Communicating When You're Running on Empty

And I've definitely had situations at work and at home and with friends and in any other environment I can think of where because of my reduced capacity or the fact there's a lot going on, my communication has been suboptimal in those situations.

I've also been on the receiving end of suboptimal communication because of tiredness, depletion, other things going on or things being taken a different way.

This is about us trying to not snap, not react, not just sitting and crying in a situation and wondering what's wrong with us.

It's about trying to do a better job about being clear, about being kind, about being boundaried around this goes on.

And these are the sort of things I'm talking about.

It's when...

There are times when my teenager asks me something, he gets a bit of a sharp response from me because my brain is really full and I'm a bit like, oh, not another thing when actually it was just one thing I was being asked in that moment and I'm reacting out of the full bucket of stuff.

Or at work, you spend way too long composing an email that really shouldn't have taken that long because you're overthinking the way you want to write it.

Or you do the opposite and you shoot something off that you should have thought about a little bit more.

And that's come from a reaction or a depletion that's just kind of meaning that you're either fogging up or you are bouncing things out too quickly and irrationally.

There's also the fact that some of you might feel that your communication isn't clear, not so much because of emotion, but brain fog that can sometimes come in the middle years of life.

Actually, it can come pregnancy fog.

There's other times where we can feel foggy.

When we're grieving, we can get foggy.

When we're under a lot of pressure, we can get foggy.

And when we do, we then find ourselves going blank or rambling.

I've seen those two things happen before where someone just looks like they've lost the ability to advocate for themselves or to speak clearly or their mind has just gone blank or they start to ramble and they use a hundred words when they could have used one so these are some of the problems that that we can have you know in what in what it can look like and i think you know it How it shows up at work is in those different ways.

It could be over-rewriting emails or sending one off too quick.

It can be being too blunt, too vague.

It can be that you start to avoid really hard conversations or you go into them full pelt.

It can be the rambling or the blanking.

So those are what tends to happen at work.

At home, it's a bit more potentially ramped up in a different kind of way.

Again, depending on who you are as a person, it could be that you go really silent and you're so depleted or you're so overwhelmed that you withdraw and you pull into yourself and you don't say what you need or what the problem is.

Or you're snappy.