HARD THINGS, PART 4: Burnout, Overwhelm and Anticipating Change
The Art of Applied Visual Thinking
The official newsletter of
Applied Visual Thinking SUPERHEROES.
Vol. 7 No. 17 August 21, 2026
WE CAN DO HARD THINGS, PART 4:
Burnout, Overwhelm, and Anticipating Change
Superhero Truth:
The body recovers with sleep. It's hard to sleep when your mind is spinning because of something it can't see.
Until the vague thing gets an edge, it keeps circling in search of answers.
Which brings us to the hard thing at the center of Part 4.
Name the Hard Thing
This one's a combination on purpose, because they feed each other. Burnout is often framed as "too much happening." But a lot of the heaviest weight isn't current — it's anticipatory. You're not just tired from what you did today. You're carrying a vague, unresolved sense of a future that hasn't taken shape yet: the conversation you haven't had, the transition you know is coming, the version of your life that's shifting and isn't done shifting. That's a specific, sneaky kind of hard, because it doesn't look like a problem you can point to. There's no single task causing it. It's diffuse. And diffuse things are exhausting precisely because they resist being named — your mind keeps circling something it can't pin down, which burns energy without ever resolving anything.
Why Words Alone Fail
Words struggle here because burnout doesn't announce itself in sentences. You don't wake up thinking "I am experiencing anticipatory overwhelm about an unresolved future state." You just feel tired, foggy, a little dreadful, vaguely behind on something you can't name. Language wants you to identify the problem before it can help you, but the
problem is precisely that you can't identify it yet
— it hasn't happened, so there's nothing concrete to describe.
The Simple Visual Fix
This is where drawing earns its keep, because you can sketch something you can't yet articulate. Try a simple three-panel: Before / Now / After.
"Before" is the easiest one to draw. It's a snapshot of how things looked before this particular change started pressing on you: your role before the reorg was announced, the relationship before the hard conversation was needed, the routine before the diagnosis or the move or the new schedule. You already lived it, so you already know what goes in the box.
"Now" is the messy middle, and it's allowed to look messy. This is the half-changed, half-decided, in-between state you're actually standing in: the meetings that haven't happened yet but are already looming, the boxes half packed, the plan that's real in some rooms and still a rumor in others. Draw the mess instead of describing it. A tangle of lines is a more honest picture of "Now" than a clean sentence would be.
"After" is the one people freeze on, because it feels like it has to be right. It doesn't. Sketch your best rough guess for the future "vibe": a stick figure standing somewhere steadier, a single word in a box, an image of the thing settled even if you can't picture the details. Don't worry about getting "After" right — that's not the point. The point is giving the vague future a box, a boundary, a place to live outside your head. Even a rough, wrong sketch of "After" does something language can't: it contains the unresolved thing instead of letting it float around contaminating everything else you're trying to think about.
Try This at Home
- Draw three boxes labeled Before / Now / After.
- Fill in "Before" first: a quick snapshot of how things were before this change entered the picture. You already know this one.
- Fill in "Now" next: the in-between mess, drawn as it actually feels, half-decided, half-happening, no need to tidy it up.
- For "After," sketch your best rough guess, even if it's wrong. A stick figure, a word, a feeling in a shape. It's allowed to be wrong.
The point isn't accuracy — it's giving the unresolved thing an edge, so it stops floating around in everything else. Things with edges are easier to carry.
Four Parts, One Thread That's the last hard thing in this series, but it's not really separate from the first three. Information overload, decisions with incomplete data, explaining the intuitive, burnout from a future that hasn't landed yet — different rooms, same house. Each one starts as something too big or too formless for words to hold on their own. And each one gets smaller the moment it has a shape on paper. That's the actual claim of "We Can Do Hard Things": not that drawing makes hard things disappear, but that it makes them holdable. A box, a landscape, a rough sketch of an "After" you're not sure of yet. Small marks, real edges, less weight. So the next time something feels too big to name, you already know what to do with it. Draw it small enough to hold. Then carry it from there.
This wraps up the "We Can Do Hard Things," series but not your visual thinking habit. Keep a page open in your notebook. We'll be back soon with something new.
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