Have you ever shut the door, drawn the curtains and sat on the floor with your head on your knees? That is where this one starts.
The world is going too fast and so is my mind. Let me finish this thought before you send another one. It is not the big things either. It is the school run, the tea, the phone calls, all stacking up until the dam goes over. I think of the emotions as voices, and every one of them believes it has the answer. Shame is certain. Guilt is certain. So is fear. They cannot all be right, and they are not there to be silenced.
One thing to try: Let each voice have its say, one at a time. Then thank all of them for turning up and go back to what is next.
In this episode
(1:19) My mind is going too quick for me
(3:02) It is not the big things, it is the school run
(3:58) When the dam finally overflows
(5:18) Your body will stop you if you will not stop
(6:22) Every emotion thinks it has the answer
(7:34) What is guilt actually telling me
(13:00) You are not always angry. They come and go
(15:26) Let them all speak, then thank them
Support the podcast and join the Weekly Calm: stevenwebb.uk
Thank you for listening.
Steven
The question this answers
Have you ever shut the door, drawn the curtains and sat on the floor?
Not on the sofa. On the floor, knees up, head down, wanting the world to stop for five minutes. That is where this one starts, and I know it well.
The heart of it
Overwhelm is not caused by the big things. It is the school run and the tea and the phone calls stacking up.
Every feeling you have believes it is right and that it has the answer.
They are not there to be silenced. They are there to be heard, one at a time.
The trains again. One pulls in and you deal with it. Then a second, and you can just about manage two. Then more platforms appear and more trains arrive and then the feelings turn up as well, and you are done.
And it is never the dramatic stuff. It is a dam built out of sand on a beach. You patch it and patch it and go and get your sandwiches, and one day it simply goes over while you are standing there.
I think of the feelings as voices, because that is how they behave. My protector. My fear. My loving one. My shame. My guilt. The one that wants thousands of listeners and thinks I am marvellous. The one that thinks this podcast is a waste of everybody's time.
They are all in the room and not one of them cares what the others think. Shame is certain it has the answer. So is guilt. So is fear. They cannot all be right.
It is like trying to teach a class where everybody is talking at once. You cannot listen to thirty people simultaneously, so you listen to none of them and the noise wins.
And this helps too. You are not your thoughts, or you would not lose a brilliant one four minutes after having it. You are not your feelings either, because they arrive and leave and you are still here. Ask yourself what you are feeling now, then let me tell you a joke, then ask again. Different answer. Same you.
One small thing to try
Take the time out and do not let anybody shame you for it.
An hour. A day. Curtains shut, phone down, floor if that is where you want to be.
Then, instead of letting them shout over each other, imagine them round a table with you in the middle and go round one at a time. Fear, what is your concern? Then the motivator. Then shame. Then the one that wants things. Give each one a hearing and do not give any of them extra weight.
Then thank them all, because every one of them is trying to protect you in the only way it knows, and say the thing that actually settles them.
I have got this. I am taking today. Tomorrow we go again, with your help.
Questions people ask
Is shutting myself away not avoidance?
Not for an hour or a day. Avoidance is nine months of it. Deliberately taking time out and then coming back is a different activity entirely, and it is the one that stops the dam going over.
Why does it help to treat feelings as voices?
Because you can listen to a voice, and you cannot listen to a fog. Giving each one a turn is how you stop them all shouting, and most of them go quiet the moment they have been heard.
What if I cannot name what I am feeling?
Then label it roughly and move on. Anxious. Flat. Alert. Precision is not the point. Noticing that there is something there, rather than being it, is the whole exercise.
Read along
The transcript
It follows the audio. Press any line to jump there.
overwhelm · overthinking · stress
Read the transcript
Have you ever been in that place when close the door, draw the curtains, and
you don't even want to sit on the sofa. You want to sit on the floor and you bend your knees up and you
put your head on your knees. Maybe you just take a deep breath and it's like just.
Can the world stop just for a moment? I just need to take a breath.
