When Mental Load Makes You Want to Hide

Renae: Hi there and welcome to this episode of It Doesn’t Have to Be This Way. I’m your host, Renae Dupuis, and today we’re going to be talking about the mental load. Sometimes we think we’re avoiding people, tasks, or responsibilities, but actually we’re avoiding the mental load attached to them. So let’s jump in and talk about where our hermit takes us. So I don’t know about you, but when I’m starting to feel a little bit overwhelmed, um, I might have some body cues that show up that are a little bit surprising for me.

Um, sometimes because I have kind of a stick to itiveness kind of bent to my personality and I try to, to, you know, keep going, keep trooping. It’s from those childhood experiences of going on cattle drives that were fourteen hours long that you couldn’t get off your horse very much. Or different types of endurance sports or things like that. And, and so participating in some of those really did end up developing kind of this shutdown in my body cues. And so sometimes I miss my body and brain telling me some messages.

And this often can happen when my mind feels too full, but I’m not feeling the cues soon enough and my body takes action. Instead, my body and brain move me to a place where I am no longer engaging in the same way. So what does this look like for me? It can look a lot of different ways. Sometimes the mental load can make me feel like I don’t even want to start. I don’t even want to start because I know that I’m going to have to take a couple of steps after that.

I’m not sure if I have enough energy. I’m not sure if I have enough time. Um, there are some pieces that might be unknown, so I don’t know what steps are going to are going to have to be taken. And my brain and body, if we’re already feeling a little bit fatigued, it’s kind of protecting me. It’s not usually a cognitive experience. It’s, it’s more of a feel of. uh, and shut down or overwhelm or I want to take a nap. Um, some of that is just my neural overloads, right?

That I’m, some of that’s just the overload of my nervous system. And it actually is a good cue that I need to take a break. And some of it might feel a little bit deeper because there’s so many beginnings that haven’t been completed. What do I mean by that? Um, I think if you’ve listened at all to this podcast, you know, that I have ADHD, I’m a late diagnosis person. and I’ve had a lifetime of starting projects and not quite getting to the finish line.

I’ve learned now that that has to do a little bit with hyper focus. It has to do with dopamine. It has to do with all kinds of structures and connections in my brain. In this particular brain adaptation. And so while maybe it had been communicated to me in some spaces as a moral failing or an inability to follow through, I now know that a large part of it has to do with my capacity. I don’t really love the fact that I have a bunch of UFOs hanging around.

Those are unfinished objects, whether it’s in my craft room or in my Google Drive or in my bazillion different journals with ideas in them. I have so many ideas, but there is something to be said about the ideation piece, right? That they create creativity and expression piece that comes with with the excitement of something new and that it’s, it’s actually meeting a need for me during that time. But the downside of not having the completion is, is that we as humans really do love completion. Um, a beginning, middle and an end.

We are very unhappy when stories have cliffhangers and then they’re not resolved. I hate that when I’m watching a TV show and I really like it. And we get to the end and there’s this cliffhanger and then it’s not renewed. It feels very unsatisfactory. I want to know what happened, what happened after that point. I want some completion. And so I have a lot of these projects that aren’t completed, and it doesn’t give me a high level of satisfaction, even though there’s the novelty of something that’s new.

I, I really, I really do want to complete things, but it feels so expensive to me sometimes. Usually if I’ve stopped, it’s because I’ve hit some level of internal or external resistance that has started to drain me or was a little bit beyond what I had budgeted energy wise or time wise, resource wise. And so to protect myself, I start to it starts to feel really, really heavy. And this can happen with relationships too. Um, my poor friends, my darling, lovely, wonderful friends who sometimes text me and I see the text and I see the text for a few minutes, and then I see it an hour later and I see it hours later and days later and weeks later.

And there have been people who I have left their text, Uh, left them on read for like a year. Just because I know that I want to be actually present with them. But everything feels so noisy, so cluttered, so heavy that I can’t find a clean starting point. I can’t find the capacity to to clear the decks enough in order to give them a good conversation. And because I don’t like to do things on the surface, I don’t like to do things halfway. It just doesn’t feel like it’s even going to be worth it for them or for me.

And so they get left on read. But then it starts to bother me too, right? Then there’s a little bit of maybe some shame or guilt or feeling of ick that happens with that. And that makes me want to hide a little bit too. So how else this shows up is that in my brain, sometimes there’s some cognitive friction. Meaning that there’s either a misalignment of energy, of goal. Maybe I have thought that something was going to take me a certain amount of time, and it took me twice as long, and I didn’t leave margin for it.

Maybe there are too many things that are weighing on me that are distracting me. Maybe it’s just a potato day. Um, I sometimes it’s a potato day, which means my brain’s not going to work the way that I love for it to work. And I need to be engaging in less mentally strenuous activities because I burned a whole bunch of those resources earlier in the week, and I need to recoup. Sometimes it’s the the environment around me has a lot of noise or a lot of interruptions.

