Music. Welcome to Mr. and Mrs. Therapy, the podcast that empowers you to transform life's challenges into opportunities for personal growth and healthier relationships. We're your hosts, Tim and Ruth Olson, licensed marriage and family therapists and trauma experts. As experienced therapists with backgrounds in addressing trauma and mental health disorders, we believe there is hope and there certainly is healing.
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We're going to be talking about the concept that having backlogged or unresolved tasks that you you want or need to have completed, how that can actually negatively affect your mood, and how when you do get those tasks finished, it can actually unburden you. And it's interesting because a lot of times these tasks can seem so small or so minimal, but they actually can have a much more substantial emotional impact than you might guess.
So the idea for this podcast actually came from church. It was very funny. Our pastor was using a cookie jar as an illustration for the sermon that he was teaching. And Ruth leans over to me and she's like, I've been looking for a good cookie jar for years. And I just look over at her and I'm like flabbergasted. I'm like, you've been looking for a good cookie jar for years? Like, what are you talking about?
And I like just started laughing and we were being totally inappropriate in church and just laughing. And I was teasing her because it was just so outside of how my mind operates. I just like couldn't wrap my mind. I was like, how have you been looking for a good cookie jar for years? And it's because I want to find the perfect cookie jar. I want to make sure that I have searched all the options and no stone has been left unturned before I find the one. And then you were talking about.
Looking in garage sales and thrift stores and all this kind of stuff. And I was just like, man, that's so different from how I operate. And so it's so funny. I think I actually pulled out my phone and I opened up Amazon and I just started looking at cookie jars right there in the middle of church because I was so flabbergasted at the idea that she's been looking for the right cookie jar for years.
Then I think you ended up taking over the search. And then I saw you, you had my phone and you saw this cookie jar and you were about to put it on the list. And I was like, no, don't put it on, just buy the cookie jar or be done with the cookie jar already. But that can be anxiety for you to pull out your phone and be like, hey, we're going to pick this cookie jar because I think part of it is like the finality of it because it's been several years that I've been searching for one that I wanted.
And I think part of it is like there's different types of cookie jars. I love the fast ones, but is that practical because we have kids? And then I like the pretty ones, but I want to make sure that it is airtight so that the cookies don't go stale. And then I have a certain taste, whereas you might have a different taste. So when you pulled out your phone and you started looking for one, and it was just recently my birthday, so Tim was like, I'll just buy it for your birthday.
But you're right. When I looked at one initially, I was like, oh man, that's perfect. So then I added it to my Amazon list, And in your mind, you're like, it's perfect. You said it was perfect to just add it to the cart and buy it. But then in my mind, I'm like, I can't buy it yet because I want to look at the rest on Amazon and see, is there anything else that I love just as much or maybe something that I don't even know that I want yet until I see it.
And it was so interesting, though, because then that cookie jar came in. And then how did you feel when you got it? Well, when it came in, I did love it. And I was so excited about it. because it was perfect. But for me, maybe not when I got the cookie jar, but when we purchased it before I actually got it, I was a little sad because part of it is the process of searching that I enjoy so much and the process of finding something.
Whereas for you, you like to have it done and you like the end of the journey. Oh, for sure. Like the research and the looking and all that kind of stuff. I view that as an unpleasant means to the end. The end is what I want. That's That's the goal. That's the thing that makes me more happy is like, oh, now I have this thing that I've been looking for.
I've been researching. Now I don't have to do that research anymore as long as the thing comes in and actually lives up to the hype that I made in my mind about it or that I saw online about it or whatever. Whereas for me, the end is kind of sad because it's the end of the journey of finding it. But you're right. When it came in, I was so pleased with it and I was so happy and I was saying how cute it is and how perfect it is. And the kids all loved it, too.
And I think one of the things about this, too, is that even though you are a process-oriented person. It's a relatively small nuisance of a task that may be one of a thousand. And the more nuisance of a small task that you have that are backlogged, the more weight and emotional pressure that that pushes down on you. And a lot of times you're not even aware of it because it just slowly builds up over time. It's this task, that task, that task. Oh, I don't need to do that now.
It's not that big of a deal. But they're still stealing emotional energy from you. They're still stealing some level of focus. focus versus if you take the time and you go through and you start trying to check more of those things off of your list, that it's less and less things that you have to deal with. It makes me think of one of the memes that I've seen where it says my brain has way too many tabs open. Four of them are frozen and I have no idea where the music is coming from.
All right. Speaking of tabs open, how many internet tabs do you have open on your phone right now? Okay, let me look. So just in the private tabs, which it doesn't matter to me that they're private. I think it just switched over that way. But I have 1,366 private tabs open. And I had eight open while you were trying to figure out how many tabs you had open. And I had eight and now I have zero. You keep them because it helps you remember like there's something I need to do with it.
