Why Everything Feels Urgent (And Almost None of It Is) | Out of Overwhelm, Part 4

Everything in your life feels urgent. Almost none of it is.

In Part 4 of the Out of Overwhelm series, I'm telling you the story of the one sentence a friend said to me in 2014 that took a decade to fully land: the laundry will always be there, but the sun won't. Then we get into why your body treats an unread email like an emergency, where that sense of urgency actually comes from, and the two-step I use with clients to tell the difference between urgent and important in real time.

In this episode:

• The laundry story, and the decade I spent unable to tell low stakes from high stakes
• Why a fast reply feels like proof you're good at your job (it isn't)
•  The red dot, the unread badge, and the low-grade alarm you live with
•  When someone else's mood becomes your emergency
•  "Just one more thing," and what it's actually costing you
•  Why urgency is a body state before it's a thought
•  The bunker, the siren, and why organizing your pens won't quiet it
•  State before strategy: notice the urgency in your body, then discern
•  The three questions: Does it have to be done now? By me? At all?

Your homework: notice one fake emergency every day this week

This is exactly what I'm teaching live in my free masterclass, Stop the Spiral Before It Starts, on Wednesday, July 15. Two live times so you can come on your lunch hour or after work. Register here: https://link.annejonescoaching.ca/stop-the-spiral-masterclass

New here? Start this series at Part 1 and binge forward.

Instagram: @annejonesfit

Substack: https://annejonesfit.substack.com/p/the-day-i-realized-half-my-emergencies (this week's essay is the full laundry story, including where the rule came from)

You know what to do. You're not confused about the plan. You're just not there when life gets loud.

