When You Feel Like You’re Falling Behind
I used to treat each day like a task, like another day that I needed to complete. What can I get done today? What can I achieve today? What can I do today to get ahead, to be successful?... rather than treating each day like an important 24 hours in my life, to use that time for what makes me happy and the life that I want. In my 6th podcast episode, I read a poem on this topic from my poetry collection changing with the tides, called “to tomorrow.”
I don't want to treat tomorrow like a to-do list anymore. I want to take that control back over my life and doing what makes me happy is the best way that I can spend those 24 hours of my time.
If you’re feeling like you’re running out of time, and falling behind in life, this podcast episode is for you!
If you feel behind now or you have in the past, you're certainly not alone in that. After talking to friends and other people in my industry, I found a lot of us have felt that way when we really should not. As a creative person I tend to have 30,000 ideas swarming around my head at any given time and it can be really overwhelming and make me feel like I'm not accomplishing enough. I think of all these ideas and all the time that it will take and all the time that I don't have and think “I will never get all of this done, I will never achieve everything that I want to achieve.”
I felt like I was drowning and falling behind because I haven't checked off all these imaginary boxes that I'm placing on myself and accomplished all of these things that I want to accomplish. Remember that everyone is moving at a different pace and that’s completely okay. You will achieve everything you want to in your own time.
Why do we tend to feel this way?
Why do we put this pressure on ourselves? Where does this stem from? I think it's a few different things. the first one is society. Every culture and every society around the world treats work and success differently, but I will speak for the one I know which is the American dream.
We have a very strong culture of individualism and putting ourselves and our success before other people and working hard to get ahead and succeed. And I feel like that culture has really had an impact on people feeling like their work, their job, their career is top priority. And I love hard work, I'm all for hard work and achieving the many goals that I have in life, so I'm definitely not speaking ill of that and I think that we do have to work hard to achieve our goals.
But I also do think it can have an effect mentally on what we prioritize in life and that feeling of falling behind and feeling like a failure if we haven't accomplished certain work goals or monetary goals or family goals by a certain age. If you get married later in life you are behind. If you have kids later in life you're behind. If you aren't making a certain amount of money by a certain age, you're behind. If you don't go to college or you go to college later in life, or are taking a year off of school, you're falling behind.
it stems from comparing ourselves to other people when we are all on very different paths and backgrounds and journeys and have had a mix of different privileges too. When we're comparing ourselves to other people, we can feel even further behind when really comparing ourselves to someone who might have had a completely different experience than us or completely different challenges that we're facing, we just don't see them.
And the other thing to remember is how much this feeling can affect our mental health and affect how much we are getting accomplished, because if we are getting very overwhelmed by the concept of time and the time is slipping away from us, that can lead to procrastination. Avoiding it because we don't want to fail. We only want to do it if we know we're going to be successful, or if it's going to take us a short amount of time or whatever it may be.
Small step
Every episode of the podcast has a small step for you to take on your self-love journey.
For this episode’s small step, I want you to recall a time in your life where you felt like you were falling behind, like you weren't going to accomplish something in time but you did. Write down the moment and how it made you feel so that the next time you're feeling behind, you can look back at this and remember what you’ve been able to achieve.
Avoid thinking of time as something negative, as something that is slipping away, as something that we are losing or that we're going to run out of. Try reframing it as something positive, as a gift. If you are not feeling confident about a certain thing, think of time as a way to grow and practice and become more confident. It's a positive thing, not a burden. Time is the ultimate tool we have to get better.
Where to listen
listen to the full podcast episode to hear everything that was discussed, and hear me read a poem from my bestselling book, changing with the tides!
tune into my podcast by visiting the links below, or stream on your favorite podcast sites like apple podcasts, spotify, and more.
I hope you're able to take something away from this episode. Know that you have time to achieve what you want to achieve.