High-Load Seasons: How to Carry a Lot Without Losing Yourself

Some seasons of life feel like everything happens at once.

Work gets busy.
Responsibilities pile up.
Unexpected challenges show up uninvited.
Sleep gets compromised.
Stress levels climb.

And somehow, you're still expected to move through everyday life like things are normal.

In this episode, Johanna shares her experience navigating a recent "high-load season" that included multiple volunteer presentations for Threads of Life, a demanding workload, podcast production deadlines, extensive travel, and the unexpected illness and loss of a beloved pet.

But this isn't an episode about avoiding stress.

Because sometimes stress isn't avoidable.

Sometimes the commitments matter.
Sometimes the responsibility matters.
Sometimes the thing we're carrying is deeply meaningful to us.

Instead, this episode explores how we can learn to carry those temporary heavy seasons differently so they don't take us down with them.

Together, we'll explore:

✅ What a high-load season is (and what it isn't)

✅ The difference between temporary overload and chronic burnout

✅ Why meaning and purpose can change how we experience stress

✅ The role of Cognitive Appraisal Theory in how our brains interpret challenges

✅ How context-switching and "too many browser tabs" impact our capacity

✅ Practical strategies for navigating demanding seasons without burning out

✅ Decision management vs. time management

✅ Strategically lowering the bar without sacrificing what matters most

✅ Role containment and cognitive recovery

✅ Emotional containment versus emotional suppression

✅ "Rest in motion" and finding recovery in the middle of the chaos

If life feels particularly heavy right now, this episode is a reminder that you don't have to navigate it perfectly.

Sometimes the goal isn't to eliminate the load.

Sometimes the goal is simply to figure out how to carry it without losing yourself.

Resources Mentioned

🎁 Free Resources:

• Bounce Back Blueprint 
• Stress Whisperer Toolkit 
• Self-Care Resources 
• Mindfulness Tools 

🌐 Website: Transformative Journeys

💜 Support the Podcast: Buy Me a Coffee - https://buymeacoffee.com/transformativejourneys 

Additional Support

If you've been impacted by a workplace fatality, life-altering injury, or occupational disease, support is available through https://www.threadsoflife.ca/

🎶 Music: “Back Roads” by Will Harrison, via Epidemic Sound.

🛑 Disclaimer: Johanna is not a therapist, just a human sharing lived experience.

✨ “I’m just Johanna – a fellow human being on my journey through this thing called life, and your guide on this transformative journey.”

Transcript

Almost everyone I think gets hit now and then with what I call a high load season. Those stretches of life where everything seems to be happening in this kind of short window… all at once. 

They're tough.

In fact, they're sometimes downright shitty. 

And whether it's something you saw coming, or it hits you like a tornado ripping through your life, we can find ourselves searching in the distance for the hope of a dim light somewhere at the end of the tunnel. 

I just passed through one of those seasons myself, and I actually did see some of it coming.

I had multiple out-of-town volunteer presentations for Threads of Life during a crazy busy time at my day job,,, podcast planning… writing, recording, and editing for upload. 

And as Murphy's Law would have it, some of it I didn't see coming at all. Right at the very end, one of our pets got sick. So I was stressed out and worried about that too. 

And then I was grieving because we did end up losing her. 

Anyways, needless to say, between long drives (which don't get me wrong, I actually enjoy), poor sleep in hotels (which I don't), the emotional weight of the presentations that I do, and the juggling act I was trying to perform to make sure my podcasts were dropping on time, all while working full time, I was pretty exhausted.

It was a lot - and in a pretty short period of time. 

And I wasn't just getting physically exhausted. I was becoming cognitively and emotionally overloaded too.

Maybe your version doesn't look quite like mine. 

Maybe yours has to do with workload around a deadline at work. 

Maybe it's caregiving or helping out someone who's ill.

Or maybe it's just the demands of parenting at certain times of year. 

Or grief or something straining a relationship. 

But most of us go through something, sometime, where the load just feels heavier than usual.

For me, there were times when I was really struggling to maintain both my balance and the energy I needed to keep going until I could get to the other side of it. 

But the commitments that I made deeply mattered to me. 

