With great enthusiasm comes great overwhelm
Ellie The Enthusiast from Pep Talk and I have done a Substack post swap! You can find my guest post ‘Enthusiasm, the calm kind’, on Pep Talk here. Now, over to Ellie…
When Gabrielle asked me if I’d like to write something about the challenge of feeling enthusiasm when you’re overwhelmed, I couldn’t help but laugh: because in those two words, she’s summed up my entire life.
And I’m not alone. Generally if you’re a very enthusiastic person, the chances are you’re also going to be more prone to overwhelm, thanks to your propensity for big feelings, and there being 1001 things you want to do at all times. Of course, one option would be to just accept that you’re not going to feel enthusiasm, but you won’t be surprised to hear that I think this is a bad solution: enthusiasm shouldn’t be optional.
A more attractive solution is to reduce the overwhelm in your life, but that’s neither something I have ever successfully achieved, nor something I have any authority in (and that, of course, is why you’re subscribed to The Haven – because Gabrielle does). It would be a short newsletter: have you ever tried, just, not? And you, Haven-dwellers, deserve more.
So this tension, this constant will they-won’t they of enthusiasm and overwhelm. How do we stay enthusiastic when we’re also feeling hella overwhelmed?
Firstly: we keep at it. When our overwhelm is coming from having a to-do list that’s so lengthy it stretches to Naples, the first plate we often let drop is the one of things that we do for fun. As a very quick fix, it’s a doable solution, but it’s based on something we always get wrong: the belief that we don’t have time to do the fun stuff, because we have too much of the other stuff to do.
Switch the narrative
In fact, we need to switch that narrative on its head: the fuller your energy tank is, so to speak, the better equipped you’ll be to tackle overwhelm. And how do we fill up our tanks? We do something we love, that really nourishes our soul.
One way to do this is to block out the time in your calendar non-negotiably. So, nestled in between your unmoveable meetings and tyrannous tasks, you also set aside time for the things you’re enthusiastic about. Then, when this time rolls around, you have to honour it.
(It’s important to note here that when we talk about holding our enthusiasm sacred, it doesn’t have to be something huge and easily definable as a thing with a capital T; instead, it can be something small. You don’t have to block out a whole afternoon and create a 6 foot sculpture; you can just take a trip to a coffee shop, sans laptop, and listen to a podcast you really love.)
Another thing we can do is interrogate our to-do lists with a modicum of distance, and see if we can let anything slide down the priority list. With enthusiasm often comes an intensity, which means we can sometimes run headlong into things where we could have dipped a toe in first.
That thing that we felt had to be done, like, yesterday: is that actually true? Could it possibly wait a couple of weeks? Would everything stay upright?
These are all assuming that overwhelm is caused by having too many things on which all encroach on your enthusiasm; but what if you’re overwhelmed by everything you’re enthusiastic about? I feel this, too – after nearly a decade of reading at most 3 books a year, I knee-slid into 2021 with a final book count of 100 by 4pm on New Year’s Eve.
But this wasn’t enough; I couldn’t stop thinking about all the books I’d missed out on in the interim, and about how my TBR pile grew ever larger, and how I could abandon my job, my writing and my life, and just read for the rest of my life, and I’d still never read everything I wanted to. So what was the point?
Enjoyment is reason enough
The point was, of course, that I enjoyed it, and that’s reason enough. (Repeat after me: I enjoy it, and that’s reason enough. Stick it on the fridge. Tattoo it on your forehead. It is enough.) So I took a step back, to save me from a crisis.
This year, I’ve kept up the habit of reading, but don’t have a reading challenge to finish or a target to hit, so it feels less strangling and more welcoming. Had I been further into the existential wormhole, I might have taken some time off, to give myself the chance of reconnecting with it in a more wholesome and helpful way.
I’m very aware that my advice here has been, in chronological order: keep doing the thing you’re enthusiastic about; don’t keep doing the thing you’re enthusiastic about. But I stand by both suggestions, and maybe the thing that ties them together is the biggest piece of advice of all. And that is: identify and acknowledge your enthusiasm.
It’s something that we all too frequently take for granted, and might not even really notice until it’s all but gone. But our enthusiasm is so fundamental that we should acknowledge it, know it, and shout it out loud and proud. We should also check in with it now and again, to see what it wants and how we can keep it going.
Sometimes enthusiasm is a blazing, white hot fire, ready to guzzle up more, more, more; and sometimes enthusiasm is the glowing coals where an eternal flame has died down, stoked and steadily staying warm for when you get back.
Ellie is an enthusiasm expert and the founder of The Enthusiast, where she wants to encourage everyone to be unapologetically, unabashedly enthusiastic. You can find her writing over at Pep Talk on Substack, as well as her shop and other bits on https://www.theenthusiast.co. She also writes for small businesses over at The Wedding Enthusiast, which you can find at https://www.theweddingenthusiast.co.uk. You can always find her eating baklava of some kind, and the only waste she likes is the high one on jeans.