I just need some time out. Just a few minutes.
Please, timeout. The
problem is with emotions. They overwhelm us, they creep up on us, and some
point, they will drown us. I'll share my story in a moment, but I'm Stephen Webb, and this is Stillness
in the Storms and Living Deeper Lives podcast. And I help people with busy lives and hectic
minds and busy overthinking people have a little inner peace in life so they can live the best possible
version of themselves. I remember very often in my life, I just want time
out. You know, the world's going too quick for me.
Not only the world's going too quick for me, but my mind is going too quick for me.
It's like, look, let me sort out that thought before I have another one, please.
And there's another one. They're like trains at a train station.
You're sitting at the train station. You have a thought. Come along. It's like, okay, let me deal with this one.
Then another train pulls in alongside, and you're like, okay, I can deal with this.
Just two trains. And then more tracks appear and more trains appear, and then before you know it, it's followed up
with emotions as well. And you just sit in there and it's like, okay, just
give me a break. Just give me that bit of time out, please.
And I always reference the Jack Johnson song breakdown or something, and he's singing
about a song, or in the song, he's singing about the trains broken down and he sat out and
he sat in the field and. Or this is the image I have.
He sat in the field and he's enjoying the timeout because the trains broke down.
No one can get hold of him. There's no mobile signal. There's no way that anybody can harass
him. And he's got nothing to do but wait for the train to be fixed.
And he's no part of that. So he has to take that time out.
And he sees it as a gift. And I have to be honest, so many times in
my life, I've wanted that. And
I'm not talking about the big times either. I'm talking about, you know, just the School run or you've
got to do tea, you've got to sort things out, you've got to get work in or you've got to make phone calls.
All of these things seem to creep up on top of us without even without us realizing it.
And it just sometimes gets just a little bit too much.
And I always look at emotions like this. Have you ever been on the beach and down one side
of the beach, you've got like a little river. And we go and play there as children and we try to build a little dam
and we try to hold the water back and we do it for so long and we're like, yes.
And then we go and get our sandwiches or something that have got sand in and everything.
You know, you know the drill. And then you go back afterwards and the water's
taken away your dam and you got to rebuild it, rebuild it.
And you keep doing this. And then at some point the dam just overflows with you there.
And that's when you have what I would say, like mini emotional breakdowns where just, please,
just a little timeout would be lovely. We can actually create these timeouts.
That's the thing. And if we understand emotions and understand thoughts, we can only have one emotion and one thought at a
time. We cannot have more than one.
You cannot literally be sitting there thinking about a positive thought and a negative thought at the
same time. You know, we have about 30 to 40 thoughts every minute.
The same for everybody. Even the people we think don't think they have about the same.
And we sit down to meditation and we think those thoughts come thicker and faster, but really we just become aware of them.
And that's what time out is about. It's emotions will they
creep along and they're there, they're information.
And they'll keep trying to tell you whatever you need to know.
Hey, I'm here. And say fear or something's coming up and the fear is like just, hey, you should be frightened of
this. And it gets louder and louder. Hey.
Until at some point it will literally paralyze your body and say, right, you need to stop and you
need to take notice of this now. It's the same with the many other voices inside of us.
I was like, emotions as voices. You know, I got my protector.
I've got my fear person. I've got my loving person.
I've got my laid back, my chilled. I've got my, my shame and guilt.
They're all different voices inside of me. I've even got my ego one and my I say ego.
I mean, go chip on the shoulder one. You know, the one that likes thousands of listeners to my podcast, the
one that thinks I'm absolutely awesome. And I've got.
The one that thinks I'm terrible and thinks doing this podcast a waste of time.
Nobody will listen. They're all there, and they're all present, and they're all giving me information.
They're all phoning me, texting me, giving me their opinion.
My. My head's like one big rave party of people with opinions all sitting around the desk.
And it's interesting because every single one of them doesn't care about the other.
They all think they've got the answer to my problems.
You know, the shame ones. Like, no, just be in shame. That's okay.
