The Habit of Overdoing

Embracing yourself, overcoming anxiety and insecurity to find balance and joy. Transitioning from trying too hard, doing too much, and needing too much.

Show Notes

It's easy to fall into patterns of living life according to external measures of success, striving for completion and ignoring our own feelings and needs. Making choices that put us in circumstances we didn't want to be in, pursuing the "should" instead of what we want. This chronic overachieving and overdoing is often rooted in a discomfort with ourselves.

One thing we can realize is that a lot of this, if not most of this, is created via some sort of internal conflict. To solve this problem, we have to get to know ourselves better and work through our beliefs. We can find that when he embrace who we are, bringing our full selves into situations, we can be able to let go of comparison and accept ourselves. We can learn that energy and consciousness are at the base level of everything, and that life works best when we seek truth and balance. We can discover that old habits can be a tool in our bag, even if we have set them down. We can realize that action that doesn't come from a place of peace, joy, and curiosity is not something we should pursue.

This journey of self-discovery can be a reminder that recognizing and addressing our own internal discomfort is key to finding true happiness and fulfillment in life. By understanding and accepting ourselves, we can create meaningful and lasting change.

Full episode transcript available at: https://theunionpath.com/episodes

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The Union Path Podcast - The Habit of Overdoing
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Like a lot of people, I've had some funny habits around doing.

For a lot of my life, things were measured in terms of accomplishment.

And not so much accomplishment in terms of or awards or accolades or any of those sorts of things, but just raw completion.

How many things can I get done, and of those things I get done, how many big things can I get done?

For the longest time, it seemed like I was trying to outrun myself, I was trying to clearly prove something.

I was trying to clearly get something done above and beyond the achievements and the progress themselves.

But really, in hindsight, it's pretty clear what I was trying to do was drown out my own life.

For the longest time, I used to have this constant, but sort of latent anxiety. It was diffused and unfocused. It didn't really seem to respond to circumstance all that much.

Sure when things were going well I felt a little better, and things were going poorly I felt a little worse, but it never really lifted.

It was like, almost like some sort of like low level Infection that I could just never shake. So it never really made logical sense.

Which is just kind of a funny thing, whenever you share with someone that you don't feel good, one of the first questions you get is, why?

And then they look at you kind of funny when you say, I don't know why. This is just how I feel. Which usually gets met with some sort of a shrug. Or some kind of banal acknowledgement that I hear what you say, but I don't really have anything for you.

And of course they don't, how can anyone help us when we don't even ourselves know what's really going on?

But these habits of doing, these habits of usually overdoing, I think are actually pretty interesting.

I think they're pretty interesting like most chronic habits of behavior we observe in ourselves. If we watch ourselves long enough, we'll realize we're telling a story.

We'll realize, you know I tend to do the same things over and over again. And not only that, I tend to do most things the same way.

And that's really interesting. That's a really interesting door into what can be pretty powerful self-awareness.

If we just stop and observe ourselves, and not through criticism, but start to ask, why? Why do I do this?

There must be a reason, it's clearly a pattern. This isn't just random, I must have picked this up somewhere. Or more specifically, this must be effective somehow.

This habit is getting something done, but I'm not really sure what. Or at the very least, I'm not really sure I want to have done what's being done.

But this doing, this constant jumping from thing to thing to thing, this constant seeking of completion of accomplishment, is really interesting, looked at through the lens of distraction.

Distraction from what? In my case, discomfort. Ah, now we're getting somewhere. Discomfort with what? Discomfort with whom? Very interesting.

Because it's at its core, it was discomfort with myself. But focusing on all these external activities, all this external busy-ness, it made it so easy to ignore the low-level storm systems that were constantly raging within me.

It made it so easy to ignore what was actually my own guidance, my own feedback loop, of something deep inside of my being saying, there's an imbalance here.

There's something that needs attention. And the funny thing is this is really where, really one of those circumstances where we can see how the root of ignorance is ignore.

I got really good at ignoring myself. Really good at ignoring my feelings. Really good at ignoring all sorts of things. Instead, getting laser-focused on my agenda, on my expectations. On my ideas about good and bad, right and wrong, and ideas about the life I was building.

But that's the funny thing, when we never question our expectations, when we never question or we never hold up our experience against our ideas,

of what this experience is all about, we can live in ignorance for a really long time. Human beings have this almost magical ability to convince themselves of almost anything. It really is fascinating.

But when we stop and look at our lives, when we start to actually question our own behaviors, our own motivations, our own purposes,

about the things that we do, then we can really shine a light on what's actually happening, what's actually real.

And this reality can be uncomfortable. Especially when we realize, maybe we're doing things, ah, not for the prettiest reasons.