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Transcript

Speaker 2 0:00

One summer, this would have been around 2014, I was working as a registered massage therapist, working all the time. I was treating a client of mine, and he became a friend, honestly. We were in our 20s. This was before either of us had had kids, and we became buds. And we were chatting about summer, like, you know how you do, right? Like, he was asking how summer was going, and I said something about how, oh, like, he said, like, "Are you enjoying summer?" And I said something about how, like, ah, like, I never-- I don't really get outside much. Like, there's so much to do. There's always something to clean, laundry to put away. I don't, I don't get outside that much, Which was true for most of my 20s. And I had never sat outside and read a book or sunbathed because there was always laundry to do or something to clean. that just had really never occurred to me before. And he said something like, "Oh, well, you know, the laundry will always be there, but the sun won't or the summer won't," or something. Which sounds so simple now, right? Like, that's a fridge magnet. But I had literally never heard it before, or I hadn't heard it before. And I, I, I still think about that moment so many years later, and I don't think he knows what that unlocked for me In that moment, he taught me the stakes for not folding the laundry were very low, and that the stakes for missing every summer as I had been were very high. And I had spent a decade unable to tell the difference. No awareness. Urgent and important are not the same thing. Welcome to The Anne Jones Show. I'm Anne Jones, nervous system coach, former registered massage therapist, and certified fitness coach of 17 years. This podcast is for high-achieving women who are tired of abandoning themselves just to keep everything running. Let's get into it Welcome back to week four of my Out of Overwhelm series. If you have been here for episodes one, two, and three, you know we have covered why rest isn't working for you, why your nervous system is running the show, and the hidden cost of being the reliable one from last week. Today, we're going after the thing driving all of it, urgency. Because everything in your life feels urgent, and almost none of it is. By the end of this episode, you will be able to tell the difference between urgency and importance in your body in real time. Both from personal experience and coaching clients, I know that we have become conditioned for email and DMs and texts to be a reply right now reflex. You get the email, you reply right away. I re- remember her, one of my one-on-one coaching clients saying... she walked into 45 work emails, which is a lot for her, after spring break. And because we had been working on her sense of urgency, she had this realization in coming back to work after spring break, having all these work emails, that just because someone sent her an email last night or several days ago doesn't mean it needs an answer first thing I think we are conditioned and trained to believe that a fast response is proof that you're good at your job, and that's not, that's not at all true. And with text messages, we treat that red dot, that unread badge, as a low-grade alarm that something has to be done, which is its intention, right? That's why it's red. That's why it's there. That's why they want you to have push notifications. It doesn't mean you have to do anything about it. Do you remember my story from the beginning about my patient, the laundry story? That was mine for a decade. That was my low-grade alarm sense of urgency. Th- this happens with, like, emotional reactions as well though, right? Someone else's mood or reaction or response becoming your emergency. Someone else's sense of urgency becoming your emergency. Or, like, I've had clients, you know, their... The whole afternoon gets hijacked by their partner's tone. Buying into a tone, making it mean something, assuming it means something, or a kid's meltdown. These are both examples of opting into the spiral, which I've talked about on other podcasts, and I'm really going to break down in my free Stop The Spiral Masterclass. But all I want you to know here is there's nothing wrong with opting into that spiral, getting completely hijacked. We all do it, and there is a way out of it. Another one that I know from clients is the phrase, "Just one more thing," right? Just one more thing is the phrase that eats your whole workday into you going home late, that pushes your bedtime. Just one more thing I will just share, I'm really, like, living the work this week, this month. Slightly overcommitted myself because as a homeschooling parent with summer camp coming up, I have four weeks of child free, during the day, 9:00 or 10:00 AM till 3:00. Whereas like during the school year since January, I have not had that, right? So I'm like, what does brain do? What can I do? What can I get off the list? What project? I wrote a substack about this, about parents, like, going into spring break and brain starts going, "What can we do? What can we tick off the list?" Which is something that we have to notice and temper. But anyways, my brain did it. So this month in July, I'm hosting a free masterclass in 10 days. I'm teaching a dance class, which I only do, like, once or twice a year, so I'm not prepared for, next Sunday, it'll be fine 'cause my brain and body just remember, but it's, it's just another thing I'm doing. I started a TikTok today. I'm just like comp- have completely overcommitted. And I have forty-eight child-free hours I took. I was like, "I need some time." I'm al- also, I'm single parenting for two weeks because my husband just got... Oh, also I had a kidney stone this whole past week. I'm just like, as I'm saying it now, I'm remembering all the things. So, but I'm fine. I'm fine. I'm not not stressed. I'm not overwhelmed. I am aware that I've ex- I've overcommitted, and I've exceeded my capacity. And so I'm telling you this because none of those things are really urgent. The kidney stone one did kind of become urgent, and