Overcome the Overwhelm – Just Start Where You’re At
Author: Jessie Podolak, Clinical and Community Resources Director
Hi! I'm Jessie Podolak, a physical therapist, health and wellness coach, and continuing education instructor for healthcare providers across the U.S. and Canada. Since 1998, I've been helping people in Northwest Wisconsin overcome health challenges, get moving again, and reconnect with the activities they love.
Over the years, I've seen the incredible things that can happen when knowledge meets readiness for change. I'm excited to share simple, practical, and empowering ideas to help our community eat well, move more, sleep better, laugh often, and live with purpose.
An object in motion tends to stay in motion, and an object at rest tends to stay at rest unless acted on by an outside force. Ahhhh… good old high school physics! If Newton were here now, he might add, “and an object that is scrolling tends to stay scrolling, bombarded by options and stuck in the analysis paralysis that defines the digital age.” Okay, maybe Sir Isaac wouldn’t have said it exactly like that, but it rings true for many of us, especially when we are stuck in unhealthy habits.
Improving our health habits can feel challenging today, when information abundance can overwhelm and immobilize us. When it comes to health, there are just SO. MANY. CHOICES. Cold plunge or sauna? Mediterranean or Paleo? HIIT or walking? Sources abound, from TikTok to TED Talks, Facebook to podcasts. Who should we listen to? Do we need to track our sleep, steps, and stress every day? What information is reliable? Our FOMO and desire to find the BEST strategy often gets in the way of simply starting.
The concept of decision fatigue isn’t new.
Some estimates suggest the average adult makes around 35,000 decisions a day, some conscious and many unconscious—enough to leave even the healthiest of humans feeling mentally exhausted.
Research now shows that choice overload can make those decisions even more burdensome, increasing stress and anxiety and causing people to abandon their health goals altogether.
Physiologically, the prolonged stress of constant decision-making can keep the body’s threat-o-meter on high alert, altering stress hormones like cortisol, and ultimately wearing down one’s health. In the end, people often put decisions off until later, bounce back and forth between options, or avoid deciding altogether. Inertia wins. We stay stuck.
So how we overcome this trip? We'll explore many of these ideas together in future converstions.
Here are a few things that come to mind for the majority of us:
Take a breath. Literally. Pause the scroll and give yourself kudos for caring about your health. Your reading this far shows you value it.
Start where you are. This is your baseline, and you get to build from here.
Pick ONE area of health behavior (we call them pillars) to experiment with this week: movement, nutrition, sleep, social connection, stress reduction, OR changing a habit around risky substances like drugs or alcohol.
Create ONE common-sense next step tied to a cue already embedded in your life. It doesn’t need to be fancy—just consistent and doable. Often, simpler is better. Example: Three days this week, I will walk for 10 minutes after lunch.
Make sure your step is one you are at least 70% confident you can accomplish. If not, adjust the experiment. Don’t let perfection be the enemy of progress. Just start.
