I love my life and my cup is full but I’m drowning in shame for things left undone. How can I balance it all? | Leading questions

I love my life in so many ways. I have a rewarding job, I’m making stellar progress towards a graduate degree, I have incredible friends and community, plus I’m even reconnecting with estranged family. My cup is very full but I still feel grief and shame for how much falls to the wayside.

I have missed countless doctors’ appointments. My vehicle’s license plates have been expired for almost a year. I often apologise to angry friends and acquaintances after they confront me for not seeing them in months. My significant other says she doesn’t see me enough. So do my parents. I clock out of work and shudder at the thought of facing my growing avalanche of text messages. I panic whenever I receive an email that demands I arrange yet another appointment or submit to a lengthy phone call. The stack of forms I’m overdue to submit makes me feel so irresponsible, as if I’m the only adult alive who can’t seem to take care of business.

I cannot imagine how anyone stays afloat in this world. When I divulge a little bit about these struggles – such as sneaking away from police cars on my daily commute because I keep running out of time to go to the DMV – people seem to react with utter shock. Am I really the only one drowning in modern bureaucracy and relationships? How can I balance it all? Or, at least, navigate it with some more grace?

Eleanor says: I think there’s an important clue in the fact that requests from people you love go in the same mental bucket as the DMV.

But I want to start by saying: you are not the only one. I’m so sorry you hear incredulity when you divulge this. There should be an amnesty each year when we confess our administrative stuff-ups so we wouldn’t feel so alone; you wouldn’t believe what’s out there.

Some of us are at the more ultraviolet end of the spectrum, admittedly. But there are leagues upon leagues of us who understand this feeling all too painfully well. Ask any tax agent.

You might want to look into the possibility of ADHD.

You don’t have to be totally sold on a hypothesis of what ADHD is to know that management can be life-changing. That doesn’t have to just mean medication. It can also be astonishingly helpful to offload executive function on to your physical (not digital!) environment; making time visually very salient, externalising things you need to remember.

As a more general strategy for “balancing it all”, I think it helps to ask whether you have a time problem, or a bandwidth problem.

If you need more time, you need more time. You need your tasks to chew up less of it – outsource, batch, ban perfectionism, insist on a timer, use this email charter, say no. And you need the people who want more time from you to understand how little you have. If you’re the only one who knows how many plates you’re spinning, you’re the only one who knows how fair or unfair these requests are.

However, it’s also possible that there is time but it isn’t usable, because you just don’t have the bandwidth.

If you end every day exhausted and pulled in dozens of directions, and if each call or request feels so heavy and hard to “do right” that it requires self-steeling and psychic warm-up and you’re completely exhausted afterwards, then having the minutes technically available isn’t useful. You might as well tell me, as I collapse across the triathlon finish, that there’s time to run another 10km. Yeah, sure. But I can’t. I’m in no condition to use that time to that end.

Bandwidth problems show up as mismatches between how we experience things and how other people do. They think: “Why haven’t you ticked off those to-do list items, it would take 20 minutes?” But because each one is so emotionally expensive, they may as well ask why you haven’t yet called an estranged lover to bury the hatchet, or confronted your childhood bully, given it would take 20 minutes. The time is not the issue, the effect on my nervous system is.

I suspect for most of us, overwhelm is at least partly a bandwidth issue. (One way to check: keep a time audit.) To be clear, I am not saying this could be solved by working harder or “making time”. It’s precisely the opposite. If time itself doesn’t help, what you ultimately need are ways for these things to feel less like horrific burdens, so there’s less reason to avoid them and less exhaustion from encountering them.

How you do that depends on why they feel so horrible to start with.

We can make such thickets of shame.

It could be about competence; “I’m not sure I can do this, and I hate how it feels to be bumbling.” It could be about the fear that people will always want more, no matter how much you can or want to give them: so “I’d like to see you!” hits the ear like “I want something from you, and after that I’ll want more” – a request for your time can feel like the threat of being consumed. (Are there any unsatisfiable parents in your past?) It could be perfectionism; I’d rather not do this at all than do it only to the level it can be done quickly. It could be screen overload, if work and admin and a lot of your socialising all happens through the same demand-communicating device.

How to make these things feel less like running another 10km depends on why they exhaust you, particularly – on why exactly your loved ones and the DMV can feel somehow the same. Understanding the specifics of your overwhelm may feel like yet another task but, once you do, the rest may come easier.

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