You can deal with that. Just be in guilt. Just be in fear.
Just be enlightened. Just be desire. Just have lust for people.
Just go around lusting sex all day. That was all your problems out.
It really is that much. It really is as crazy as that in our heads, right?
And then you couple that with all the feelings that come up in our body. It really is one absolute crazy storm
of committee opinions and feelings and emotions. And then at some point, it's just, Whoa, they
overflow. At some point, they just. Yeah, it's like,
just one at a time, please. I suppose it's much like a school teacher, isn't it?
It's like if the whole class is trying to give you information, you cannot listen to them all at the same time.
So you try to sit down and listen to each one. Try to listen.
Right, okay, what's fear telling me? What's guilt telling me?
But that's so hard to do, isn't it? Because we're used to just having a couple of emotions.
We're either trying to push away something we don't want, or we're trying to grab hold of someone we want.
So it's either we're trying to resist pain or go for pleasure.
And that's it. Simple. That's life. But it's way more complicated than that, isn't it?
It's way more complicated because of all these complex feelings.
You know, if only Adam had not ate the apple. Damn you, Adam.
We would still be walking around like animals, like our dogs and cats.
You know, a dog can go and have a fight and rip another leg.
A leg off another dog and come back and go, yeah, so what are we doing later?
Going out for a walk? They don't have that complex feelings of timeline and emotions.
I Know, I'm going to get some listeners go, yes they do. My dog has feelings.
Not in the same complex way we do. They have feelings before.
Adam at the apple. Adam at the apple. There you go.
Shame, guilt, fear, anger, all
those complex emotions arose in human life a few thousand years before the Bible was wrote.
I'm not saying the Bible is the word of God, I'm not going down that route. But I'm saying the Bible at the time was a
scientific document, we could say, based on their level of understanding at the time.
And they had to come up with a way of how come animals around us don't have these feelings, but
we do. Let's blame Adam, Adam and Eve.
It's all their fault. It's all their fault. I need to take time out now.
Close the curtains, lock the door, sit on the floor, turn the light off and go.
Give me a break. So if you want someone to blame for your breakdown, blame them.
They are the reason. Counselors and psychiatrists and all of that make an absolute fortune nowadays
because we're just trying to sort out that committee in our minds, that committee, that ever flowing
river of emotions. So how do we sort out, how do we help with these things?
Well, first of all, realize that you're not your thoughts.
You know, if you are your thoughts when you have a thought and then you think, I remember that, that's a brilliant, brilliant
thought, I don't need to write it down. I'll never forget that amazingly incredible thought I've just had four
minutes later. What was that damn thought? But if you were, you wouldn't forget.
Apparently every atom in our body changes every seven years.
So I've now changed 1, 2, 3, 4. I don't know my seven times table, about six times seven, eight times,
maybe nine. But now I've changed like seven times.
It's like going through the Star Trek portal, isn't it? Every time you go there, you get killed in one and you get born in another.
Beat me up, kill me and then reborn me on the spaceship.
That's basically what's happening. Is the new person you.
No, it's a copy of the exact moment you left.
What if something went wrong and then there was two of you?
Oh, that's weird. Even weirder, what if something went wrong and there was two of
you and you're left behind, but the new one is where your wife
is and then they go with your wife but you're still on the planet.
Is your wife cheating? Okay, mind blown.
Whoa, that's just, that's Just crazy.
But yeah, we replace ourselves about every seven years. So we're not even our bodies.
We're not even our bodies. I'm starting to think replacing mine with somebody a little more, less Buddha
centric with a belly might be a nice, nice idea.
Come on, Atoms, if you are listening to me, get a little firmer.
Atoms, please. Without going to the gym.
But then we have emotions, right? And just as the thoughts come and go, we have emotions that
come and go. We're not our emotions.
Because if we are our emotions, how come they disappear and they come back and they disappear.
If you were to sit there now and take a deep breath and I asked you what are you feeling?
You could do this with me now, what are you feeling? Don't judge it,
