In this solo episode of the Crafted to Thrive podcast, host Nikita Williams addresses the pervasive feeling of overwhelm that entrepreneurs with chronic illness often experience. She explains that overwhelm is not merely a result of a heavy workload but stems from the brain’s nervous‑system response—triggering fear‑flight‑freeze‑fawn states—especially for those whose bodies have been conditioned by chronic‑illness‑related trauma. Williams emphasizes the importance of self‑compassion and granting oneself permission to acknowledge that feeling overwhelmed makes sense. She draws parallels between the survival mode of entrepreneurship and chronic‑illness coping, showing how both can push the nervous system into a protective state that clouds logical decision‑making. To counteract this, she offers concrete, low‑effort tools that can be practiced before or during moments of overwhelm: intentional box breathing, aromatherapy with calming essential oils, brain‑dump journaling, EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique) tapping, and reaching out for support. She also highlights gratitude journaling—reflecting on what one is thankful for and tracing the steps that led to those achievements—as a way to re‑ground perspective and neutralize anxiety. Williams explains why overwhelm stalls business progress, acting as a self‑sabotaging freeze that prevents clear action. She concludes by inviting listeners to schedule a coaching call for personalized support in turning overwhelm into clarity and scaling their business without compromising health.
Chapters
All right, y'all, I am excited to give you the first in a while Create Your Clarity Monday chat. And this is about overwhelm. Many of us during this time of year, especially in September, going into the kind of like the last half, a little over last half of the year, start to feel really overwhelmed when we look at where we are in our business, where we are in our life, right? And I want to talk about what does overwhelm do, where does it come from, and how can we be clear when we have overwhelm? Is that even possible?
Welcome to Crafted to Thrive, the globally ranked podcast for entrepreneurs living with chronic illness. I'm your host, Nikita Williams, and after being diagnosed with multiple chronic illnesses myself, I figured out the surprisingly simple missing links to growing a profitable business without compromising my health. Since then, I've helped dozens of women just like you learn how to do the same. If you're ready to own your story and create a thriving business that aligns with your health and well-being, you're in the right place. Together, we're shifting the narrative of what's possible for entrepreneurs with chronic illness. This is Crafted to Thrive.
So first, I need to acknowledge that overwhelm isn't necessarily because you have a whole lot of things to do, like you have so many things to do, you're busy. That is one aspect of overwhelm, but you could literally feel overwhelmed with nothing to do. And so from the science and the research, we find that overwhelm is often caused by a view of our perspective of the situation or of the circumstances. And why does and how does overwhelm affect our bodies, our minds, and everything? So when we're in overwhelm, what happens to a lot of our bodies and our mind and our nervous system really is that it puts us into the fear-flight freeze and fawn world of our nervous system. And this puts us into survival mode. So our ability to be logical and to reason is not able to— it's not able to function as if we were in the flow of our nervous systems, the fear-flight and the rest and digest. So what happens when we're feeling overwhelmed, our brain is hyperfocused on the problems, the circumstances, the situation, and the easiest and fastest way to get out. It may not be logical, it may not make sense, but that's what our nervous system is designed to do in order to save us, to protect us, right? And so when there is no lion and there is no dire need for making decisions, and we are in this constant state of overwhelm, which honestly, you guys, I wanna say this, especially for my chronic illness warriors, this is a, a state of mind that we find ourselves in often because of our trauma surrounding our life living with chronic illness. So our nervous system for a very long time, depending on how long your symptoms or how long your chronic illness has been happening and how you've been being treated by it, can have an effect on your nervous system constantly kind of being in that state of fear and flight protector mode, fear-driven, make life or death decisions. And that load and that nervous system energy in itself can be overwhelming, right? But this is something that I like to tell my clients all the time is if we can find some space for compassion, that it makes sense that we might not be in the hardest time of our life fighting for our life living with chronic illness now, We had been for a very long time. So that is an easy pathway for our brain to go when something new happens, when we experience a change, when life is happening, when we