So it became super important for me to figure out what I could do to make this season more manageable to carry, without a total crash and burn at the end, or Gawd forbid, right in the middle of it.

That meant a bit of soul searching to figure out what actually mattered most…

A bit of strategic time management…

And some very intentional choices about where my energy needed to go. 

I think a lot of us go through seasons like this. 

And while I definitely don't have it all figured out,

I do think it’s worth talking about.

So let’s just dig into that.

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Podcast Intro

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Welcome back to Transformative Journeys with Johanna! I’m your host Johanna – and funnily enough, this week’s episode came about in a practice-what-you-preach sort of way.

I was about halfway through a three and a half ish hour drive home from doing a volunteer presentation for Threads of Life. My fourth in a month, my third that week, and with one left to go the next day.

I was pretty exhausted because as a speaker, my presentations require a fair bit of emotional vulnerability. I'm talking about the injury that led to my son's death at work, and about the impact that it had on my family and the importance of workplace safety and injury prevention. 

But it also often requires me to switch off my introverted side for a while to interact with groups of people.

And that's actually a pretty big deal for me. 

So I'm driving home in this kind of, this is the homestretch.. just a couple more days and I can rest… state of mind.

Filling the long but beautiful Northern Ontario drive with one of my favorite podcasts... When I thought, “This is the perfect time to practice that productive boredom thing” that I'd just recorded a not yet dropped podcast about.

I had beautiful scenery, a long stretch of quiet highway ahead of me. And I often see my drive home from presentations as a piece of my self-care routine that helps me replenish my cup. Sometimes I specifically choose a slightly longer route if I know it's prettier, or if it helps me to avoid a busy highway, or just even to give myself that solitude that I need to recover from my necessary times of extroversion.

Anyways, I digress. 

I really thought I'd just be driving down the road, enjoying the silence for a while, looking at the changing landscape, watching the tops of the rock blasts along that stretch of highway through the Canadian Shield for inuksuks (something that I have loved doing since I was a kid), emptying my brain and filling my cup. 

The point is, it turned out to be one of the most productive, boring drives I have ever had.

So I'm going to have you jump into my time machine for a minute with me and travel back in time, about a month and a half back in time, by the time this actually airs. 

So it's around mid-April. It is stupid busy at my day job and I'm feeling a little stressed about that.

And I know I'm going to be missing three days of work coming up, which is making me a little anxious. 

I'd made a particular point to have all of my Threads of Life presentations written well ahead of time, because I tailor each of them to the industry, to the level and role of the audience, and of course, to how long I'm going to be at the mic. Anyways, they were ready to go, so nailed it. I felt good there. 

I also try to stay about two weeks ahead with my podcast writing and the recording, because I like to have things researched and thought through before I hit record. Usually that works out.

But I knew I was about to lose three evenings while I was away presenting, plus another evening to travel. And the further behind I got, the more I could feel the pressure starting to build. My carefully crafted schedule was no longer going according to plan.

So here's where I admit, you know, there was some anxiety surfacing. 

And the self-care that I talk about here as being so important, it was going down the toilet. 

The seesaw that I had so carefully been trying to balance so that I could get through that busy couple of weeks I'd known was coming.

Yeah, the side I was on hit the ground like a stone. 

Then I get the news that one of my colleagues at work was going on an unexpected extended medical leave starting the next day, which also happened to be the Friday right before the three days off for presentations week. And she's my primary coverage on my days off.

Anxiety just dialed up several notches to near panic. 

You see, because even though my nine to five has zero connection to either my volunteer work or my podcast, my brain doesn't separate them into neat little compartments when it comes to overall stress level. It lumps them all together as the same saber toothed tiger in the bushes waiting to jump out and rip my head off.

Are you tired of my whining yet? Don't worry. There is a point to my waffling and I'm almost done. 

You see, one of my biggest struggles with all of this, I have a lifelong tendency to be a perfectionist, which is something I'm working on really hard after hearing Brene Brown say, and I'm going to actually quote her here, “Perfectionism is not the same thing as striving for excellence and it's not about healthy achievement and growth. Perfectionism is a defense move. It's the belief that if we do things perfectly and look perfect, we can minimize or avoid the pain of blame, judgment, and shame”. But this is definitely a huge work in progress for me.

