How do I stop feeling overwhelmed by all the standards and specs?

The standards and the specs pile up until they feel like a mountain no one could hold in their head, and the overwhelm is real. But notice the trap in it. You are trying to know all of them at once, and that is neither possible nor necessary. No one carries the whole book in memory. The people who work confidently with standards do not memorize everything. They know the handful that come up constantly cold, and they know how to look up the rest quickly when they need it. The skill is not total recall; it is knowing which specs matter for the job in front of you and being able to find the others without panic. That is a much smaller, learnable thing. Start with just the standards you actually use most often and learn those well, and build a simple way to look up the rest. Master the few, reference the many. The mountain does not shrink, but you stop trying to swallow it whole, and the part you truly need becomes something you can actually hold.