Overcoming Overwhelm: A Guide For Freelancers To Fix The Root Cause And Stop Treating The Symptoms

Brian Hood (0:00)

This is the 6 Figure Creative Podcast, episode 261

Welcome to the 6 Figure Creative Podcast, where our mission is to help you turn your creative passions into a stable, reliable income.

If you're in audio, video, design, photography, or really any other creative field, and you just want to learn from other successful creatives, you're in the right place.

Hello, and welcome back to another episode of the 6 Figure Creative Podcast. I'm your host, Brian Hood. If this is your first time listening to the show, first of all, welcome, so glad to have you here. This is a show for creatives who want to earn more from their creative skills, usually as a freelancer, and you want to do it without selling your soul. If that sounds like you, you're in the right spot. For my returning listeners, glad to have you back. This is the first episode after a long series of the Back to Basics series. We're kind of moving away from that for now because I want to talk about a subject that's beyond just the basics. This is something that we deal with in all areas of life, from beginners to intermediates to experts. And this actually came in as a question that our listeners suggested. So if you actually go to 6figurecreative.com/better, that's B-E-T-T-E-R, you can suggest changes to the show, things you don't like, things you like, topics for the show that you want to hear. This actually came from that. Some of the suggestions we've gotten, we've actually implemented. Like for example, YouTube listener or viewer, hi, hey, I'm waving at you, actually suggested that we put our episode numbers back in the titles on YouTube because for some reason we just stopped doing that and it was hard for them to find the shows on YouTube that we had referenced back to because that's their main place of viewing. So that's sort of feedback we listen to, we do, we implement, and now all of our episodes, again, have numbers on them on the YouTube channel. So this is a topic that came straight from the listeners and I love doing this sort of stuff. And it is a topic that everyone has struggled with. I am not the expert in answering this. I can promise you that at best, I know a little bit more than some people.

That's the best I'm gonna give you here. And this is the topic of overwhelm. I get overwhelmed. So again, I'm not the end all be all expert at this, but I wanted to take my best shot at answering this because I do like to think that I am a generally chill person who isn't overwhelmed often. Those are my credentials for this.

So let's chat about what he asked. Here's the actual wording from the email. This is anonymous. You can submit these questions or any of the feedback anonymously, or you can actually give us your info and we can get in touch with you. But he says, he or she says, Hey Brian, I'm in the middle of trying to get clients, work on my portfolio, build my website or website ideas and services.

I currently have a full time job and I work around 60 hours a week. I'm also married and I try to spend time with my wife when we're both off. I get overwhelmed sometimes when I haven't slept more than a few hours a couple nights in a row. How do I battle exhaustion when I need to use any free time so that at some point, I can transition to working for myself? I love your podcast and thank you for all you do. Well, thank you. I love you for submitting a question here. So my goal for this episode is give you some thoughts and ideas and strategies for how you can overcome overwhelm so you can stay creative, you can stay sane, you can stay productive, you can keep progressing in your business.

And I think that overwhelm is one of the biggest killers of creativity. I can't imagine many people are hyper creative and are able to create their best work as a creative when they're overwhelmed. Now, I will say sometimes being overwhelmed leads to having to get shit done, which we'll talk about later in this episode. So sometimes we're very productive when we're overwhelmed, but rarely would I say we are creative when we're overwhelmed. So how do we deal with overwhelm? If you're a person who always feels overwhelmed or you're the person who submitted that question and you were clearly overwhelmed, how do we fix this? I think the flaw here is if we're trying to deal with overwhelm, we are merely treating a symptom instead of a root cause. And if we treat the symptom, we are just creating a temporary solution to the problem instead of solving the problem once and for all. So think about if you have a back pain and you go to the doctor and the doctor's like, oh yeah, back pain, that sucks. Here's some morphine, here's some pain medication. And you say, okay, I take that. Oh, back pain's gone, great. I've treated the symptom, problem solved. Nope, not really, problem's not solved. You just treated the symptom. So now I have to take morphine or some sort of pain medication for the rest of my life or until the back pain just naturally goes away. So you can see the flaw here. Treating overwhelm is just treating the symptom and not the actual root cause. So as far as techniques and strategies and quick tips for how to not feel overwhelmed, that's not what this episode is today. We're gonna talk about root causes.