Just ask my husband. 

Fortunately, though, my self-awareness has improved enough that I knew that I absolutely could not do things the way I always do them if I didn't want to crash and burn. 

And you might be wondering right now, “So with all that stress you're talking about, is all that really worth it?” 

So this episode has zero to do with avoiding stress - because sometimes shit happens whether we're expecting it or not.

And sometimes the weight we're carrying doesn't just come from what you're doing. Sometimes a huge component of it is whether our brains believe that what we're doing matters. 

And that's not just big. It's HUGE.

So what this episode has everything to do with is the fact that sometimes when life gets heavy, the goal isn't to eliminate the load. It's to figure out how to carry it differently so it doesn't take you down with it.

So I'm going to define what I call a high load season so that we're on the same page. 

High load seasons are:

·       temporary, whether you saw them coming or not. 

·       They're time-bound, so they have a bit of an identified time frame to them.

·       They're purposeful. It often involves something that somehow holds meaning for you. 

·       Whatever you're doing requires sustained output, physical, cognitive, and sometimes emotional too.

It's a period of time where you know that the current sustained activity will be ending soon, which will allow you time for recovery afterwards. 

What high load seasons are not, though, is just as important. It's not:

·       Chronic stress and burnout.

·       It's not prolonged, unhealthy, unsustainable, and ongoing periods of time where you're overriding your needs while carrying a heavy load. 

·       It's not dealing with something where you're being forced to live outside your values.

·       It's not feeling stuck or trapped in environments that are emotionally damaging rather than just temporarily challenging.

There is a huge difference between carrying a heavy load for a meaningful and defined period of time and living in a state of chronic depletion that not only never lets me up for air but also no longer reflects who I am or what matters to me. 

So knowing what matters to me was critical in both how I viewed and felt about my time in that high load season and in evaluating how I was going to navigate it. 

Because sometimes there is a moment in the middle of it where I am asking myself, “Is this actually worth it?”

And you know, much like the little angel and devil sitting on your shoulder thing that sometimes happens when you're making a decision, the truth is that sometimes there's two voices with two different answers.

One voice is saying, “Yes, what you're doing matters, you're making a difference, and this is definitely important”.

But the other voice might be saying, “Why did I say yes? I don't know if I can keep doing this”.

And the truth is that sometimes the exhaustion of one part of my life might be bleeding into my feelings of capacity in another.

There's the part of life that's our day job... Then there might be the part that's our personal life… the version of us that might be supporting someone else going through something... And then for some of us, there could be, you know, working a side gig or creating something.

So it feels like we're constantly flipping between a dozen browser tabs in our brains while we're trying to switch back and forth between the roles. 

That in itself is exhausting. And there's some pretty compelling research about how context switching, which is sometimes also referred to as cognitive switching (or its close cousin, multitasking), similar impacts but slightly different activity.

Anyways, how it impacts our brain and our energy level. And throughout all this, our nervous system's on switch is locked in. It's not getting the downtime in between tasks that it needs to turn off one task set to prepare for the next.

It's likely not getting much rest if your sleep is being affected by, you know, travel or sleep disturbances. 

And it might even be getting a bit confused about which version of you needs to be present when each browser tab is open. 

When we're putting that kind of demand on our brains and our nervous system, it's really important for us to identify and nail down what's going on, why it's going on, and whether there's value in it for us and what that value is.

And maybe most of all, examine what we see our priorities as and how we're going to navigate them in the short term or whether they're real priorities at all. 

So the reason for this cost benefit analysis, as it were, is because our brains actually interpret stress differently if we feel there's meaning behind what we're doing. And that interpretation is thought to be passed down to our nervous systems using something referred to as the cognitive appraisal theory, which says that how we interpret stress has an impact on how it affects us.

In other words, our brain and nervous system will tolerate a higher load when it understands why… and when it sees that what we're doing is aligned with or gives us purpose. 

And sometimes the answer isn't that the cost is too high. Sometimes the answer is that I've forgotten why I'm paying it.

And for those of us who have been through something hard or traumatic in our past, that meaning or purpose isn't just a nice idea or some woo concept that we read in an article somewhere. It's how we make sense of what we've been through. It can help to decrease our feelings of helplessness around the event or the situation, and it's often part of how we rebuild our life afterwards.

