Overwhelm Is Reversible. Here Are the Best Strategies From Psychology and Neuroscience | Claudia Hammond

This is the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hello, my fellow suffering beings. How are we doing? There's a tendency to think about overwhelm as a distinctly modern problem.

But people have been worrying about this issue for millennia. Socrates said, Beware the barrenness of a busy life. And more recently, Soren Kierkegaard said, Of all ridiculous things, the most ridiculous seems to me to be a man who's brisk about his food and his work. Both of those quotes haunt me, 'cause I think I am a little too busy. So anyway, what I'm trying to get at here is if you're overwhelmed and overscheduled, you come by it honestly, not only as a member of Homo sapiens, who, as we've just established, have been worrying about this for millennia, but also because we now live in what many people believe is an age of overwhelm, where even though we actually have more spare time, many of us feel like we have

too much to do and not enough time in which to do it. The pressures seem relentless, pressures from the outside and pressures from the inside, pressures that we put on ourselves in an era of rising perfectionism. Okay, so that's all the bad news. The good news is that there are things you can do about overwhelm. There are evidence-based strategies from psychology and neuroscience, and my guest today has written a whole book about both the problem and the solutions, and that book is called Overwhelmed.

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