How To Deal With Overwhelm
If you have been watching the news, or scrolling social channels recently, it is impossible not to know that almost everyone is talking about the coming recession and potentially challenging times ahead.
We understand that the sheer volume of distressing information is massive and that can feel disorientating and overwhelming.
So we thought we would put together a science-backed set of steps to help you deal with the feeling of overwhelm.
Why you need to deal with overwhelm as soon as possible
It is tempting to try and power through and simply hard work your way through our feelings of overwhelm.
However, dealing with it needs a completely different strategy, so you can alleviate the stress physically and professionally.
Although we tend to notice overwhelm as too many conflicting thoughts and priorities in our head, it is actually a whole body experience affecting our whole nervous system including our head, heart, spinal cord and organs.
If we don’t deal with overwhelm, the cognitive impact can include brain fog, forgetfulness, difficulty thinking logically, an escalating feeling of anxiety, and even panic.
We can become more prone to distractions, procrastination and our motivation can evaporate, making it harder to deal with in the long term.
How to Deal with overwhelm - The Techniques
Focus on the present moment
A large part of the issue is the wild spiral of ‘what if’ thinking, where we can start to put together chains of catastrophic thinking, which can distract us from the core problems and dissolve our own sense of power in taking control of the situation.
Overwhelm is a part of the adrenal ‘Fight, Flight, Freeze’ response and to start with we need to take care of our physical body.
Breathe
When you feel stressed, you can calm your nervous system by using the following breathing pattern, which will relax you very quickly.
1. Sit as straight as you can, so you can use all of your lungs properly.
2. Do two deep inhales through your nose
3. Followed by an extended exhale through the mouth
4. Repeat 8 to 10 times
The double inhale increases the amount of oxygen we take in and the extended exhale rids
the body of carbon dioxide, which will help settle your adrenal response and
increase focus.
Accept that you feel overwhelmed
All of our emotions are simply signals for us to take an action or set of actions and attempting to repress or ignore them will result in the emotions becoming more intense, so we can’t ignore them.
By acknowledging how you feel you can start to tune in to the source of your overwhelm and begin to make the necessary changes.
Pinpoint the primary source of overwhelm
Ask yourself the questions, “where is my overwhelm coming from”?
What are the one or two things that if I removed them would shift 80% of the stress I am feeling right now?
It could be external pressures from coming price rises, or the sheer size of a task. You might not be able to take that off your plate, but this exercise will show you where to focus your attention, so you can break it down into more manageable chunks.
Write down what you are thinking. Getting things out of your head and onto paper can help you reduce stress and outline exactly what you are thinking and reduce the catastrophic spiralling thinking that can happen when you try and keep things in your head.
Limit your input
With the advent of 24 hour news channels and always available social media channels, the amount of information we are exposed to is huge.
The first action you need to take is to limit your input. Stop watching the news, and cut down on your social scrolling. I know you probably think you need to ‘stay informed’, but when was the last time you saw something that offered actual help for you in your particular situation?
Almost never …right?
By limiting your input, you can reduce the noise from the rest of the world and increase the focus on what is most important to you and your business.
Focus on what you can control
Yes, the economy is scary at the moment
Yes, costs are rising
Yes, external pressures
on your business are mounting on a daily basis
But which of those can
you actually do anything about?
None of them, so
worrying about them is pointless.
It’s better to put your
focus firmly on things you can do something about.
Try this:
- Write a list of everything that is worrying you at the moment.
- Cross out everything on that list that you cannot have any impact upon.
- Of the issues you have left, that you can affect, put them in order of importance to deal with.
- Cross out everything below the top three.
Put all of your energies into dealing with those top three issues. Once you have created momentum with those three, repeat the exercise again and then deal only with the top three again.
That way you can create focus and reduce overwhelm by managing your cognitive
workload better.
Set boundaries on your time and workload
You are not a machine.
You need rest, nutrition and boundaries to maintain your performance, simply working more hours will reduce the effectiveness of your work and burn you out more quickly.
Make an agreement with yourself to reduce your unproductive behaviours and maintain your performance for the long term.
Use Time Boxing
You can increase your focus and productivity by using a technique called ‘Timeboxing’ where you commit blocks of time to work on a specific area of your work ONLY during that block.
A timebox always has specific deadlines and goals associated with it so “do marketing”
wouldn’t be a useful time box, as it is a project without an end or specific outputs.
A better timebox would be “write weekly blog post on how to deal with overwhelm for publication on 6th September”.
This has a clear output and deadline, so you know it is finished when it is done and you get that little squirt of dopamine and feel better.
Measure what you have done – not what you need to do.
Part of the issue with overwhelm is that the more we look at what we need to do, or haven’t done yet, compounds the feeling of stress and hopelessness.
A simple fix for this is to keep your focus on the tasks you have completed and the outcomes you are achieving.
To-do lists are, by their very nature endless.
By the use of timeboxing, clear outcomes and deadlines and focusing on what you have achieved you will develop a sense of momentum and dose yourself up with dopamine (by ticking things off) that will increase your feeling of agency and resilience.
Dealing with Overwhelm - Conclusions
If we are in business, then a feeling of overwhelm is pretty much unavoidable. There are always more things to do than we have time to do it.
And that’s ok, it’s how we deal with it that counts.
Learning to manage our physical state, control our focus and prioritise our workload is a skill that will pay off more the longer we apply the techniques.
To help you with this process, we are getting ready to release our first App “Get it Done” in November, if you would like to find out more about it, drop us an email at aloha@kinawesome.co.uk.
If you have any questions about dealing with overwhelm, drop them in the comments or email us at the address above, we love hearing from you.