I did literally go to urgent care, which is kind of ironic, on Wednesday, on Canada Day. I was there at 7:30, and I had been avoiding it, and I was like, "This is the thing that is inconvenient, but I should probably stop avoiding it." it was kind of a good thing that I went. But What I'm saying to you is I often hear, "Just one more thing. Just one more thing." And I'm in a season right now where I'm not really saying just one more thing, but I've committed to all these things, and as a person who normally does SFA after 7:30 or 8:00 PM, I've been staying up. I've been staying up till, like, 11:00, 11:30, which is very late for me. Like, I don't think well at night, but I'm, like, in these challenges, watching these videos, writing, and then I'm like, "Oh, I'm doing this Out of Overwhelm series I have to finish." So I've created it. I've created, I've created the overcommitment. I've created the over capacity. It's all stuff that I love doing. Too many blessings at once, right, equals ov- overwhelm. But I always just come back to, okay, if I do one more thing, what is the cost? I was sort of coaching myself through this last night, 'cause I've been pretty consistently, for the month of July so far, getting it all done, at what cost? Well, the cost is, sleep. It has been sleep. But not sleep, 'cause I don't wanna sacrifice sleep either, so it's been my early morning time. So my meditation has been suffering a little bit. So it's just at what cost? You have a human capacity. Like it or not, time is a human construct, but it keeps on ticking, so You are going to have to sacrifice or let something go, and, and I'm not here to tell you which one is which, but I kind of am. And last week we talked about rest. One of the recent episodes we talked about why your rest isn't working, and that's part of it. So if you're saying to yourself, "One more thing, and it has to be right now," okay, and at what cost? Because none of these things are emergencies. Other than my literal kidney stone, which even that was not an emergency yet, none of these things are emergencies. But if your body can't tell the difference yet, I'm going to tell you why, because I used to be like that as well. I used to feel completely different in my body. Urgency is a body state before it's a thought. So your to-do list did not create an alarm in your body. The alarm in your body went looking for the list, looking for the things. So I told you that story, my sort of evolution with my, my patient who alerted me that I actually didn't have to spend all summer afternoons inside cleaning my house and putting laundry away. It was a huge aha for me. And then more recently, just a few years ago, when things really hit an overwhelming anxiety climax, and I started working on my nervous system, I learned the word urgency. Like obviously I knew what the word urgency meant in layman's terms, but I had never related it to a feeling in my body or a thought in my brain. But when I heard it, when my coach said it to me, it perfectly described something that I had never considered, which was that I was treating most things- Because I was feeling like most things were urgent and could not wait, or there would be a bad consequence if they did, without ever considering whether that was true Urgency comes from speed learned as safety or reactivity learned as safety. I was working on urgency with a one-on-one client, and we visited her inner child, and her urgency traced back to being 13 years old, working her first job, hustling for a phone. She's about my age, and so this was her first cellphone. Flip phones. I think I even told her I had the red Motorola. That was the connection in her body. When we went to this feeling of urgency, it took her right back to being 13 years old, and you want this phone, you better work for it. And that's not, that's not a bad thing. But it felt very important and urgent to her teenage brain to get a phone, 'cause all her friends were getting phones, which is kind of funny that we went through this, like, 20 years ago, and now we're going through it again with kids' phones. And so that's not good, bad, right or wrong, but that's where she... That was the first, one of the first times she learned to hustle. And so when she feels a sense of urgency in her body, she goes back to being a 13-year-old, I better work so I can get money, so I can have a phone, so that I can be liked." that's what it really is. And that's not necessarily what it's gonna be for you. But the point is, urgency is a signal in your body. It's not a command. You're just interpreting it as such. And being more organized and disciplined has not fixed it for you, because you are strategizing from inside the bunker with the siren going off. You're in the bunker, body's feeling it, it feels so urgent, the siren is going off, and you're trying to organize your pens by color so that you can calm your nervous system. The siren's gonna keep going off. So here's the two step. The unlearning for me was twofold. F- I mean, first, my client, my patient at the time, had to bring it to my attention. I had to, I had to come around to it, like, "Oh-" I don't have to do this laundry right now. And I had this realization when I was writing my notes for this podcast today, because if you know me, if you've been around, you know that the laundry is my thing. It's my symbolic thing. And in a family of people who work out and swim, there's always, and have uniforms, there's always laundry. And some of that laundry's important, like the uniform, right? And, and the ba- the bathing suit. Those things have a sense of urgency. But I think that the laundry has become symbolic for me because of this conversation with my patient so many years ago, and it just shone light on the, like, nobody is gonna There's literally no negative consequence to not folding and putting this laundry away. The laundry is, in fact, clean. If you need the uniform, it's, it's, it's there. I'm just not Well, I don't fold my husband's clothes anyways, but that's a conversation for another day. But I think that's why that's my thing, that I'm like, "That