Why Your Best Tools Stop Working When You're Overwhelmed

Do you ever feel like your planner is staring at you from across the room? You're getting stuff done, but you're more of a busybody than actually moving the needle on the things that matter.

If you're overwhelmed and find yourself avoiding your planning tools even when you know you need them, this video is for you.

Watch the video below, or read on for the full transcript.

You're not lazy. You're not broken. Your brain is overwhelmed. Today I'm going to explain why that happens, and what you can actually do about it.

Hi, I'm Cas Winter. I'm a productivity and self-care coach for those who are neurodivergent and chronically ill, and I've been navigating both my whole life.

Even though I'm an expert in this field, overwhelm still blinds me to how effective my own tools are. When I find myself avoiding my tools, it's a sign that I need them more than ever.

If you're tired of advice that wasn't built for your brain or your body, you're in the right place.

Here's what's actually going on when you're in that busybody state.

Overwhelm is almost always a sign that you're past your capacity. I talk a lot on this channel about the three gas tanks (physical, cognitive, and emotional), and overwhelm is basically your brain's way of telling you that you're running low on one or more of those tanks, or worse, you're going into debt.

And here's the part that makes it so frustrating: when you're in cognitive debt, you lose access to the very skills you need to think your way out of it. So it's not that you're lazy or broken. You're not making up your struggles. Finding a way forward when you're in this state is genuinely harder, if not impossible, on your own.

Overwhelm is often also a sign that your existing plans no longer reflect your current reality. You're not necessarily bad at planning, it just means that something has shifted and it’s time to adjust your plans.

And for those of us who struggle with spending a lot of time in fight, flight, fawn, or freeze, our nervous system makes it even harder to access our cognitive functions when we need them most.

So if you've been telling yourself a story about why you're not doing what you want to be doing, I want you to consider that the story might be simpler and more compassionate than you think. Your brain isn't being difficult. It's overwhelmed or in debt, and that requires a different kind of solution than sheer willpower.

So what is the solution? The first tool I want to teach you today is externalizing your thinking.

Externalizing your thinking means using pen and paper or a note-taking app to log your thoughts outside of your head. And here's why that matters when you're in cognitive debt.

Our brains are really good at using information, not storing it. Think of your working memory like the RAM on a computer. It's not how much you know, it's how many thoughts you can juggle and work with at one time. And when you're experiencing decision fatigue, brain fog, or executive dysfunction, your working memory takes a hit.

So when you try to plan from inside your overwhelmed brain, you're asking your RAM to do more than it currently can. But when you externalize your thinking, you transfer that cognitive load from yourself to the tool you're using. The tool holds the thoughts. You just work with them.

But here's the catch. While externalizing your thinking may be all you need when your overwhelm is just beginning, it only works as a standalone tool when you still have access to your metacognition, which is the part of executive function that allows you to ask yourself questions and coach yourself through something in logical sequential steps.

Most tools assume that you will bring a certain level of metacognition to the table. That’s why tools that work for you most of the time can suddenly “stop working” and make you feel like there’s something wrong with you.

But there’s nothing wrong with you. You’re in cognitive debt and you need more support than usual.

There's actually a well-known term for what happens when your cognitive tank gets this depleted, and you may have experienced it without knowing that's what it was called.

Decision fatigue is a popular name for this type of cognitive debt. When we drain our cognitive gas tank all the way to empty, we don't have any gas left to make more decisions. If you struggle to figure out what to eat for dinner after a long day at work, that's just one example of decision fatigue in action.

In order to address cognitive debt and decision fatigue, we need to develop skills such as energy management to try and prevent them in the first place, but we also need to have tools in place for when decision fatigue inevitably hits.

Often the tools that will help us are the tools we already use, but with added granularity. Here's an example of what I mean.

In sixth grade I was given the homework assignment to write detailed instructions for how to make a peanut butter sandwich. If you were ever given this assignment, you may have a distinct memory of your teacher following the instructions "put the peanut butter on the bread" by placing the peanut butter jar on top of the bag of sliced bread.

Bon appétit!

Besides being comedy gold (yes I love bad jokes, so sue me), it perfectly illustrates what can happen when instructions aren't granular enough for your target audience. My teacher explained that an alien would have a hard time following any of the instructions my classmates and I had written.

But the same is true for someone who is overwhelmed and experiencing decision fatigue. They're unable to fill in the gaps in those instructions. So if you've ever said to yourself "I should be able to do this because I've done it before," you're mistakenly accusing yourself of being less intelligent when what's actually going on is you're out of gas.

It's a capacity problem, not a character problem.

Now that you understand both externalizing your thinking and why granularity matters, I want to introduce you to two tools. These are just two examples of tools that are really effective when you're in a state of overwhelm and decision fatigue.

The first one is called Anytime Pages. It's a really powerful journaling technique to help you figure out whatever is going on with you in the moment, whether you're struggling with a strong emotion, trying to figure out how to move forward on a project, or figure out what to eat for dinner. Anytime Pages is a single instruction tool. So if either your overwhelm is just starting and you have more cognitive ability, or your overwhelm is so strong that you cannot even handle a set of granular instructions, Anytime Pages is a good place to start. If you want to learn how to do Anytime Pages, you can check out my tutorial here.

The next tool is an example of a really granular set of instructions that even an alien could follow. Let me show you what I mean.

This is the Anytime Reset which is just that, a tool to help you reset regardless of your circumstances or the time of day.

Let’s take a look at Part One, which is called Collect. The whole point of this section is to get everything out of your head and onto paper (aka externalizing your thinking), but look at how it does that.

It doesn't just say "write down everything on your plate." It asks you: what tasks and projects are at the top of your mind? And then, do you already have a planning system where tasks might be saved? And then it lists the places you might find them. Your planner. Your calendar. Your email. Direct messages. Random scraps of paper. Snail mail.

It's already thought of things your overwhelmed brain wouldn't be able to think of. You don't have to generate the questions. You don't have to remember where you stored things. You just have to answer the provided questions.

That's what granular looks like in practice. And that's what makes this tool different from just opening a blank page, or staring at your calendar or to-do list and hoping for the best.

The Anytime Reset is a same-day, in-the-moment tool designed specifically for when you're overwhelmed, frozen, or can't figure out where to start. I designed it to have the granularity overwhelmed brains need. Not some algorithm, not AI, me. So when you're in cognitive debt and you can't figure out what to do to move forward, let alone how, you just have to follow my simple yet detailed instructions.

You can grab it for free here.

Let’s summarize. If you’re overwhelmed or experiencing decision fatigue, you’re either running out of cognitive gas or you’re in full on cognitive debt. Because of this, the symptoms you experience when this happens are a result of a capacity problem, not a character problem.

The solution is to both externalize your thinking and use a tool that has the amount of granularity you need depending on your level of cognitive debt. Often, the more cognitive debt you’re in, the more granularity you’ll need.

The Anytime Reset is one example of this kind of granular tool. It does the heavy cognitive lifting for you.

So the next time you find yourself being a busybody, walking past your planner without opening it, doing everything except the things that matter most, I want you to remember this: your brain isn't being difficult. It's overwhelmed. And overwhelm is a capacity problem, not a character problem.

You don't have to wait until you feel better to make progress. You just need tools that meet you where you are. Tools that have already done the thinking for you, so all you have to do is show up and follow the steps.

That's what the Anytime Reset is for. You can grab it for free using this link.

You're not broken. You never were. You just needed the right kind of support.

I'll be back in two weeks with another video. See you then. Bye.