But remember - and this is really important - meaning doesn't justify a do-it-at-all-costs perspective, especially if that cost is chronic stress… depleting you without also helping restore you too…. or it's misaligned with your inner values. 

That's not purpose. 

Not everything hard is meaningful, but sometimes meaningful stuff is.

But just because something is meaningful doesn't mean it should always be hard. 

So I find it helpful to examine it by assessing it something like this. 

·       What's it costing me right now in emotional capacity, cognitive room, energy, and time? 

·       Can I see the beginning of it either behind me or coming up? 

·       And do I have a pretty good idea of when it's going to be over? 

·       Why am I doing it? Does it give me purpose or does it or will it have an impact on something that's important to me? 

·       And is what I need to do to get through it aligned with my values? 

·       And I guess, finally, what can I and will I let slide to help me navigate the high load right now?

For me, some temporary, somewhat managed stress for something truly meaningful to me affects me very differently than ongoing exhaustion and stress from something that doesn't have any meaning.

But before we dig out some of the tools that have helped me do some of that navigating, I want to sort of reiterate that these are not strategies for dealing with long-term stress, for coping with long-standing overwhelm, or for managing intense grief. 

That would be kind of like taking a knife to a gunfight. 

These are my short-term stress band-aids, things I use to manage my energy when it's running short for something that matters, that I use to lower the bar in my ongoing battle against perfectionism so that I can protect my capacity and stay aligned with my values.

And how to prevent push-through mentality from taking over and replace it with moving forward through it with intention. 

In other words, I use them to triage in the short term until I have time to pull out my real stress-busting and self-care toolboxes.

I’m gonna pause for just a second here before we unpack the really good stuff.

No sales pitch. I hate those too – and I don’t have anything to sell anyway😄

If you’re listening to this episode right now while carrying a lot…

I hope this conversation is helping you feel a little less alone in it.

If you need a little extra support, I’ve created a bunch of completely free tools and resources designed for when it’s more than just a “season” you’re in - but they’ll be helpful now too

No “just think positive” fluff.

No motivational poster bullshit.

Just real tools for real people doing real life.

Things like the Bounce Back Blueprint, self-care and stress-management resources, mindfulness tools… stuff that can help you carry heavy seasons a little differently.

They’re all linked in the show notes and they really are free.

And if you ever want to help support the podcast itself — there’s also a Buy Me a Coffee link there too.

No pressure.

Truly.

Listening, sharing, and coming back to hang out with me each week already means way more to me than you probably realize.

Alright… let’s get back into it.”

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All right, so let's talk about what I actually did. 

Because I'll be honest, in those occasional times, like a few weeks ago when I'm already on overload, I sure as shit don't have time to pull out the heavy artillery in my resiliency toolkit. 

And keep in mind, some of this I did when I saw the signs on the wall saying I was heading into a heavy few weeks, and some of it came about halfway through or even near the end when I really started to feel myself becoming more depleted.

One of the things - one of the very first things - I decided to do…

And before I start this, you should probably know a guilty truth about me. I would be giving myself way too much credit to say that I am any good at time management… planning… time blocking… or scheduling of any kind, to be honest. A look at my day planner would send any number of people I know into convulsions.

My planner consists of a list on the page for Monday of the things I need to get done, or more realistically, I hope to get done that week. A few items of which I might have the foresight to put on a page for the date I actually need to do it. Every night I just transfer what I didn't get finished onto the next page, or sometimes add to it.

Prioritization consists of choosing which thing on the list should probably be done first.

So cue up mini strategy number one, pre-deciding. Notice neither the word planning nor scheduling is in that.

Just thinking about those words while I was time crunched made me break out in hives. 

I needed to reduce the number of decisions I was going to have to make in real time while I was in cognitive overload. 

Not time-management – decision-management.

Some of that pre-deciding happened earlier in the month - like deciding in advance what was realistic to get done and what would need to be deferred. 

That meant taking anything on my to-do list that wasn't critical to my Threads of Life presentations or the podcast that we were going to be dropping before the second week of May entirely off and writing it in for the second week of May. 

