Jacqueline Snyder explains that overworking—especially among business owners—can be a way to avoid uncomfortable feelings, framing work as a controllable, addictive buffer. She advises instead to sit with the feeling, identify what situation is being avoided, and use low-effort shifts (listening to music, dancing, singing, moving the body) to change one’s nervous state without diving back into work.
Part one of lessons that my business is trying to teach me Overworking to avoid my feelings. Many times people will go into something that they can control. Oftentimes with business owners that could be working or overworking. Overworking tends to be a buffer, something that you're sidetracking, something that you're paying attention to to avoid sitting with the feelings that working is an addiction, just like drugs are an addiction. I've noticed that a feeling comes up and a way to avoid that feeling is just to dive back into work. Work is a controllable. Work has an action or something that we're doing to have a result that doing to the result is an immediate hit. Try this instead. Instead of jumping into working, sit with that feeling. Ask yourself, what is this feeling? Trying to tell me what situation has just come up that I'm trying to avoid or I'm trying to buffer in order to avoid this feeling. Once you understand what that is, make a shift. Think, okay, how can I shift out of this feeling without the doing? It's really shifting the being the version of us that gets to be a tip that one of my coaches and mentors gave me was to find a way to shift. And a couple tools that you can use are listening to music, moving your body and dancing, even singing. Try making a shift with just a song where you dance or you sing and energetically you shift your body and your nervous system.
