Overwhelm – Who has been there?
We all face it from time to time and some weeks I feel like I simply live there. How do you deal with overwhelm? I share my tips and hope you will share yours too.
Dealing with overwhelm. I mean, who’s been there? I think sometimes I live there. My life is so crazy and chaotic at times. And I hate to use the word busy, because I hate that word. I hear it all the time. I hear it come out of my mouth.
But it’s the easiest way to describe what’s going on is busy or chaos, or I don’t know what you want to call it. But at the same time, it’s not bad. It’s not a bad busy, t’s a good busy, it means I’m, you know, I’ve got plenty of work and money is coming in and business is thriving and things are good.
But it doesn’t change the fact that you can feel overwhelmed. I know I do. So, I wanted to share with you several of my ways that I deal with overwhelm that I have found that work best for me, and I’m sure you will have some other ones that you find work best for you. So the first thing I do when I’m overwhelmed is I simply sit and meditate, because I need to clear my mind.
Overwhelm – Racing Throughts
Because the worst part of overwhelm is the mental clutter that comes with it, where the brain is just racing, and your thoughts are racing and you’re anxious. And I don’t know if you’re like me, but if I get overwhelmed, even when I go to sleep at night, I will wake up in the middle of the night at some point during the night and just be anxious. And just going through this mental checklist of things that I have to do, that haven’t been done.
And that I feel like if I don’t do them, they are life or death situations. And this only happens in the middle of the night. Because when I’m awake during the day, nothing seems that important. While things need to get done, and things are important. They’re not life or death situations.
So but at night, my brains like, yeah, we’ll go off the deep end, where do you want to take that? So I meditate because it clears my mind. And it gives my mind some space to just breathe. And just say, you know, this isn’t all what I think it is. It’s not as bad.
It also gives me clarity, so that I can figure out, Okay, what’s the next step that I need to take. The next best step, because really, this key to overwhelm is just action moving forward, so that you don’t stay stuck where you are.
So the next thing that I do, big thing that I do is I limit consumption of TV, social media, the news, whatever. And the reason that I do this is because when I am overwhelmed social media, especially and the news, and reading articles and things like that, it’s just too much for me, I can’t handle the barrage of information, because my brain is already own overload. I just simply need a break from everything.
I feel like I can’t breathe, I feel like I can’t think and there’s just no focus and no clarity. If you want to read what I say about fear go here. So I need to cut down on the stream of information coming at me. And that comes to my next one, which is email. I don’t know if you’re like me, but I get hundreds of emails a day. And a lot of them are from clients that I need to respond to, or people asking me for, you know, things to complete tasks I need to do, or information gathering…
More resources on overwhelm:
https://hbr.org/2019/10/how-to-deal-with-constantly-feeling-overwhelmed
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/overwhelm-is-our-exhaustion-a-sign-that-were/id1564530722?i=1000525533995
https://zenhabits.net/mindset-overwhelm/
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