My poor darling husband, um, even after, you know, we’ve been together for almost thirty years and still forgets that when I’m concentrating, that interrupting me means I have to start all over again. And I’ve only budgeted so much energy in time because I only have so much energy in time. And so I might have a pretty vehement response to that. And in order not to unload that on people, sometimes I might pull away. So sometimes it can look like avoidance.

Sometimes it can look like me not speaking, disappearing, and sometimes it shows up as procrastination. Well, what looks like procrastination. Um, it’s really more avoidance, I would say. I don’t know about you, but I have really benefited from those times that I’m able to take a moment and, and pause and say, what’s the resistance pattern coming up here? Why or what am I avoiding? Because it’s starting to feel tangled or it’s starting to feel like if I start this one piece, then it’s connected to this other and then this other.

It’s not a simple thing and it just feels overwhelming. Or is there an unfinished loop that’s interrupting? It’s staying on my periphery. I think for me that I found that what works best for me is not to think of it as I need to try harder. I got a lot of that in earlier years and in different times of you just need to put your mind to it. You just need to decide. You just need to push through. But that’s when we ended up in that space where I was ignoring what I needed in order to push through.

And you can do it for a certain amount of time, but it comes at a cost later. So I think it’s not to try harder, but to for me to reduce the number of open loops, find some things that I can give myself a beginning, a middle and an end. And this is really poignant too. And when your caregiver, when you’re caring for other people, um, especially people who have long term challenges or illness, there usually isn’t a straightforward beginning, middle and end. You’re usually in a very long process.

And so finding those places that you can have a completion or mark, a milestone can give enough satisfaction, enough peace, enough contentment to know that you can have an impact on the world. You can change things, you can make things happen. And that really helps in those spaces where you’ve experienced a lot of not being able to. So one of the ways that I approach this is with a three column mental sort. This is a way of taking a look at what’s going on in my brain and what needs actually does need my attention right now.

Um, I am very honestly going to confess to you that I will make great to do lists and schedule things, and then I’ll get to my to do list. I’m like that. None of that looks fun. It looked fun when I was making the list and now I don’t want to do it. And so in those cases, it is a little bit of checking in. What’s the resistance? You might just need to take a break and take a moment and scaffold yourself a little more and then continue on because stuff does need to happen.

Or maybe it is that it’s not been sorted into containers that I can approach yet. And so this three column mental load, this three column mental load sorting practice is to have three columns of now. Not now. And I need support. So if I’m looking at something and saying, okay, here are all the things that are crowding up my brain. Maybe I’m writing down a list of, of, of everything that’s making noise and taking up space and then sorting them. Is this a not now?

Is this a a later thing? Is this essential? I mean, some people use the Eisenhower matrix for this. That’s that one’s actually still really hard for me, because there’s certain parts of it that I don’t know the answers to. So this three column sort helps me a lot more. And so can I do this now? Do I need to do this now? Yes or no? Is this a not now? Yes or no? Um. Do I need support? I need to do it, but I need support. And then I ask a simple question.

What is one next step that fits my actual capacity? What I’m doing when I ask that question is I’m creating a container of grace for myself that tells the truth about what’s actually happening. So I’m not procrastinating. I’m not listing all the things and getting organized and then setting myself up to fail, which I’ve done so many times. So, so, so many times. It’s instead with this one question giving me the opportunity to create the conditions for my success.

Telling the truth about what’s really available to me and taking one gentle next step forward. I don’t think that it’s a problem for us to take time away, or that when we need a break, we take a break or that we need to withdraw. Sometimes I think that’s actually pretty healthy. I think spending time figuring out what we need and listening to our heart, mind, body and soul is really important. It’s when that time away starts to interrupt our ability to connect with ourselves and others.

If it becomes just a shutdown time, that’s telling us we need more support. And actually that’s probably more external than it is internal. So the the thing with the hermit it can really disconnect us from ourselves and from others. And that’s not when we are our best. We can have distance between ourselves and others. We can take breaks and still be connected even if we’re not doing something active. But we’ll talk a little bit about what that plan of coming back into connection looks like at another time.

For now, I just want to encourage you to be gracious to yourself and think about what are the ways that you might approach resorting or sorting or creating containers. When you start to feel overwhelmed, when you start to feel like it’s it’s all too much. It’s really loud. It’s a lot. You’re worth the time. You are worth the space. And I encourage you to. Take time to look at how these these patterns are showing up in your life. And of course, you can always look at any resources that are on the Renae M. Dupuis website.

We’ve got a lot of free downloads and some other tools that you can purchase. And if we don’t send me a message and let me know, we’ll see what we can come up with. Thanks for stopping by.