But normally if I open a tab, I search for something. then that tab is now served its purpose for me. And now I can get rid of it. Whereas for me, if you were to do the clear all tabs button, that gives me anxiety because you're right. So many of these tabs are almost like a bookmark for me to remember a website that I wanted to go back to or a craft that I wanted to do. And so if it's something that I want to do, I'll just keep it open.
In and then hopefully one day scroll back on it and it'll remind me, oh yeah, I want to do that. But I recognize that with so many tabs being open, I don't have the time to go back through and look at them all. And so a lot of times I will take the time to close out. Like if I'm unsubscribing to an email, it'll pop me open into a new tab. And then at that time, I'm like, okay, I gotta close out five tabs. So I try to close out five tabs.
But the rate at which I'm opening new tabs, me closing out five tabs will never catch up to it. Or what happens sometimes is I'm closing out five or 10 tabs in my mind. And I'm like, okay, I'm gonna close out five or 10 tabs. And as I go to close out one, I'm like, then I look at it and I think, oh, yeah, I forgot. I didn't want to look into this dental system when the kids are old enough to have braces. But that might be years from now.
And I keep it open because I remember while we were still in California, my dentist said, hey, when it's time, you might want to look into this. And so I didn't want to forget it. So I opened the tab and I kept it there. And this tab has been open literally for years on my phone. And see, that's bonkers for me. That's just not how my brain operates. I would more think like, OK, I remember the general idea of what the thing is.
Is so then I can figure out what the name is later when it does come up. But one of the things I want to talk about, and this is an interesting story that really happened to me that really impressed upon me, the fact that the more unresolved things you have, you're actually way more stressed out than you think you are. Even if you say, hey, I'm not going to do anything with this right now, it's still having this unpleasant emotional weight on you.
Even if it's so slight, you're not even sure that it's there. But again, stacked up with 10 or 100 or 1,000, it can really be stealing a lot of energy and a lot of mental focus from you. I used to work at this company where I was working with kids, and each time I would see a client, I would have to write somewhere in the range of about a page single space of notes about the 60 minute session. Now, this company, we had what was called a month lockout.
So at the end of every single month, whether it was your first client you saw that month, or it was the last client you saw before the month end lockout, you had to have all of your notes written and done by that end of the month. Now therapy can be an emotionally taxing thing. And so even though sitting down and writing notes is not necessarily a very difficult thing, it is an easy task to kick down the road where it's like, I don't want to do this right now.
Now I would be seeing between 20 to 25 clients in a week. And so then that would mean I would have like 80 to 90, maybe even a hundred notes that I'd have to write for that month. And if I was being particularly lazy that month, that would be 100 notes I might have to write in the span of three or four days, which is essentially like 100 pages that I would have to write. It could just get absolutely overwhelming.
Actually, I remember in my interview, when I was being interviewed to be hired at that company, they had said, Hey, do you have any questions for us? And everybody that I had the opportunity to say, Hey, what's your favorite thing about working here? And what's your least favorite thing about working here? And everybody had a different favorite reason for working there. But every single person had the exact same answer for why they hated working there.
And it was always the notes in the documentation because it was exorbitant. It was a lot of notes you had to be taking. And so I remember I've been working there for three or four years and it was just crazy making. I would say, okay, I'll do it in the evenings after I'm done with work, or I'll do it on the weekends. Or I'd even say, you know what, like, I'm not going to do it on my own time. I'll just wait till Monday, and then I'll do it at that time. But.
It would loom over my weekends, and I didn't even realize it, but it was actually stealing a lot of my joy from the weekends. Even if I had made this commitment in my mind, I'm not going to do the note over the weekend. I'm going to wait until Monday. But then Monday would roll around, and I'm so backlogged already from skipping a week that now I'm trying to catch up, but then it's boring doing notes. And it takes a lot of mental focus to do the notes, and I just didn't want to do it.
And so you'd keep kicking it down the road until you get down to the end of the month. and now, oh my gosh, I got to write 100 pages and I got to stay up late. I got to stay in the office late. And it was just a nightmare. And I remember making this pact with myself one time where I was like, I can't do this anymore. This is awful. And so I said, you know what? Here's what I'm going to do. No matter how long my day is, my day is not done until I'm done with every single one of those notes.
Not only am I done with it, but it's printed and signed and turned in and it is off of my plate because I just couldn't stand the feeling of having them loom all the time and then having this gigantic amount of work that I had to do all at once. And so I went about doing this and I was just on top of it and it was awful, right? I would stay later and after I had a really long day with a bunch of clients, like I didn't want to sit down and do it, but I just forced myself to do it.