Closer to the end of the month - actually, about a week before the four-week or four-presentation week - I looked at what was left on the list and I moved to…

Mini strategy number two, which was strategically lowering the bar in some areas.

And given my struggles with perfectionism, this was actually a really, really good exercise for me. 

I took a look at what was left on the list and I slightly modified my standards. 

I figured out what I could pull back on a little bit.

Things like not creating and dropping as many YouTube shorts that week… The YouTube version of the episode I still had to edit was maybe a little bit less immersive... I simplified and reused some of the content on social media.

I didn't drive myself crazy trying to fit everything in when I had a lot fewer hours to work in. I just adjusted my standards bit.

Not lowered the quality. Adjusted some of the little details and the quantity. 

Because sustainable consistency beats an impressive burnout.

Mini strategy number three is what I think I'll call role containment. 

That means getting better about delineating my roles. When I'm in one role, I try to be all in for that role.

Real life struggles with not ‘just taking a quick look at social media’… turning my phone on complete silence - not even vibrate - while I was working.

I was putting what I learned about the costs of cognitive switching on our productivity and focus, back when I was, you know, researching the micro boundaries episode into practice. Those mini distractions, like just checking to see who texted me, could have reduced my productivity by as much as 40%.

Not something I could afford during those few weeks.

Then when I needed to switch roles, for example, from my day job to working on my podcast or writing a Threads of Life presentation, or from working on one of those things to the self-care part of my evening, I tried to take a few minutes in between to shut down one browser tab in my brain before I opened a different one.

A few minutes to do some sort of intentional cognitive shifting.

And those few weeks really were cognitively, emotionally, and physically demanding and exhausting… so I had to be very careful to mentally prepare myself and find mini strategies for coping with that.

Things like Micro Strategy number four, literally doing a reality check and reminding myself that this is short term, not forever.

I'll do it right before and during that high load period as well, because it can help a little to remind myself that this is a time frame and more importantly, there's an end point.

I plan for the fact that:

I'm going to feel tired…

And I'm going to feel stretched thin sometimes - probably often…

And there will probably be times when I will feel particularly emotional.

And maybe I'll be able to express some of that emotion, but because the truth is, I have no shame around expressing emotions when I'm on stage. But I may need to sit on it sometimes (like waiting in the drive-thru window grabbing a tea for the drive home would be a good example - why scare the shit out of some poor teenager making minimum wage because I'm bawling, right?)

I know I can handle a lot when I know there's both an end game and an end date.

Which brings me to MicroStrategy #5, which is a bit of emotional containment.

And this is not suppressing my emotions or packing them in a box, slamming the lid on it, and pretending they aren't happening.

Don't get me wrong, this isn't a strategy for the big emotions and the immediate emotions.

But sometimes I know I need to wait until I get to a safe time and space or to a place where I have the capacity to unpack it, to feel it, to process it, and give myself a little love and compassion.

And I saved my most important micro-strategy for last because it is probably the most important one of all.

It's micro recovery.

This **** is not fluff. 

It is the cornerstone to how I handle my high load seasons.

I don't have time for bubble baths, long walks, or an evening laying on the couch reading.

What I do make time for is what I call input interruptions - but it's sometimes also referred to as organic or embedded rest.

Making sure that I fit in at least a little idle time for my brain.

   ·  A 5 or 10 minute walk with no earbuds.

   ·  Getting up from my computer for two or three minutes to stare out of the window in between tasks.

   ·  Some silence while I'm driving.

   ·  A few minutes of mindfulness while I was folding my laundry.

And a hard no to myself about scrolling. Not just because it wastes time, because it wastes emotional and cognitive bandwidth. And while I may be zoning out, I'm not resting my brain while I'm scrolling.

And sometimes my rest can happen inside of the busyness of what's going on during the season.

I had that 3 1/2 hour drive home from one of my presentations that week.  And do you know what?

It wasn't just the 3 1/2 hours of sitting on my ass that was restful.

That drive ended up being a very fruitful combination of enjoying some of my favorite music, listening to a couple of Brene Brown and Adam Grant's podcasts, absolutely my very favorite podcast on the planet, some complete silence to think while I took in some of the incredible Canadian scenery.

