Overwhelm Disguised as Busyness
When someone asks you how things are going or what you’ve been up to, a common response is, “life is busy!”
Sometimes this canned response is said with pride, like it’s evidence of a productive life. Sometimes it’s said with exhaustion, like a quiet cry for help. Or sometimes it’s just what comes out of your mouth because the honest answer would take too long to explain.
If you’re honest, ‘busy’ probably isn’t the best answer to the question you were asked. While it certainly may be true to some extent that we actually are busy, the reason we respond with the generic “busy” answer is because we’re culturally conditioned to respond this way. But from my own experience and observations from people around me is that underneath the canned “busy” response, something like overwhelm may be hiding.
And while feeling overwhelmed is something that each of us experiences throughout life, it’s something we need to pay attention to, because overwhelm that goes unexamined turns into something worse: quiet resignation, numbing behaviors, and normalization.
The Two Kinds of Overwhelm
Not all overwhelm is the same, and treating it like it is will keep you stuck.
The first type of overwhelm comes from circumstances you didn’t choose:
A layoff.
An unexpected expense.
A difficult season in your marriage.
A child going through something hard.
A death.
Health issues.
The second type of overwhelm comes from accumulated commitments you stopped examining:
The commitments you say yes to without thinking about.
The projects you started because they sounded good in the moment.
The lifestyle you built that assumed a version of you with more time, more energy, and fewer competing demands than you actually have.
Most people experience some mix of both, but we tend to overemphasize overwhelm as circumstantial. That framing feels better because it removes our agency.
If the overwhelm is happening to me, I’m not responsible for it.
But if you’re honest, overwhelm is sometimes the result of choices you made and then stopped examining, and you can’t address that overwhelm the same way you address the circumstantial kind.
Sitting with unforeseen circumstances requires patience, but sitting with a bloated calendar full of things you never should have said yes to requires a different move entirely.
This exercise is the diagnostic gap, and until you can look at your overwhelm and separate what’s actually unchosen from what you’ve been telling yourself is unchosen, you can’t respond to it well.
The Default Responses
Most of us don’t do this diagnostic. We do something that feels easier in the moment.
We mask it. Nobody knows the weight we’re actually carrying, so we tell ourselves that’s fine because “everyone’s busy” and we pretend that busyness is the cost of a productive life.
We ignore it. We push through it and hope it passes, but we keep saying yes, and we add more to the plate because slowing down feels irresponsible.
We cut reactively. When the pressure finally cracks, we start dropping commitments without thinking about which ones actually matter.
All three responses feel like they’re addressing the overwhelm of busyness, but they’re not. They’re avoiding it, and the result is that the same overwhelm keeps showing up, sometimes in a different form, sometimes worse. And then we find ourselves drinking more, scrolling more, binging more, because the numbing feels easier than the examining.
I want to be honest. I’ve been in seasons this year where I’ve felt all three of those pulls. Full-time work. Building BFAP on nights and weekends. Trying to be present with Lindsey and Ava. My mom’s passing. Trying to keep in touch with friends and extended family. And all the normal life stuff mixed in between.
Living intentionally doesn’t eliminate busyness or feeling overwhelmed. It just changes how you respond to it. Every new season brings a new configuration of demands, and the version of intentionality that worked in the last season isn’t always the version that fits the current one. If you’re feeling overwhelmed, that’s not a sign that you’ve failed at intentional living. It might just mean the season shifted and your response hasn’t caught up yet.
So what do you actually do? Not to fix overwhelm forever, but to respond to it well when it shows up?
The Practice That Actually Works
The response I’d offer isn’t a productivity system. It’s the same practice I’ve been writing about across BFAP, but applied here to the specific feeling of being underwater. If you’ve been reading along, some of this will sound familiar. Sit with it anyway. The practice matters more when you apply it to something real, not just to concepts.
Pay attention. Before you cut anything, before you add anything, before you react at all, actually look at what’s creating the excess busyness in your life. Not in a general “life is a lot” way. Specifically. What are the commitments, obligations, relationships, and rhythms that are actually filling your time and energy right now? Most people can’t answer this question with any real precision, which is exactly why they can’t respond to their overwhelm intelligently.
Ask why. For each thing that’s actually on your plate, ask why it’s there. Did you consciously choose it, or did it accumulate through default? Does it still align with what you say you value, or is it a leftover from a previous season? Is it feeding something meaningful, or is it just there because you never stopped to question it?
Notice patterns. Overwhelm often follows patterns. Same time of year. Same pillar of life. Same relationship dynamics. Same categories of yes. If you find yourself overwhelmed by the same kind of thing again and again, that’s data. It’s telling you something about a structural issue in your life that you’ve been treating as a temporary problem.
Take ownership of the inputs. Some of what’s overwhelming you may genuinely be outside of your control. Sit with those things, extend yourself grace, and acknowledge that some situations and seasons are unavoidable. But some of what’s overwhelming you may be the direct result of inputs you can adjust. And until you own that distinction honestly, you’ll never see the parts that you actually have control over.
This is not a process that’s meant to be one and done. Overwhelm from an overly busy life accumulates over months and years, and it rarely resolves in an afternoon. The discipline of actually looking at your life, one honest question at a time, will do more for your overwhelm than any amount of masking, ignoring, or reactive cutting ever will.
The Invitation
If you’re feeling overwhelmed right now, here’s what I’d ask you to sit with this week.
What is the source of your overwhelm?
Which parts of it did you choose, even if you didn’t realize you were choosing?
Which parts are genuinely unchosen?
What would it look like to respond to that overwhelming part of your life differently, starting this week?
You don’t have to cut anything today. You don’t have to overhaul your life. But you do have to be willing to look. Because overwhelm that you refuse to examine will slowly reshape you into someone you don’t want to become. And the person you’re becoming is more important than any single yes or no you’re making right now.
Life is going to keep being full. Every new season brings a new configuration of demands, and the goal isn’t to eliminate the fullness. It’s to make sure the fullness reflects a life you’re actually choosing.
Your life is speaking, even in (and especially in) the noise.
The question is whether you’re paying attention.