feel like we can't make decisions quick enough. It's a very natural brain neural pathway that has been created from our trauma in our life living with chronic illness that makes it easy for our brain to snip into that mindset, that perspective of seeing things. And so one of the ways you can become more clear and kind of calm and ground yourself is to realize that it makes sense, right? So this is something that I like to say to my clients is like, okay, you might feel all of these things and all of these things are happening, but why does it make sense? If you can find the evidence of why it makes sense, you can step into self-compassion. And so this goes down to my really interesting way of thinking about how entrepreneurship and chronic illness have like these crossover experiences, right? When you're in a business and you're an entrepreneur, oftentimes we are in creative mode, but sometimes we shift very easily into survival mode, right? We have to pay the bills, we have to figure out how to make the money, we have to figure out how to reach more people and do more things. And I'm behind because of my chronic illness. And all of these feelings can give us this moment of circumstance where we perceive everything bearing on us and putting our nervous system into this fear and flight place, right? And it makes it really hard for us to see clearly. There's two things that overwhelm is identifying when we feel overwhelmed. One, that is there a, a permission we need to give ourself, right? Is there permission? So in my mind, permission means to that first point I mentioned, is it permission to realize that this was to be expected, feeling overwhelmed, and it makes sense, right? Where can you give yourself leeway to be like, yeah, this totally makes sense why I feel this way, and breathe, right? I'm gonna give you some tools to help you to tap into overcoming overwhelm when you might be in overwhelm, right? So where can you give yourself permission to let something go, to give yourself permission to say, oh, this makes sense, to say no, to ask for help, to lean into support, to do something differently than you may have normally have done it, walk away. So many things you can give yourself permission to do when you feel overwhelmed, right? The other piece of overwhelm is sometimes the things that we've really prayed for, that we've wanted, that we've been looking for. Do we need to actually think about where am I grateful for where I am today? Why am, why am I grateful? How can I be grateful? Right? And so what I think about this is sometimes, especially especially as business owners, we feel extremely overwhelmed where we're doing something new or we're doing something we have been dreaming of doing, and then we're in the middle of like doing it. So I see this to come across with some of my clients who are starting a new marketing strategy or have finally decided to invest in a coach, or they're doing a certification, or they have all of these new clients, right? And so they start to feel this anxiety, this overwhelm, this like, oh my gosh, fear, flight, fawn, like fear, flight, freeze, fawn. I find this happens with my clients, like they feel like they have to stop, they have to like take a break completely, they run away, like there's a lot of different kind of things that happens. And this makes sense, okay, because this is new territory for you. But what also makes sense is that these are the things you prayed for. These are the things you've journaled for. These are the things you were looking forward to, and now you're in the season of receiving that or experiencing that. And where can you be grateful? So one of my favorite exercises to do in general, this is something you do before you actually feel overwhelmed. And a lot of these tools I'm going to share with you are things that are a lot easier to do when you're not in overwhelm. And I'll explain to you why when you're in overwhelm, it's kind of difficult, but let's focus on what you can do right now. When you are making a daily practice of being grateful, not only write things that you're grateful for today, like the immediate things that are happening today, but also reflect and write and connect with why is the thing that you're grateful today such a big deal? And oftentimes I find the reason why this is such a big deal is because the other things that you had to do in order to get to here. Now, how does this help neutralize a bit of overwhelm? Because when you are making yourself remember all the steps that you had to take to get to this bountiful receiving, you realize that it did take time, that you put so much effort, or you put effort into, to create into this moment that where you are. So you spent a lot of time getting ready to learn about this tool, work with these clients, launch the podcast, launch the blog, the YouTube, whatever. And now here it is and you're receiving and you're experiencing. If you think about it from the context of all the little steps that led to today or that moment in time that you're grateful for having the clients, you're grateful for having launched