How to cope when you’re stressed, rushed, and overloaded! (When not having enough time is torture)

Do you ever feel stressed, rushed, or overloaded? Personally, I find that a lot of the time when life feels overwhelming, it feels like I don't have enough time to focus on what I need to do. So in this video, I'll be sharing some of the ways I've found that allowing myself to take the time I need can make it significantly easier to cope when things feel stressful or overwhelming. Hi, everyone, Paul Micallef here from Autism From The Insight. I make weekly videos sharing the human side of autism

, so make sure you hit subscribe to get the latest content. So a quick story to start us off. So a couple of years ago, I visited the Dachau Concentration Camp in Germany, which is a memorial site to help educate people about World War II history. And one of the things that stuck with me from that visit was learning about the practice of not giving the prisoners enough time to do anything as a deliberate torture strategy, basically. So never having enough time to do a task properly, like getting

dressed, for example, means that you've put one boot on and now you have to walk out the door and there's no time to put the other boot on. It was a way of making sure that life was a constant state of unmanageable stress. And I remember relating that directly back to my own life and recognizing how often I felt something similar. In a way, no wonder I'm stressed and overwhelmed when I feel like I don't have enough time. It's basically a torture strategy. The only thing is that in my case, a lo

t of the time, it's self-imposed. I try and take on too many things and commit myself to too much stuff. And then I wonder why I get overwhelmed when it feels like I don't have enough time to get it all done. And I think part of the reason that this is such a common thing is that it's really easy to underestimate how much extra time I need for a lot of basic things. One of our member webinars recently was on leveraging routines. And one of the things that we came up with is that we need routines

a lot of the time. We rely on them to function and to get through everyday life, which means that in new situations, we have to budget a lot of extra time to work out what to do in unfamiliar environments. In other words, when I'm used to leveraging the efficiency of routines, when I wanna do something new or unfamiliar, I have to remember that it's gonna take me a lot more time than usual because I can't leverage that efficiency that I'm used to. And when I forget how much extra energy things

take in advance, it leads me to taking too much on, putting too many expectations of myself and ultimately feeling rushed, like I don't have enough time to adequately devote to any given task. So what I've learned recently, or at least what I'm trying to relearn and internalize a bit more recently is that life is so much nicer and easier when I allow myself to take the time that I actually need to focus on a task and to do it in the way that comes most naturally to me, even if that means spendin

g much, much, much more time on it than someone else in my position would normally take. So a good example is my new video background. Thanks so much to everyone on Patreon who gave their feedback throughout the process. That was really, really helpful. I've essentially spent the last two weeks trying to figure out how to make this work, which sounds like a very, very long time when you think about it. How long should it take to put a video background together? Maybe an hour, maybe two hours. Yo

u're probably not gonna guess that it's gonna take two weeks of time and mental energy to focus on it until it's finally done. But for me, it's totally worth it to invest that much time in advance until I'm actually happy with the solution so that I don't need to come back to it and try and optimize it later again. And this is just one of very, very, very many examples of having to rediscover and recreate working routines in a new environment. So as some of you may know, if you've been watching

previous videos, I've recently moved house, hence why I had to change my setup a little bit. And you can imagine how many routines I had to recreate from scratch just because I'm in a different location. Once that routine is set up, however, it's incredibly efficient and saves me a lot of time going forward. I completely took for granted how happy I was with the previous video background. It was more than two years that I just didn't need to think about it at all. Turn the camera on, record a vi

deo, don't spend any time or energy thinking about what's gonna go in the background or how to set it up. So if you think about it, I've spent the last two weeks investing my time and energy into a solution that is hopefully gonna last me a couple of years. And that's the part I need to keep reminding myself. Sometimes I feel like I'm really slow. I feel like I'm really inefficient, that it takes me a really, really long time to do things. But how I need to reframe that is that I am front loadin

g the process. I am investing a lot of time and energy upfront so that I can save a lot of time and energy down the track. Now, it's not always a great idea to do that, especially when I'm doing lots of new things. I don't have time to become an expert in every single thing that I do. Sometimes I just need to do it and get it done. But remembering that this is the natural way that I work allows me to leverage the benefits of investing in an efficient system upfront without putting myself through

all this unnecessary stress of beating myself up, saying I'm taking too much time or I'm investing too much time or I'm wasting too much time. I mean, imagine if I paid myself an hourly rate for the amount of time that I invested in trying to figure out this video background, for example. Imagine if I paid someone else two weeks worth of work to do that. That sounds like an insane level of investment, but it's what I have to do to be able to get stuff done. And this is the last piece of the puz

zle for me, at least, is that what if it doesn't pay for itself back? What if this is just some kind of inefficiency that I have to live with because it's the only way that I get something done? What if I still end up behind everyone else? What if I am really slow? What if I, even at the end of the day, when you add up all the benefits and costs and everything, what if I still come out behind? Well, there's not much I can do about that. That's just how my brain works, and that's my own personal

limitations. And I kind of need to accept that I do have limitations, and sometimes I can do a lot more than others in certain areas, and sometimes there are some things that I just can't keep up with everyone else. So maybe you can relate to that in some areas, at least. And this is where, when I put those neuro-normative expectations upon myself, like working five days a week or working eight hours a day or socializing every weekend or responding to text messages or you name it, anything that

other people kind of do most of the time and you're kind of expected to keep up, what if I just accept that that's too much for me and I'm gonna reduce the expectations of myself so that I don't feel rushed, so that I'm not literally torturing myself every day by creating these deadlines that I can never meet so I'm always behind, always rushed, always stressed. One of my favorite analogies is of juggling balls, and when you have too many, it feels like everything drops. And the opposite of that

is sometimes removing just one thing from my schedule suddenly brings me back from the brink of overwhelm, from the brink of pushing myself to the absolute limit, and suddenly everything is fine. Suddenly I've actually got enough time and enough energy and enough focus and attention and everything that I need to just take as long as I need to get the thing done. And suddenly even previously stressful tasks, like answering an email or cooking dinner or going shopping or something like that, when

I've got lots of time and I can just zone out and relax and do it however I feel like doing it at the time, suddenly it's actually no big deal. I'll give you another stupid little example. I needed to get some adhesive hooks to put my picture on the wall. And I probably stood in that aisle in the shop for maybe 15 minutes, just staring at all the options and looking stuff up online and reading reviews and taking an extremely long time to make what was essentially a very, very simple decision. I

could have picked any of those products. They're all pretty much the same. I'm sure they would have done fine, but instead I didn't rush the decision. I didn't give myself a timeframe. I just chilled out for 15 minutes, staring at all the different adhesive hook options until I eventually thought, okay, no, that's enough. I'll take this one and go and everything's fine. No stress, no rush, no overload. Just take as long as I need without any stress. So that's my experience at least. I've found

that life is a lot better when I don't overload myself. And a big part of that is giving myself permission to take things at my own pace, which is sometimes incredibly quick and sometimes incredibly slow. So anyway, I should probably leave it there for today, but I'm curious to hear your experience. Do you often feel rushed that you don't have enough time meeting the expectations of daily life? How do you manage that? Maybe you've experienced burnout and had to cut back significantly on a lot of

things. Please leave a comment down below. I'd love to hear your experience. Thanks again to all the channel patrons on Patreon for all your help with feedback as I set up this new background. If you're not already a patron and would like to be, you can support this channel financially for as little as a dollar a week. So thanks again for watching. I hope you've enjoyed this video and I'll see you again next week. Bye.