Overwhelming Yourself

If you are a regular reader of "Detach", you probably already know that when it comes to tackling a large job, particularly when it comes to clutter, I tend to walk away from the job because it seems too large to tackle. I'm aware of how crazy this sounds, but I let a pile of clothes build up in the floor of my closet for months because I kept thinking "I just need to take everything out of this closet and reorganize it. And there's no way I can do that until I have a week's vacation. When I'm able to completely overhaul this closet, that's when I'll move these clothes."

Dr. Eve and I had more than one session about this problem. This article repeats some of the methods taught to me by Dr. Eve, but I think it's a good one, and it can be used for anything in your life that seems overwhelming, not just the clutter in your closet or kitchen counter!

Overwhelming Yourself
There are several ways you may overwhelm yourself into doing nothing. You may magnify a task to the degree that it seems impossible to tackle. You may assume you must do everything at once instead of breaking each job down in to small, discrete, manageable units which you can complete one step at a time. You might also inadvertently distract yourself from the task at hand by obsessing about endless other things you haven't gotten around to doing yet. To illustrate how irrational this is, imagine that every time you sat down to eat you thought about all the food you would have to eat during your lifetime. Just imagine for a moment that all piled up in front of you are tons of meat, vegetables, ice cream, and thousands of gallons of fluids! And you have to eat every bit of this food before you die! Now suppose that before every meal you said to yourself, "This meal is just a drop in the bucket. How can I ever get all that food eaten? There's just no point in eating one pitiful hamburger tonight." You'd feel so nauseated and overwhelmed your appetite would vanish and your stomach would turn into a knot. When you think about all the things you are putting off, you do this very same thing without being aware of it.
-Feeling Good
David D. Burns