And at one point, that silence turned into a brainstorming session for this episode, talking into my phone to keep track of my thoughts.

And none of that was planned.

But instead of feeling like a limp rag when I got out of my truck in the driveway that day, I felt like my nervous system had let out a deep exhale.

And even though I knew this wasn't quite the end of the season yet, and I had one more presentation to do, and one more day of behaving like the extrovert that I am not…

Sometimes rest in the middle of a high load period doesn't get to look like stopping. Sometimes I find it in little places in the messy middle of the chaos, 

But it still counts as rest.

None of that replaces intentional rest and self-care when I need it. And those things should be non-negotiables, even during run-of-the-mill everyday busyness.

But when you're in a high load season, the little things can matter more than you think.

So, if you’re in a high-load season yourself right now – or have one coming up… when life feels like you've got 37 browser tabs open in your brain... 

Take a minute to ask yourself:

   ·  Which ones are actually priorities?

   ·  Which ones can wait?

   ·  Which ones need to be closed completely?

   ·  And which ones are just sitting there playing music and draining your battery?

Because take it from someone who took the long road to figuring out how to better navigate my busy presentation seasons (You know I always take the long route...).

You might be surprised how much lighter things feel when you stop trying to keep every single tab open at once.

This week we talked about navigating high-load seasons.

What that is and what it isn’t. It’s not chronic stress or burnout. It’s a temporary season of high-level and sustained – but meaningful - output.

I don’t do this perfectly by any means. And gawd knows it took me a long fucking time to build some strategies into mine so I didn’t feel like having a nervous breakdown in the middle of it.

But building in things like decision-management, modifying our standards to help us maintain the truly important things, reality checking ourselves, and building in a bit of rest in motion, can help reduce some of the stress, and let the light at the end of the tunnel feel just a little bit less far away. 

As we wrap up, I want to leave you with this. 

Let’s be honest… even if you use all the micro-strategies available to you… you’re probably still going to feel tired sometimes – even when you’re showing up for something that matters to you.

You’re still going to have times where you feel stretched thin.

The goal isn’t necessarily going to be to feel amazing through it – especially in the home-stretch.

The goal is to try to figure out how to move through it – while keeping yourself intact.

And if you find yourself questioning whether it’s worth it…

Don’t just look at how hard it feels. Look at what it’s connected to.

Because when it’s connected to something that matters to you… with a little micro-moments of intentional self-care - even the hardest part of the season can feel like swimming toward the shore… instead of drowning in the middle of the river.

Thank you for being here with me today.

I'd love it if you came and said hi to me on Instagram at transformativejourneys.joanna or pop over to my website and say hi to me there.

I do have an enhanced version of this podcast on YouTube - with on-screen prompts, beautiful visuals, and a more immersive experience. Head over to my YouTube channel Transformative Journeys.

If you have an idea you'd like to hear me talk about, leave me a message and you might just see it in a future episode.

And last, yes, I am going to do what all the podcasters do. Please, it would make me so happy if you would hit that like and subscribe button, tap the bell, whatever it is on your platform.

It helps my show get noticed and it helps me know you're listening. I will make you a deal. If you tap it, I will keep dropping the best of what's in my heart and my slightly sarcastic soul so that we can keep learning together.

Until next time, this is Johanna, reminding you… that it doesn’t matter if you fall. What matters is how well you bounce.

This… is Transformative Journeys.

See you next time!

💜 Your support helps me keep creating free tools and honest conversations. Because let’s be real – even when you love what you're doing… sometimes it takes a whole lot of metaphorical duct tape to hold it all together.

If you'd like to toss a little love into the duct tape fund, you can support the podcast at buymeacoffee.com. I’ll put a link in the show notes.

End note: Just a disclaimer! This podcast is for entertainment and informational purposes only and should not replace the advice of a medical or mental health expert. I am not a licensed counsellor or therapist - just a human with a mic and a story of growth and resilience. No degree… no fancy letters after my name... I’m a full-time student at the School of Hard Knocks, University of Life where I figure I will graduate when I take my last breath. In other words, I’m just Johanna - a fellow human being on my journey through this thing called life, and your concierge on this transformative journey.