How To Tackle The Feeling Of Being Totally Overwhelmed
This year has been a wild one. And by wild one, I mean total dumpster fire. If you’re feeling not quite yourself, or in a constant frantic state, please let me assure you that it is completely normal. Completely.
You might find that you’re struggling to keep your head above water, trying to juggle everything and just wanting to drop everything and scream your lungs out. Welcome to overwhelm. We’ve all experienced it at some stage or another, and whether you experience it for just days at a time, or for months on end, there are steps we can take that can help offload some of it and increase more times of mental clarity.
Give yourself a routine and stick to it.
Overwhelm often comes from a place where we have a million things to get done, and only so much time to do it. Routine helps here because it allows you to work through your day in not just a way that best allocates your tasks, but in a way that’s primarily routed in habit. The feeling of familiarity will help extinguish a few of the flames lit underneath you that has you reaching boiling point, because whilst you may feel out of your depth in some ways, you’ll have a feeling of safety in your morning or evening rituals, or the general make-up of your day.
Use lists to your advantage.
This one is super handy if the overwhelm is a physical one with lots of tasks you’re yet to complete, but you know you need to get done. If you’re one of those people who go to sleep at night but can’t get your mind to stop running you through a mental to-do list, constantly adding more and more to the never-ending abyss of things, lists are your friend. The physical act of writing the tasks down and unloading them from your brain can be massively useful to tackle feeling overwhelmed by what you’ve got going on. You might find that you need to break them up into separate lists, for example, one for work, one for home, and one for miscellaneous errands or projects. But overall, the most important thing of all is to make sure that whatever listing system you have in place actually works for you. Lists, especially ones that are broken down into their various categories, offer an opportunity to manage what you’ve got to work through in bitesize chunks, rather than throwing all the plates up in the air and seeing which ones you can catch.
Use a journal to brain-dump.
Of course, not all overwhelm comes from the physicality of what feels like a thousand goings-on, but from the psychological and emotional. And it’s this kind of overwhelm that journalling can be a wonderful remedy for. Similar to creating a list, letting a series of thoughts and feelings leave your brain and onto paper or into a document on your laptop or tablet can be really useful. If you’re not a writer, you might find that being a bit more creative, like expressing these things and letting it all out through art may be a better option. Letting your brain quit circling the same thoughts round in your head will allow you to not only read through and find more efficient ways to override the overwhelm, but it also offers a cool down for your brain.
Give yourself an opportunity to press pause.
Speaking of a cool down, this leads us perfectly to our next tip: allow yourself to press pause. Now, this may seem counterintuitive, especially if your overwhelm is predominantly a matter of getting shit done, but hear me out. Overwhelm can have us operating in different ways, but mainly on two polar opposites: complete meltdown or non-stop functioning. No matter which one of those options relate to you best, just giving yourself permission to slow down, or preferably, stop altogether, can help. This can be allowing yourself an hour to wind down at the end of the day, regardless of how much you’ve got left to do (remember, there’s always tomorrow), or even blocking out a part of your aforementioned routine for doing absolutely nothing – or having a nap. The thought of doing nothing when you’ve got so much to do can be terrifying and very anxiety-provoking, but the decompression and small rest stop is guaranteed to be helpful. Besides, burnout isn’t cute for anyone, so rest is essential; it’s productive in its own way.
Channel some energy into something that makes you truly happy.
This differs slightly from the previous tip as it’s focused on curating time for yourself that involves another activity, rather than just easing off the gas pedal of all of the things you’ve got happening. Much like pressing pause, the thought of injecting something else into a busy schedule or using up time that could be allocated for another errand or task can be a scary one. But it’s necessary. You (and your brain) deserve to focus on other things that not only relieve stress, but that make you happy and boost your system. When you’re stressed out, which is often the main feeling when we’re overwhelmed, your brain produces lower numbers of neurotransmitters such as serotonin (your happy hormone) and dopamine (your pleasure hormone). By giving yourself some time to do something that makes you happy, the amount of stress (and subsequently, overwhelm) that you feel will reduce, even if your to-do list hasn’t.
We can’t quick-fix everything, but it does help to implement as much as we can to help protect ourselves when things get a bit too much. By throwing a few of these into the mix, you should come out of the worst of your overwhelm in a much easier way.
Image credit: Matteo Vistocco
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