Overwhelm has become one of those words I hear almost every week.
Clients tell me they're overwhelmed.
Friends tell me they're overwhelmed.
Business owners tell me they're overwhelmed.
And there are times when I feel overwhelmed too.
What's interesting is that overwhelm isn't always linked to how much we have to do.
I've met people juggling businesses, families, ageing parents, community commitments and busy diaries who seem remarkably calm.
I've also met people with far fewer demands who feel completely overwhelmed.
That got me thinking.
If overwhelm isn't just about the quantity of things we're doing, what else might be going on?
Some of the answer comes from an idea I first encountered whilst working in customer experience within the financial services industry.
The idea was friction.
A Lesson from Customer Experience
When designing customer journeys, we spend time looking for points of friction.
Anything that made an experience harder than it needed to be.
Perhaps a customer had to fill in unnecessary information.
Perhaps they couldn't find what they were looking for.
Perhaps the next step wasn't clear.
Each additional hurdle made the experience feel more difficult.
The more friction there was, the more effort was required.
The more effort required, the less likely customers were to complete the journey.
At the time, I thought of friction as a customer experience concept.
Now I see it everywhere.
Including in my own life.
Friction Is Everywhere
Sometimes friction looks like spending ten minutes looking for something you were sure was in the usual place.
Sometimes it's opening your laptop and not knowing where to start because there are seventeen competing priorities.
Sometimes it's putting off a simple task because the process feels more complicated than it should.
None of these things are particularly dramatic.
That's what makes them easy to miss.
But each one requires a little bit of energy.
And over time, those small drains add up.
As The Energy Coach, I think about energy in three ways:
- Physical energy
- Cognitive energy
- Emotional energy
Friction can quietly drain all three.
Physical Friction
Physical friction is often the easiest to spot.
It's the cluttered cupboard that makes finding things difficult.
The morning routine with too many moving parts.
The systems that require unnecessary effort.
The task that always takes twice as long as it should.
None of these things are huge problems in isolation.
But together they can make everyday life feel heavier.
Cognitive Friction
This is often where overwhelm begins.
Too many choices.
Too many priorities.
Too many tabs open, both on your screen and in your mind.
I see this a lot with business owners.
They're not short of ideas, they're drowning in them.
Every unfinished decision takes up a little bit of mental bandwidth.
Every unclear priority requires another conversation with yourself about what to do next.
No wonder we feel exhausted.
Emotional Friction
Then there's the friction we carry emotionally.
The conversation we're avoiding.
The boundary we know we need to set.
The expectation we're placing on ourselves.
The worry that keeps resurfacing even though there's nothing we can do about it today.
In my experience, emotional friction is often the most draining because it follows us everywhere.
You can leave your desk.
You can't always leave your thoughts behind.
But Here's the Interesting Part...
The customer experience industry became fascinated with the idea of creating frictionless experiences.
And whilst that makes sense in many situations, I'm not sure a completely frictionless life is the goal.
In fact, some friction is incredibly useful.
If I leave my phone downstairs at night, I've created friction between myself and mindless scrolling.
If my running shoes are by the front door, I've reduced friction around going for a run.
If I have to pause before making an impulse purchase, that friction may save me money and regret.
The issue isn't friction itself.
The issue is whether the friction is helping or hindering.
The PERMEATE Connection
One of the elements of the PERMEATE framework is Engagement.
And engagement often lives in the space between boredom and overwhelm.
Too much friction and everything feels frustrating.
Too little friction and we become disengaged.
The sweet spot is usually somewhere in the middle.
Enough challenge to keep us interested.
Not so much challenge that it drains all our energy.
Whether we're designing customer journeys, building habits or creating a life that feels sustainable, that balance matters.
A Different Way to Think About Overwhelm
When we're feeling overwhelmed, our instinct is often to ask:
What can I stop doing?
Sometimes that's the right question.
But sometimes a better question is:
Where is unnecessary friction making life harder than it needs to be?
Because overwhelm isn't always caused by doing too much.
Sometimes it's caused by expending too much energy on things that could be simpler.
And every piece of unnecessary friction removed creates a little more capacity.
A little more breathing room.
A little more energy for what matters most.
