Feeling Overwhelmed: Relieve Stress & Simplify Your VO Life

Loneliness. Doubt. Knowledge gaps. Distraction. Overwhelm. Rejection.

Voice actors battle these struggles every day and oftentimes they lead to unfocused action, wasted resources, poor decision-making, and feelings of overwhelm (or VO-verwhelm).

Without the right support and resources, it's no wonder why so many voice actors and audiobook narrators burn out before achieving their dreams.

VO-verwhelm is a real thing, and today we’re going to talk about what it is, and how to recognize the feelings of overwhelm, reduce stress, and simplify your VO life.

What is overwhelm? It’s the feeling of being completely submerged or inundated by too much information, too many tasks, or too many demands on your time and energy. It can lead to stress, anxiety, and a sense of being unable to cope with everything that is going on around you.

It’s super common among voice actors and audiobook narrators, and if it’s left unchecked, it can lead to you quitting that thing you love.

We don’t want that. We want to stay in the game. We want to do what we love and love what we do and we can’t do that if we’re constantly stressed, feel like we’re drowning, and not making any progress.

So, now that we know what it is, how do we manage it? Here are 7 strategies to tame the overwhelm beast:

1. Prioritize

You simply can’t do all the things. True in life, true in business, true in voice over. Your time is your most valuable asset and how, where, and with whom you spend it will determine the quality of your work, your relationships, and your life.

The Pareto principle, also known as the 80/20 rule or the Law of the Vital Few, says that roughly 80% of effects come from 20% of causes. In other words, a small number of inputs (the 20%) usually lead to a disproportionate amount of outputs (the 80%). This principle can be applied to many areas of life, business, productivity, and personal finance. What are the vital few behaviors you can do every day that have the biggest impact? Make the time for those, to the exclusion of shit that just doesn’t matter.

“I don’t have time to X” – market my business, exercise, spend time with my family…whatever the important stuff is. Yes, you do. But you have to sacrifice the meaningless mind-candy and distractions that have little or no impact because we all only get 24 hours.

2. Schedule

Failure to plan is planning to fail. Scheduling your vital few, your priorities, literally means making the time for them. When you schedule the impactful behaviors in your life, you are creating what psychologists call a commitment device. I call it pre-deciding. You are making a decision now that will determine your action in the future.

By intentionally deciding now exactly when and where you’ll execute your behaviors later today, later this week, this month, and this year, and writing it down on paper or electronically, you relieve the stress of having to find the time every day to do the important stuff.

Once the important behaviors are scheduled, treat them with the respect you would meetings with other people. Move them if you must, but do not cancel them.

3. Set Boundaries

As freelancers who work from home, oftentimes the people in our lives don’t respect that we WORK and we have commitments to our clients and our business and ourselves, and oh yeah that happens to be from home.

It’s not their fault. They have to be taught that we have the same or even higher level of commitment than anyone who aims to do good work does. This means having calm, kind conversations around boundaries.

It also means setting boundaries and expectations with clients. If you don’t work weekends to protect your family time, then honor your family by holding that boundary. The earlier you can set expectations with clients the less likely you are to negatively surprise them down the road.

It also means setting boundaries with yourself. That’s one area where scheduling and commitment devices help. If you’re going to ask others to respect your boundaries, you have to respect your own boundaries, your own commitments to yourself.

4. Declutter

Marie Kondo is famous for her approach to clutter. “Keep only things that speak to your heart. Then take the plunge and discard all the rest.”

When it comes to decluttering your overwhelm, zoom out. Ask yourself, in the grand scheme of things, what time and energy commitments speak to your heart? What behaviors have the biggest impact to the quality of your life? Discard all the rest.

5. Get in Community

One of the biggest causes of VO-verwhelm is the fact that what we do is isolating at best and at worst, downright lonely. We’re all in our tiny, padded cells talking to ourselves all day and we’re so siloed that we naturally think that our problems are all our own and unique to us.

But when we get into the company of others who do what we do, we find so much commonality and community. We’re all largely going through the same struggles and the great part about that is we can help each other. We’re all on a different point in our journey and that’s what allows us to understand and support each other.

That idea is precisely why I created the VO Pro Community at vopro.app. To bring us all together in a safe place to ask for and receive help, to be able to help others, to learn and grow and develop and make progress not as individuals locked in our booths, but as a community of generous, kind people helping each other be better in our businesses and our lives.

6. Minimize Distractions

Distraction and procrastination are nothing new. The ancient Greeks even had a word to describe this type of behavior: Akrasia. Akrasia is acting against your better judgment. It is when you do one thing, even when you know you should be doing something else. Akrasia is what prevents you from following through on what you set out to do.

But why do we get sucked into distraction and procrastination? Because we as humans are hard-wired to value immediate gratification over future rewards. We’d rather scroll Instagram now than go to the gym because the rewards from the gym come later. We’d rather eat the ice cream now because losing weight comes later, after not eating the ice cream for weeks and months.

Be intentional about your social media usage. Social media can have a positive effect on your business, but you have to be intentional about it. There’s a huge difference between mindlessly scrolling TikTok for 20 minutes and setting an intention to spend 20 minutes on LinkedIn growing relationships by genuinely and thoughtfully commenting on the posts of others. Both are social media but only one will add to the long-term quality of your relationships, business, and life.

The degree to which you can train yourself to delay gratification and reward is the degree to which you can stay focused on your long-term goals and minimize distraction and procrastination.

7. Take Care

When I was younger, I battled clinical depression. I felt like shit all the time, mentally, emotionally, and physically. One of the most valuable lessons I learned is that it’s hard to feel good when you don’t feel good – meaning, if you don’t feel good physically, you have almost no shot of feeling good mentally.

To feel good physically, you have to take care of your body. Being intentional about nutrition and exercise is the best thing you do for your body and your mind. Move intentionally every day. Push yourself physically a little every day. Be super protective about what you allow in your mouth.

Schedule and protect your sleep. Sleep is a superpower and most Americans don’t get enough. Most adults need between 7 and 8 hours of uninterrupted sleep and when we don’t get enough consistently, it can lead to heart disease, kidney disease, high blood pressure, diabetes, stroke, obesity, and depression. Sleep deficiency is also linked to a higher chance of injury.

Make the time. Schedule it. If you don’t take care of your body you reduce your ability to manage overwhelm, stress, burnout, depression, anxiety, and a host of other ills.

Life doesn’t require you to be perfect. Do a little, but do a little every damn day.

I hope this video can help you fight the feeling of overwhelm, reduce your stress, and live a better life.

If you found value from this post then help us spread the word to other voice actors and creative entrepreneurs by sharing it with them. That will help us help others.

We’ll see ya again here next week. Thanks for reading.