When you’re already feeling overwhelmed and someone wants to “talk through things.”

The last thing you may want to do is talk about it. Your mental space is crowded already and you really don’t want to take in anything else.. You may just want to be alone..

Should you “talk through things?”

Let’s make things simple – The answer is YES. Now let’s take a look at why..

Clearing an overcrowded mind:

There are certain things you can do to clear an overcrowded or overwhelmed mind. And one of those things is fighting through until the end.. Let’s use an example to illustrate:

Let’s say you want to become a Professor of Psychology at Louisiana State University. In order to become a Professor at LSU, you have to at least get a Masters Degree. During the Masters Degree you keep feeling overwhelmed and want to quit.. Though instead of quitting, you fight through until the end of your Masters Degree and then BOOM you can finally become a Professor! 

Extracting from the example – The point here is that you would not have been able to become a Professor if you would’ve given up along the way. You need to fight through the difficult times in order to achieve. You may second guess yourself along the way, but rest assured that moving entirely through a difficult conversation will lead to a resolution and less weight on your mind.

Let’s illustrate with one more example:

Imagine your bedroom is super messy.. maybe some of you won’t even have to imagine 🙂 As time passes, small piles of clothes and random things start to garnish the floor. As more time passes, it becomes exceedingly difficult to navigate your bedroom without knocking something over.. You use to be able to walk a straight line to get from one side of the room to the other. Now you have to walk in 3 steps, take one big step over a couple pieces of clothes, take two steps to the right to avoid a chair sitting in the middle of your room, take another large side step to not kick some other random crap on the ground, then voila you are at your destination! Because the stuff in your room accumulated slowly and/or you’ve become accustomed to it being messy, it is now difficult to realize the extra time it takes to navigate your room.

Extracting from the example – The more crowded your mind is, the more time it takes to get into a clearer state of focus. Your mind may have slowly accumulated all these thoughts, which means you may have become accustomed to taking extra time to navigate through them. If you clean your mind, you can move from point A to point B quicker.

More concisely worded:

By spending the time to “talk through things” you can clear more mental space. You just have to give it the extra time (maybe more than you would’ve liked). Similar to putting more work in up-front to save time in the long run. Not talking through things is taking the lazy way out and will only make the journey more difficult.

How do you “talk through things” when you’re mind is already filled to the brim.

First of all, it may be very difficult to listen and accept another person’s point of view when you feel like you already have too much on your mind. You may feel ansie and unable to sit still and/or focus. This is okay. It just means you have a lot on your mind.

Remember this – having a lot on your mind can vastly decrease your ability to focus. In order to improve your focus, take deep breaths and keep going. If you’re in conversation with someone, reassure them that you’re listening (because they’ll likely think you’re fed up when hearing your deep breaths). If you need to, inform them that you have a lot on your mind and you’re doing your best to listen – feel free to tell them the deep breaths are helping you calm down (because they really are).

Above all, do your best not to end this conversation when you feel like it is “done.” It’s likely your perception of the conversation’s end and the other person’s perception of the conversation’s end differ.

The conversation is not truly over until both of you feel like y’all are no longer overwhelmed. Both of your minds will feel clearer and more at ease. If either of you don’t feel like your mind is clear or at ease than y’all haven’t fully resolved the topic at hand (e.g. you only cleaned some of your bedroom – you left legos all over the floor).

If you have any questions or want to talk more about “talking through things” reach out to me at michael@massivepockets.com or on Instagram at www.instagram.com/michael_ostrow