Is Your Overwhelm a Sign of Anxiety?

I can’t tell you how many of the clients I see in my therapy practice express feeling stressed, overwhelmed, exhausted, anxious, depleted, and burnt out. This seems to be the condition of many Americans.

We exist in a culture that lives to work, rather than works to live. We wear “busyness” as a badge of honor and struggle to set boundaries around work during our “off” hours. We also place high demands on ourselves as parents—so much so that Surgeon General Vivek Murthy recently declared that parental stress is a public health emergency. According to research by the American Psychological Association, 48 percent of parents report feeling overwhelming stress on a daily basis compared to 26 percent of other adults.

The lives of our children don’t look much better. Unstructured time has become a rarity, replaced by school, homework, sports, and extracurricular activities that require complex time and schedule management. Simultaneously, and for reasons in addition to the stress of their schedules and demands, our youth are experiencing anxiety and depression at unprecedented levels.

Perhaps nothing better illustrates the problem than my recent internet research on how to teach people to do less. Every article I read framed the benefit of learning to do less as enabling you to be more productive. That’s akin to applying the problem and claiming it’s the solution.

Often, the line between overwhelmed and anxious gets blurry. I would define the distinction as this: There are manifestations of anxiety driven by the need to be constantly busy and an inability to relax and rest. This stems from several different sources: being excessively busy to avoid feeling; the fear that if you don’t function at the level you currently are, something bad will happen or you will no longer be successful; or the belief that your value resides in what you do and produce, not in who you are.

One can feel overwhelmed without feeling anxious. But if feeling overwhelmed stems from an inability to rest and do less for one of the reasons listed above, then it is likely a manifestation of anxiety.

A key solution to these root causes of anxiety is learning to do less and becoming comfortable with it. By doing less, you create the space and energy to fully experience your emotions. When you can tolerate your feelings rather than fear them, the need to push yourself to exhaustion in order to avoid them fades away. You begin to challenge the belief that your success depends on constant overthinking and overworking.

By intentionally doing less—whether it’s preparing, researching, thinking, or planning—and simply observing the results, you’ll realize that your success comes from your natural skills, qualities, and abilities, not from anxiety. This shift allows you to move your sense of worth from external productivity to your inherent value—rooted in who you are, not in what you do.

Doing less will require you to let go and set boundaries—and this will likely feel uncomfortable, if not impossible. You may find yourself arguing for all the reasons you can’t let go and do less. You likely are thinking of the things that won’t get done, or won’t get done well enough, and all the bad outcomes that will result.

If this is the case, notice this, allow it, and be open to another possibility—that doing less can be your path to relief from anxiety, and to a life of greater ease and contentment.

Here are some steps you can take to help you to do less.

1. Identify tasks you do that feel particularly draining, that you wish to say no to, or that you do out of a sense of obligation or guilt. These are opportunities to say no or to do less.
2. Schedule time for rest, relaxation, or fun. Often it is hard to give yourself permission to relax or have fun. Scheduling time for this can be a stepping stone towards a more spontaneous ability to prioritize doing less.
3. Seek support and cooperation if necessary in order to let go of certain tasks or responsibilities. In order to do less, you may need support from someone else who will pick up what you are setting down. If this is the case, focus on the desired outcome, not the process of how the task will get done. If you feel compelled to manage how and when something gets done, not if it gets done, then you are not letting go—only creating the illusion of doing so.
4. Notice and identify your feelings of discomfort, and attend to them through compassionate self-talk rather than distracting yourself from the feeling by jumping into action.
5. Practice saying no. If you are asked to do something that you don’t want to or can’t do, practice saying no and pay attention to the outcome when you hold this boundary.
6. Start small, focusing on low-stakes tasks to let go of first. These may be tasks that have low importance, or that you do even though they are not your responsibility. By starting with easier tasks, you can experiment with doing less with little or no consequence.
7. Identify and focus on what you will gain by doing less. Be motivated by the positive outcome, rather than the feared negative one.

Understand that letting go and doing less is a process, one that will often feel uncomfortable. Be patient with yourself. Focus on the benefits of doing less. It is not so that you can be more productive; it is so that you can experience more ease, relaxation, fun, and balance—and remember that you are a human being, not a human doing.