Even in healthcare, overwhelm should not be normalized
It's easy to get consumed doing everything, if we never consider why we're doing it.
Cool, calm and collected. It's one of the things I wish I had inherited from my father. When I think of him, I see a man who defies overwhelm. I, on the other hand, have not followed in his footsteps.
During my healthcare training, we were indoctrinated to differentiate ourselves from mere humans. Doing only what you can handle at the time was deemed as being deficient, lazy, or unmotivated. Instead, those of us who were called to medicine, were led to understand that we could handle more than the mere humans we care for. We would have to build ourselves as individuals capable of over-functioning amid chaos because it is what healthcare demands from us. Or so we believed.
There was no discussion about fixing the chaos and overwhelm in how things operated in our hospitals or clinics. If overwhelm was showing up, the problem was not healthcare- it was us.
The question that has always kept me acquiescing to overwhelm instead of resisting it, has always been, “Are boundaries possible when people’s bodies and lives are on the line?”
The simple answer is yes. The deeper answer is when we don’t learn boundaries and caring for ourselves, there is no way we can truly & deeply care for others in a transformative way.
We provide instead a version of care that yields superficial results. We cannot stave off illness, but we can’t truly teach or promote wellness because we don’t know what it looks like ourselves.
When we learn to identify overwhelm and push back against it, or even better, protect ourselves from it, many people will be unhappy—our families, our bosses, our workplaces. As a people-pleaser, making people unhappy is my worst nightmare.
Instead we normalize our overwhelm and the issues that contribute to it, so nothing changes except us. So many of us are dying in our work to keep people alive. What would one of us pushing back against doing everything, all the time, right away do for another person? Does seeing someone fighting against the factors that lead to overwhelm motivate us or mute us?
Despite the health consequences of overwhelm, such as poor sleep, isolation, depression, anxiety, loss of relationships, I still find it hard to resist overwhelm because it has always been a marker of my value- the work I do, not the person I am.
It’s time to remember that overwhelm is a sign that our values are being violated. Fighting the systems that thrive on our overwhelm is not only critical for us, but more importantly, it is contagious.
Here are the 5 things I’m trying (emphasis on “trying”) to do to fight against overwhelm:
Recognition. Trying to be aware when I'm feeling overwhelmed, I literally need to get it on paper- everything on paper. I often call it a brain dump, where I exhaustively think about what I need to do and put it down just because I've found out that it gives me room to truly see what's involved and what the potential steps are that are involved. Honestly, it gives my brain some space to breathe and to recognize, okay, what is it that I actually have to do? The other thing that happens is once it's down on paper, I can critically assess do I have to do all of this right now? That's exactly what I did. I looked at that long list of things I had to do and could actually wrap my mind around it.