has gotta be last on the list," because he drew to my attention that there is a level of importance for the things that you are doing. And many of my clients come to me not realizing this. Everything is acting of equal importance, and therefore of equal unimportance, and therefore inevitable failure because we cannot do it all because we have a human, a human capacity. So I had to come around to that realization, and then not until I started working on my nervous system did I notice it in my body. If you've heard me talk before about my somatic work, I, as a humorously trained fitness professional, dancer, massage therapist, and yoga teacher, pre like 2021, I didn't know how to feel in my body. I could feel a pain, but I didn't truly know how to feel what was happening in my internal world. I couldn't feel the siren going off in the bunker. So that was the next thing that I had to learn. Then the next thing I had to learn was the discernment when I had this realization like, Oh, not everything is urgent. Oh, just because I have this feeling, which I can now feel, it feels like, ooh, stress in my chest, I don't have to do anything about it." But one doesn't know that when they're completely dysregulated. So we need to address your state. We need to turn the siren off in the bunker. State before strategy, before we line the pens up by color, before we learn how to es- you know, come up with a plan for escaping the bunker. So step one is noticing the state, naming the urgency out loud first, and then naming the urgency in the body before touching that for the love of God to-do list, which can just go to hell. But you need to notice the urgency in the body. What does it feel like? You cannot sort priorities while the alarm is sounding, which is why every planner you've ever bought has failed you, which is why every 30-day challenge has ended 14 days in. So you must notice the state, name the urgency out loud, notice how it feels in your body. And then step two, discernment. What feels most important right now? Not the whole list. Not the whole list. It can't be the whole list. It cannot be the whole list. In this moment, what can wait and what cannot? Who must do it? Does it have to be done now? Does it have to be done by me? Does it have to be done at all? Those are the three questions I bring to my clients and my students If you can catch it, as I teach, and I'm gonna teach in the Stop the Spiral workshop on July 15th, if you can catch the urgency mid-moment, you have the opportunity to choose differently. But if you are living in your head, and you're on your phone all the time, and you don't know that you have a body, and you've never sat still with yourself for two minutes, you are gonna miss it. You're not gonna know. It's just all gonna feel like urgency. All right now, distraction all the time. But if you can catch it mid-moment and choose differently Then you get to choose what happens next or doesn't happen next, or what feels better I know both personally and from working with clients the cost of sorting priorities incorrectly for years or not sorting priorities incorrectly. The really important stuff slips through the cracks. Your health slips through your cracks. Your cracks. Your health, your health slips through the cracks. Everything is urgent all the time. What... There's no evenings. I'm gonna do a second shift in the evenings. You keep losing yourself to what feels loudest versus quieting the siren and then deciding what to do next. Do you need to escape the bunker? Is there something to do within it? You must quiet the siren before you can even decide. So I'm going to leave you with this: urgency and importance are not the same thing, but your body has probably been treating them as if they are identical. So my homework for you this week to get out of overwhelm is to notice one fake emergency every day this week. Just notice. You don't even have to fix it, just notice, "Oh, this really feels like an emergency. Maybe it's not." And then the next thing I want you to do is to go to the link in the show notes and register for my free masterclass, Stop the Spiral Before It Starts. it is free. There are two times, so you can do it on your lunch hour, you can do it after work. It is on July 15th. It is a Wednesday. I will be there live, and you also want to be there live because I am going to teach you a tool, and it is best taught in the body by you being there and doing the tool with me, practicing the tool, coming up with your tool, feeling how urgency feels in your body. If you are watching it after the fact, it's better than nothing, but, but watching bodies do things is a documentary. It's not an experiential happening. So masterclass, you must register and then you must come. And then I will teach you how to notice Noticing the fake emergency. I will teach you how to stop it. I will teach you how to stop the spiral it triggers. That is what we were doing in my free masterclass, Stop the Spiral Before It Starts on July 15th. DM me, spiral on Instagram. Go to my webpage, it'll, it'll, it'll pop up at you. It will say, "Register now," and then you will do it. And if you must know- The laundry is still there, but actually the laundry got all put away quite recently because that's what happens. Because when you, when you leave it, when you, when it needs to be done, you, you will do it. You will do it. But now I have new laundry, and so at some point this weekend I might put it away 'cause that feels nice and it helps me to pack, but I might not because it's gonna, it's gonna be there again, and maybe I wanna go for a walk, and maybe I wanna take myself to happy hour, and maybe I wanna read a book, and maybe I wanna edit this podcast. So regardless, I trust that the laundry will still be there, just as I am always here for you. Join me next week for the last installment, number five, of the Out of Overwhelm series, and also join me next week in my free live masterclass. There is literally no reason why you couldn't, you won't come. You need to come on July 15th. All right? I love you, have a good week. Unsubscribe from overwhelm