Today I’m going to talk about something that affects nearly all book writers—and let’s be honest, pretty much all people—at one point or another, and that’s overwhelm. 

 I’ll be giving you four tips to help you overcome these feelings when they arise so that you can feel calmer and more confident to move forward with your writing.

 To find the full transcript of this episode, go to YourWordsUnleashed.com/5.

So, onto overwhelm. You definitely know what I’m talking about. This was always a tough issue for writers, but it’s gotten a lot worse during this seemingly never-ending pandemic.

This is especially true for women who generally have to give much more of their time and energy to care for their families and their students’ emotional needs, leaving them with almost nothing at the end of the day for themselves or their own work. 

Overwhelm is not quite the same as burnout, although it’s related. But for scholarly authors, it’s that feeling like you’re drowning in too many ideas and too much data and you have no clear path forward. It can make you feel panicked and like time is running out. 

And these feelings, which are based in fear, often slow your writing way down or can even cause you to avoid it altogether. 

I mean, how many people do you know who put off writing for entire semesters while they’re teaching, thinking that when summer or a research leave comes they will jump right back into it and get so much done? I know I have!

But then when they finally get to sit down and write, they become so overwhelmed that they accomplish very little despite having all that unstructured time.

Feeling overwhelmed by writing your book is not just an emotional issue, it’s also physical. It can literally feel like a heavy burden, an actual weight that sits on your shoulders, causing you to hunch down into yourself, or on your chest, making your breath shallow and preventing you from taking in enough oxygen. 

Or it can manifest as tension and distress in the pit of your stomach. For many years I had chronic stomach issues that would flare up in times of acute stress, which would then become a reason why I didn’t have the ability to get my work done. 

When you’re feeling overwhelmed, the idea of finishing your manuscript or getting a contract with a press you admire or having your book be published and read by people out in the world can seem like a distant dream. 

It’s way too easy to use your writing as an opportunity to harshly judge yourself. Like maybe you see these as good things that only happen to other people who have their acts together and you can’t visualize it for yourself.

So, with all of this in mind, I’d like to offer four tips to help you navigate your way out of overwhelm so that you can stop spinning your wheels and start moving forward again in a way that feels good—and not like torture.