Setting priorities as a creative

Sensory Overload is something you might‘ve heard about before. It is mostly experienced by people with anxiety, ADD and people on the autism spectrum. Something similar to this can happen to creative people when they get so laser focused and obsessed with something that they get overwhelmed by it.

I don‘t have a name for it, but I do know how it felt when I spent several days in a row figuring out how to start a podcast or sitting on my computer for two weeks just figuring out how taxes work in Germany when you plan on starting a business. It‘s not quite burnout, but oh boy, does it come with a lot of overwhelm. Let’s look at how we can work on it by setting priorities as a creative.

How to deal with it

Here‘s the thing, there is usually an end to those phases of laser focus, but your body keeps giving you these stress signals and that restlessness that you had around researching that thing or building whatever. Let me give you a breakdown of how to deal with this and any other kind of overwhelm.

Journal

We‘re on episode ten but you‘ll hear this for pretty much any emotional problem from me. Journal it out. Can be in your notes app, in a journal or on Google Docs on your computer. Getting your jumbled mess of a mind onto paper helps with organizing your thoughts and slows your infinitely fast spiral down.

Self Care Day

If you tend to have this overwhelmed feeling over several days you should really take at least half a day to just be there for yourself. Ideally you try to incorporate a lot of mindfulness practices like meditation, mindful eating and planning in enough rest. But a general self care day also helps.

Reprioritize

Whatever your mind is focussing on right now, the topic at hand has priorities and so does your life. Write down everything about the overwhelming current topics and sort them by how important they are. Same goes for areas of your life. If it‘s from a less important life area you will instantly worry a little less about it.

Action plan

Make one for whatever you were laser focused on now that you journalled, calmed down and prioritized your situation, you can finish up clearing your mind with an actual action plan around the problems at hand. Write a list of tasks in detail that go through every step you have to take to get the problem at hand out of the world or learn about the thing you hyperfixated on so much.

Talk to others about it

If none of these help you might need help rationalizing your inner workings by talking it out with someone else and getting their input. I know I definitely need that after I consumed all the knowledge about something within a couple days. Your brain sometimes just needs to dump it all back out to organize it and make it seem less daunting.

These are obviously only a few tips on how to deal with overwhelm and setting priorities as a creative. If you need more self care tips you should check out the self care category on my blog or sign up for self care freebies here:

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Setting priorities as a creative by Rabea