#15 ‘Overwhelm’ is a choice.
Our bodies have hard-wired systems to manage stress. Stress is felt through the entire nervous system, connecting to the head, heart, spinal cord, and all the organs.
The moment we feel stress/overwhelm/anxiety, our body releases a chemical that normally helps move muscles. Other neurons respond to that reaction by releasing adrenaline. This tells your body to “do something!” or “say something!”
It pushes us into action.
Rather than blindly jumping to the next thing without taking a moment to release those chemicals, we first get to come down a level or 10 so we can take intentional action.
1. Calm the nervous system with 2 big sighs (aka breathwork)
When you feel overwhelmed, the first thing to do is calm your nervous system.
When your body goes into stress-response, you want to activate the neutralizing nervous system, responsible for reducing stress. It helps in the heat of the moment, reducing panic and providing a real-time calming effect.
So it’s 2 inhales through the nose, followed by an extended exhale through the mouth. The double inhales and the longer exhales rid the body of carbon dioxide, which relaxes us very quickly. One or two big sighs are enough to calm down fast.
When you send oxygen to the brain like this, you free up more brain space so you can decide what to do next.
Fun fact: This is a part of the Navy Seal Mental Toughness program where they teach breathwork to reduce panic when our military is in high-stress situations.
2. Eisenhower Matrix
I use this daily with my task list. When I see a long list of things I get to take care of, the first thing I do is run through the list and categorize it. I can do this in my head but first, I write out the tasks in the quadrants. This helps visualize high-priority items like nothing else!
3. Use the Pareto Principle 80/20 rule
This basically says that 20% of your actions will account for 80% of your result.
So at this point, I may have anywhere from 2 to 10 tasks in Quadrant 1, Urgent and Important. And it took a lot of negotiating to boil it down like that because, at the moment, you feel like everything is important and urgent.
I take 1 to 3 tasks and commit to those for the day. That’s it. If they are really big tasks, like creating a whole system for the salon, I might just take 1 and commit to that for the whole week.
Some people’s roles won’t really call for this but depending on your responsibilities, that little tidbit may come in handy.
If I take a whole week to get something big done, at the end of the week I feel extremely accomplished knowing I checked something off that will yield big results.
That’s a WAY more effective process than… “I can’t focus on this 1 thing for 3-7 days so I’m going to take care of a bunch of Quadrant 3 tasks”. And by the end of the week, I’ve done things someone else could have done and they didn’t get me to a result I was originally wanting.
The next morning, I do the same thing again. I only commit to a small number of tasks in a day and maybe in a week depending on what I’m working on.
This helps me to have confidence that I’m taking care of high-priority tasks but also ones where I’ll be able to see a return on the time invested.
I hope this supports you as much as it has supported me!