And what I ended up finding out was that over the weekends, like I felt much more relaxed. And I enjoyed my weekends more. And I wasn't dreading so much the end of the weekends when they were coming. And even though maybe it chewed up a little bit of my extra time in the late afternoons or evenings, because I was continuing to try to make sure I had all that documentation done, when it was done for that day, there was an emotional release for that day.
And then when it was done for that week, there was an emotional release for that week. And I'll never forget, we used to have these offices and they were kind of communal offices. So we'd have like five or six therapists. They had their offices there. We didn't see clients in the office. We just were there to do our documentation there. And it's Friday afternoon and it's the lockout day of the month. And so everybody is procrastinated like I used to.
And they're all sitting there furiously typing away. And I'm just kind of waiting out the clock. I got nothing to do. I'm just sitting at my desk. I literally remember I have a Dixie cup of water there and I'm just kind of sipping on my Dixie cup of water, just kind of staring at the ceiling. And my supervisor walks in and she's like, Tim, don't you have any notes to be doing? Because everybody's at their desks furiously typing and I'm the only one out
of the other five therapists who's not. And I just look at her and I was like. They're all done. And then I just hear this collective sigh from the rest of the ops. And they all wish they were me because they were furiously trying to get this all done before end of day and before the lockout happened. And I just remember like that peace that I had in that moment.
It was so palpable and it was such a different mentality that I had in that moment compared to everybody else where it was just I was able to be relaxed and nobody else was. And when you think about all these backlog tasks that you have on your mind, they really are stealing your peace. They're stealing your ability to be joyful. They're stealing your ability to be relaxed because you always have all this extra stuff that you have to do.
But if you really hunker down and now don't get me wrong, there's always going to be new stuff coming your way. But if as much as you can, you are on top of as many tasks as you can be, then you get that much more emotional relaxation from it. That's a really good example because I also worked at the same company and I remember times where I would have to try and catch up and it would take eight or nine hours of me sitting down and doing it.
And that led to a lot of burnout for the therapists there. And you're right, it wasn't the clients, it was the paperwork that oftentimes felt overwhelming. And I think even when I was at a different organization, if I would let my notes go over more than one session, I would begin to kind of panic or feel overwhelmed because now in my mind, when I went back to write the notes, I want to be as honest as possible. But over time, the meetings do start jumbling together because you're like,
oh, wait, did we talk about the husband this time? Do we talk about that time? And it is stressful over time.
And because of the weight of that, I know that you You even led that organization in concurrent documentation, where as an opportunity to help therapists be present with their clients and not feel burnt out and overwhelmed and then get resentful at the clients or at the work, and they could be excellent therapists and present in the moment because they weren't worried about all this backlog.
And so we've even carried that into our own private practice and our own work with our clients because we really want to be present with them and what they're working through and talking about and not have in the back of our mind the weight of really this important and burdensome thing, but it's not the most important thing. The most important thing is to be present with the client and work with them,
walk them through what they're going through right now. and it's hard to do that if you have all of these tabs open. And as much as we joke about how many tabs I have open, I do know that that is slowing me down. And that's the exact same example we give when we're talking about EMDR and how trauma really affects you.
We talk about how when you have so many apps open, you can only be in one app at a time, but if you have all these other apps open, they're taking resources, battery life, memory from you. And so it's so important through EMDR to really close out those traumas fully so that even though you haven't thought about them in a long time, out of the 1,366 tabs open, I haven't thought about probably 1,300 of them in a long time.
And yet they're back there and they're taking those resources and the battery life and the the memory. And so as much as we joke about it, I know that it really is important to get a system in place where I don't have so much backlog of stuff. And so I am so thankful to have Tim, who is so different than me, that he can help close out some of these tabs like the cookie jar.
And even though we process different, and the process is just a means to an end for him, and he enjoys is the ending and I enjoy the process, it really is important for me, even though I enjoy the process, to close things out and to have an ending to things. Because so often I do procrastinate and push things down, partly because I don't want things to end.
But then he can see and he probably experiences the weight and the consequences of me having all of these things that really aren't brought to closure and are left open. Well, and I think another way to think about it, Ruth, is there's always going to be another cookie jar, right? There's always going to be another thing that you can pine over like the cookie jar and you can invest in looking in and be excited about the research and the process of that.
But then you also can close out that cookie jar and enjoy now having that cookie jar because there will always be the next thing. All right, guys, thank you so much for listening. And remember, your mind is a powerful thing. Thank you so much for tuning in to this episode of Mr. and Mrs. Therapy. We hope that you enjoyed today's episode and found it helpful. If so, would you take 30 seconds and share it with a friend? Also, we'd love for you to leave us a review on Apple Podcast.
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