Maybe even if we have the best intentions in the world, what we're doing doesn't really work and doesn't really seem like it's ever going to work.

That's a really hard thing to sit with, but it's the truth, and ultimately we can't escape it. Because as much as we can ignore our feelings, we can ignore reality, we can never escape it, we can never escape the truth.

Because the truth is where we actually live. We can bend it and shape it through our interpretations, through our perceptions, through our own motivated reasoning,

but the truth is always the truth, and the sooner we get in touch with the real truth of our life, the sooner we can actually fully live.

So when I think back to all this doing, all this achieving, all of this busy-ness, the first thing I notice is the tenor of all of this busy-ness, this kind of frantic energy, sure feels a lot like anxiety.

I think that's interesting. I think that's interesting to start to draw those lines from the way a behavior feels, to perhaps what might be actually driving that behavior.

Of looking at behavior as an extension of a feeling. Of looking at behavior through the energy it rides on, and being able to trace that back within ourselves,

being able to find the path that behavior has been on. To be able to find that path that behavior is taken, and work our way back to the source, as much as we can.

Cause that's really the thing about life, right? It's energy flowing through to various and myriad ends. And if we don't actually want the ends we're seeing, that's really useful to trace that energy back.

To really bear witness, really pay attention, to what we're doing, how it feels, and what we're getting, and if that isn't truly serving us, starting to try to figure out, why?

Starting to figure out, well, what would actually serve me? Start to figure out, well, what's actually important to me?

Start to figure out, what actually has meaning, what actually has a sense of purpose? What actually has a sense of alignment,

with who I actually am, and what actually matters to me? Because the thing about too much activity, too much doing, is it really flies in the face of being.

It really allows us to externalize our own sense perception of life onto all sorts of external circumstances.

It allows us to live vicariously through our expectations of the life we're going to get to, instead of living in the life we actually have.

How do we get there? How do we get to a place of being, obviously, if we are filling our lives with frantic activity, there has to be a reason, we don't just do it randomly. Any chronic pattern there has to be a reason. In my case, again, the core reason was discomfort.

And once I started to pull at those threads, once I started to really look at what is this anxiety all about, what is this feeling of walking around like I have a beehive in my chest,

or like, I'm about 5% of the way to vomiting, most of the time. What's going on? This doesn't feel normal, this doesn't feel like me, this feels like something added to me, this feels like a low-level poisoning.

This doesn't feel like my system, this feels like my system run amok. So when I really started to pay attention to these feelings, instead of trying to outrun them through my own behavior,

some really interesting things started to emerge. With the main thing being, I had made a whole bunch of choices that involved putting myself into circumstances that I didn't actually want to be in.

In fact, I found many of them repellent, some of them even fairly grotesque, but I did it anyway. I did anyway, because it's what I should do. I sat in that cubicle in that terrible office building with that horrible boss,

in a job that was so mind-numbingly boring, I wanted to stab myself in the ear with a pencil, just to have something interesting to talk about that night.

I didn't do any of those things, I just sat there and I took it, every day. And then when I realized what I was doing, what I had done, I realized, oh, this is a pattern.

I've gotten really good at this, taking, taking the hit, just taking it. At any situation, I was the good boy. I didn't make a fuss, I didn't talk back. I didn't really advocate for myself in any particular way, which made me really easy to get along with.

I did everything I could to change the shape of myself to fit my environment, instead of actually asking myself, is any part of me actually belong here?

Does any part of I actually want to be doing any of this? Because like anything else, our lives really do need to make sense to us.

Sure everything may not be this incredible pleasure circus at every moment, but it needs to at least make sense. It needs to actually pencil out and say, yup, this looks good.

I may not be perfect, probably isn't, but when I actually do the math on the good and bad, this makes sense. I've actually had that experience far less of my life, while far more of my life I've been somewhere between nearly crushing discomfort,

or looking around, feeling like I'm crazy. Looking around listening to the conversations that people around me have, looking around, looking at the things people around me did, and just feeling alien.

Like I don't want to do any of that, and how do these conversations seem very interesting to me. But there I was, in these environments, vigorously pursuing the should, and the should ran deep. I should be here, because why? Because, income, sure. I should be here because, prestige.

Oh, I can tell people what I do and they can, oh, be impressed, or at the very least, not disappointed. I was doing the right thing, I was playing my part.

I had on the costume, and I was playing the role, of the should. But, over time, there was a corrosive effect that started to emerge.

First started with a feeling, and it grew from there. But the gist of it is, there was an internal conflict.

There was an internal conflict that could not be reconciled, because I was actually splitting myself in two.

I was splitting myself between the person I really was, and this other person I was pretending to be all day, everyday.

And to cope with this discomfort, I just got better and better at burying myself. I would promote my spokesperson, and demote the real me.