the business or the new podcast or the new blog or the new YouTube channel or whatever, or having gone on live on Instagram or something like that, what led to that? And that helps ground you so much when you think about it and you can like refer back to it. And if you make a practice of doing these gratitude journals at least once a week, and I know I'm the person who's like, you know, everyone talks about doing it every day, but to me, if you can find once a week, every week to start building that habit, it may become every single day, but at least once a week, take time to reflect on What are you grateful for this week or in this day? And then how did you get here? It helps ground your perspective, right? It helps your brain to see, oh, we wanted this and I'm so thankful for it, right? So when you feel overwhelmed, oftentimes we need two things. We need to give ourselves permission to do something differently, view something differently, ask for help, something, right? And the other side of overwhelm could be the fact that we need time to reflect on what we're thankful for that we've been asking for. Now, all of this is super easy to do when you're not heightenedly overwhelmed, where you're not like sitting at your desk right now and feeling completely overwhelmed. It's a lot easier to do these things that I'm sharing with you to do. So what to do when the moment hits you where you're feeling overwhelmed? If you recall this, take a moment and breathe, right? Do some intentional box breathing. If you don't know what that is, that's a breath exercise of breathing in for a count of 4 and then holding and then exhaling at a count of 4. Um, my box breathing is inhaling for a box of— inhaling for a count of 4, holding for a count of 4, and then just blowing super slow. I don't count the exhale, right? Um, aromatherapy, using essential oils like bergamot. Just turn on your diffuser if you start feeling a bit overwhelmed. Oils like neroli, ylang-ylang, bergamot, lavender are beautiful oils to help ground you, right? To be more focused and, and realize where you are. Literally send signals to your nervous system that we're not in fear and flight right now. We're okay, right? The other thing to do is write all of the thoughts down. Brain dump. Dump it all on a journal, whatever thoughts that are coming, because sometimes they're just stuck in your brain, and until you have them out loud It's challenging. If you're feeling overwhelmed and if you have a coach or a friend, reach out and just tell them, I'm feeling overwhelmed, and spill the beans, right? Or another tool could be to start tapping. By tapping, I mean EFT tapping. So these are like tapping with your fingers. This helps calibrate and release your negative energy and your thoughts and your nervous system. And you don't have to go through all the points with the setup statement and all that jazz that I teach my clients to do. You can literally just go through the points and say, I'm feeling So overwhelmed, feeling so overwhelmed, right? Just to kind of acknowledge and give yourself permission. Again, doing all of these things are acts of giving yourself permission to be okay with feeling the feeling, right? And then you can finally be a bit more clear to make a decision how you want to act or respond to the current circumstances or perspective of that current circumstance. Now, why is— why am I talking about overwhelm? Overwhelm when it comes to your business anyway, why am I talking about overwhelm when it comes to your business? Well, overwhelm stops a lot of people. It's the sabotaging thing that we kind of do to ourselves when we get to a place and we get stuck. This is one of the reasons why we get stuck. This is one of the reasons why we don't take steps forward, because we literally are in our nervous system in freeze moment. We don't— we are just thinking, how do I get out of this situation? And we can't see a clear, bigger picture when we're in overwhelm. So this is one way to create clarity so that you can take action to help you take the next step in your business. So I hope this was helpful. If you're like, Nikita Williams, all of this sounds amazing. I still need help with this. And all of my clients constantly need help with this. I need help with this. This is why I have coaches. It is one of those things that's so much easier to have someone, a third party, to see, hey, I feel like you're feeling overwhelmed. Let's work through that, right? Let's honor that. Let's also work through that. And that's what I love doing for my clients. And this is part of the reason why they're able to have flare-ups, have life happening, and still get to where they want to go without completely stalling, right? Still seeing success. If that's something that you want support in, go to the show notes and click the Book a Call with me and let's focus on how we can help you feel more empowered and stop feeling overwhelmed so you can create your next $100,000 with ease and without all of the stress bearing you and keeping you stuck. All right, y'all, until the next time for the Create Your Clarity series.
