, snow under, crush, devastate.”

Groan.

To anyone who’s experienced overwhelm, and I suspect that’s plenty of us, those words may be all too familiar. Whether it’s sudden or cumulative, chronic or acute, the feeling is one of drowning, immobility and powerlessness.

During those times, everything feels too big. It’s not just everyday busyness and packed schedules. When we’re overwhelmed, making dinner becomes a monumental effort. Better eat out. Bills, housework? Forget it. Tasks that used to take only 10 or 15 minutes now seem utterly impossible. There seems to be no time or energy for anything. So we do nothing.

Worse, we have no faith that this, too, shall pass. We seem hopelessly mired in the quicksand of “too much to do.” We keep trying to will our way out of the quicksand with a will that just wants to lie down.

“There are good reasons for feeling this way,” says M.J. Ryan, author of Trusting Yourself: How to Stop Feeling Overwhelmed and Live More Happily with Less Effort.  “Daily life is more demanding and less spacious than it once was. We are flooded with information and choices. We are all doing too much and have fewer options than we might like. When I ask people about feeling overwhelmed, the words I most often hear are ‘inadequate’ and ‘helpless’.”

Part of the problem, as I see it,  is the cultural belief system in place that overrates doing and achievement and underrates quality of experience and connection with values.

In our cultural mindset, it’s not uncommon for a family member, friend or a magazine article, with all good intention, to suggest the “Nike solution”. Just do it. Make priorities. Choose three things and accomplish them quickly. Go through the mail as soon as it arrives. Do a “brain dump” and create a huge to-do list with everything that you can think of on it. Now get started! 

Not bad suggestions necessarily, but healing from overwhelm isn’t really about measuring accomplishment. It’s about connecting with what has meaning for us, with what feeds and enlivens us.

The philosopher Paul Tillich called values our “ultimate concerns… which form the core of what we care passionately about. An ultimate concern is not an interest that is merely a fashion or a whim, but one that is a centering point for our lives.”

“When we know what matters deeply to us, life isn’t so overwhelming,” says Ryan. “We don’t get bogged down as easily in the minutiae of our daily lives because what is most important to us is front and center.”

Thus, when we come into alignment with our values, we find the inner resources and spaciousness needed to get on with life in a calm, confident way, knowing we can handle anything life throws at us.

Here are some questions to ask yourself as a starting point: 

♥   What things, if they were taken away or you couldn’t do them, would make life unbearable?

♥   What makes these things valuable to you?

♥   Where do you invest the best of your time, money and energy?  Why?

♥   What do you take the most pride in?  Why?

♥   What most excites you in life?  Why?

In these fast-paced, challenging times it’s more important than ever to increase our self-awareness and self-trust by discovering and attending to what really, really matters to us.

I’ll be sharing more ideas on what helps with overwhelm in future posts. In the meantime, please join in the conversation by leaving your comment. We can learn from one another’s challenges, ideas, and resources.