And this works for a while. Especially when we're young, we have seemingly endless energy and willpower. But there's that feeling behind it all, slowly growing, like a magma chamber.

Where the pressure keeps building and building, and the longer we ignore it, the more we end up having to deal with. Because these sorts of issues, when deferred, don't go away.

All of that energy goes somewhere, does something. And if it's never expressed through our words and actions, it ends up being internally expressed within us, usually in ways we really don't want.

So that was the main thing. This habit of discomfort, this habit of internal conflict, this habit of self splitting. I can trace it back forever.

Because of the core of it, was not actually a discomfort with my environment or circumstance. At the core of it, was a discomfort with myself.

Was a deep and abiding judgment that who I really was, the me only I know, was in many ways unacceptable, and needed to be hidden at all costs.

I'm not sure where I picked this up, I'm not sure where I picked up the idea that being myself was actually dangerous. I can think of a thousand possible ways, but I'm not really sure any of that is really all that helpful,

I'm not really sure, running these feelings back to their implantation does much more than just dredging them back up again.

Maybe that's just me, but I'd rather move through it, than dig everything up again. Because I'm not fully convinced that I actually have to know what put it there.

It seems to me that it's enough to know that it's there, to work through it, to work with it. Because, if I'm trying to disprove the original establishment of these ideas, then that just kind of feels like arguing with my own life trying to win, but maybe that's just me.

So realizing that I'm walking around with this deep discomfort about who and what I really am on the inside, it's a hard thing to face. It's a hard thing to know, that there's parts of you, if not, most of you, that must be hidden from view.

That is not acceptable for public exhibition, has to remain a secret. That's a really toxic and corrosive idea, that we ourselves are somehow unacceptable.

But we can process this a bunch of different ways. We can think and think and think and think, and we can try to disprove to ourselves all of these ideas.

We can repeat mantras. We can read self-help books. We can do all sorts of things and all of those things are perfectly fine and good.

But at the end of the day, the funny thing is, these are our beliefs, and we can choose to believe whatever we want. Our beliefs are malleable.

We don't walk around with this fixed set of beliefs that we're stuck with to the end of our lives. These beliefs exist in our minds, and we can change our minds.

Doesn't necessarily mean it's easy, but it absolutely doesn't mean it's impossible. And the first step to changing anything is obviously awareness.

Obviously we can't solve problems we're not aware of. And so it's difficult as these awarenesses are, as hard as it is to really look them in the face, and take the the blowback of, or the recoil of the uncomfortable recognition.

But it's really the first step in doing something about it. And it's by far the most important step in doing something about it.

So when I found that my chronic overachieving, overdoing, was really rooted in a discomfort with myself, I don't know any other way to say it, it took a really long time to do something about it.

And in hindsight, it seems like such a linear journey. Of, oh, well I realized these things, I tried a lot of things to solve this problem, and eventually something worked.

Step one, step two, step three, and so on. I don't think it actually worked like that. It was really more of a spiral sort of process.

Of once identified this, I think it actually took me quite a while to actually want to do something about it because it was so painful.

I don't know, I find things with a profound emotional charge like that, I don't immediately want to just storm it action.

I kind of want to just sit with that for a minute. I feel like I've had the Knocked out of me. I'm not anxious to try to go run a sprinting race.

But the process that did unfold, over quite a long time, did mostly involve getting to know myself. It sounds funny to say, that actually has to be a project that has to be something one endeavors to go and do,

but since I had spent so much time ignoring, there was a lot of ignorance that I had to make up for. There are a lot of things I had to learn about myself. Some things I had forgotten, some things I'd never known, and some things I just had decided either not think about, or were wrong.

And making all of these discoveries and working through them one at a time, it did end up being a long process, but it was a process that really built on itself.

And it really started, or it really started to gain steam anyway, when I started to really ask myself, on the deepest level I can access, who am I really?

And had to work down through all the superficial layers, through the layers of physical form, to the layers of personality,

through the layers of the human animal, through the layers of values and motivations. But as I worked my way down, I really discovered a lot of alignment.

It was pretty amazing that, a lot of the things, I did a lot of things I thought, really were aligned with much deeper parts of myself.

And so it became this interesting treasure hunt to go deeper and deeper, because I discovered more and more of the whys.

Why I actually did things, why I didn't do other things. Why I was here, and not there. Why this was done and that was undone.

It seemed to all be flowing from a common source, and so I kept going, deeper and deeper, looking for the headwaters.

Looking for who and what I really was, on the inside. Getting all the way down, ultimately, to two things. Energy and consciousness.

It's my belief, it's my understanding, this is at the base level of everything, it's not just me. In fact, through one pretty persuasive way of looking at it, there is no just me.

Everything is energy and consciousness and these ideas of separateness are merely tricks of the sense organs. Mainly logical mental models that we've built to make our senses and our experiences in life makes sense.

Without getting into an overly heady diatribe about non-duality, the important thing is as I went deeper and deeper as I really looked and who and what I really am,

a lot of these judgements, a lot of these ideas of unacceptableness and faults and flaws and deficits and incorrectness really started to fall away.

Because at the very least, those were all just ideas. Those are all just thoughts I had, and I'd had them long enough that they got installed as beliefs.

And when I really started to explore to the core of myself, then things really started to change, I really started to be able to feel myself a lot more.

Because ultimately to get underneath the mind, it seems to me that feeling is really all we have. And then after feeling around for a while, I made the fairly simple realization of, boy, this is the main thing I've ignored.

I've been so wrapped up, so caught up in thinking, and overthinking for so long, and have drowned out my feeling.

And in getting to know myself, this feeling certainly seems to know a lot about who I really am. It seems to be a pretty effective guide in finding my way to myself.

At the very least, it seems to be about the most reliable way I've ever found by identifying truth. Truth has a feeling, it has a resonance, almost like it has a frequency to it that we just recognize.

We hear the truth we know it. And I think, or at least I'd like to think, that we know it because we feel it.

And getting down into these more subterranean levels of myself, feeling these judgments and criticisms, and all the ways I've ostracized myself throughout my entire life.

Feeling these things begin to melt away, begin to lose their power, began to lose their influence, began to lose their authority, then I really found something very interesting happened.

I found that anxiety, that nervous frantic energy start to be displaced with something different, something very different, with much more of a sense of calm, sense of peace.

A sense of things I had heard people talk about for a long time and I had no idea what they were talking about. I was uncomfortable all the time, everywhere I went, everything I did, I was uncomfortable.

Until I wasn't. I was uncomfortable until I wasn't uncomfortable with myself. I was uncomfortable until I really, really, knew myself.

I was uncomfortable until I let go, and re-evaluated all of these ideas about all the ways that I fell short, and instead decided to actually embrace who I was, who I am.

Instead of trying to be all the things, and all the ways that other people wanted me to, I started to actually be myself and trust that that was enough, and that that was good.

I started to actually bring my full self into situations. And instead of being entirely motivated out of discomfort, instead of trying to disapprove these ideas about myself, I started with the basic premise that I'm okay.

I'm good. I'm not better than anyone else, I'm not worse than anyone else. I'm not an ant among giants and I'm not a giant among ants. I can let the comparison go.

I am what I am not in relation to others, I am what I am because I am what I am. I am that I am, and that's good enough.

So when I think about this focus on action, and doing, and busy-ness, the main thing I think about now is how utterly imbalanced I was.

How utterly misinformed I was by, not only how life actually works, but who I am. And that's the thing with everything, or at least the realization that I've had, is that my life tends to work the best when what I seek revolves around truth and balance.

I find that that not only keeps me grounded, but it seems to make the journey a whole lot more pleasant. When those are the things that I'm actually seeking.

And so after quite a long time of displacing this anxiety with this peace, I still find myself leaning on old habits.

Because that's the thing, right? If something has worked for us, even if we've set it down, even if we've abandoned, it has a funny way of coming back around again.

It's still a tool in the bag, it may not have been used for awhile, but still often comes up when we're looking to get something done.

But the thing is, any sort of action that I pursue that doesn't ultimately come from these feelings of calm and peace, and comfort, and joy, and curiosity, and interest.

Out of passion, out of delight, if it doesn't originate from that sort of place, it's probably not going to be something I'm going to want to be doing anyway.

And more importantly, it's probably something I'm doing to counteract something else. Something I'm doing to try undo some other thing.

Because that's one of the big things that our frantic mind uses to get a lot of its authority. It's convinced us that if we don't do things out of this heightened,

ultra-charged state, we'll never do anything. We'll never get anything done, we'll never get what we want. We'll never be who we want.

We will wither into some sort of unimportant, unfulfilled, puddle of a person. But that's not true, that's a trick.

That's a trick to get us to do things we don't actually want to do. And to stay with them for entirely longer than we actually want to.

Because if we can step through the anxiety, if we can look around the insecurities, if we can look around the misperception of ourselves,

and actually get to know who we really are, and align with that presence, then what we do we'll actually do with our full, real selves.

Then what we do will actually be aligned with who we really are, and we won't be doing things to get things done. We'll be doing things to do the things we're doing.

We'll be doing things because we're living a life of intention, we're living our life on purpose, we're living a life of purpose.

And that will ultimately lead to where we want to go. That will ultimately allow us to do the things we actually want to do, and progress through our own lives in the way we actually want.