How To Deal With Being Overwhelmed
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Do you often feel overwhelmed by everyday tasks? Does daily stress and anxiety leave your brain feeling fatigued, unfocused, and overwhelmed? If you’re like many of us, the answer is a resounding: yes. While we can’t completely eliminate stress and anxiety from our daily lives, we can take positive steps towards working on our mind/body connection and focusing on ways to reduce feeling overextended. These are eight ways of our favorite ways to calm your overwhelmed mind.
What is Mental Overload?
Any time that your brain is busy over an extended period of time, cognitive fatigue, or brain overload, can also happen. This could happen when you’re facing deadlines at work, you’re missing out on valuable nightly sleep, or your constantly under pressure in a high stress environment. This can lead to even the simplest task feeling like a burden and can leave to burnout. A few symptoms of burnout and/or brain overload could be:
Easily irritated
Forgetting small tasks
Difficulty concentrating
Finding it hard to sleep at night
Physical symptoms, such as headaches or stomach aches
Sadness, depression, or feeling defeated
How Can you Reduce Feeling Overwhelmed?
The first step in reducing overwhelming anxiety is by learning simple tricks to help calm down your anxiety. This items could be unique to each individual, but by engaging in relaxing hobbies, you can help reduce the feeling of being overwhelmed by life and take steps to change it. Try these different ways to help calm yourself down.
Stay in the Present
Think about what is causing you the most stress right now? Is it the thought of what might happen? Or is it the reminder of what has happened? Both of those represent tenses in our life that we cannot control. You cannot predict the future; you cannot change the past. Stop thinking in worst case scenarios. Focusing on the moment, however, allows you to shut out the distractions and focus on what is currently in front of you. By reducing the noise, you give yourself clarity into the current situation and can focus on the task at hand.
Make a List & Schedule It
Want to help organize your tasks? Make a list. One of the easiest ways to prioritize your tasks or upcoming events is by writing each item down and assigning it a value based on most important to least important. If you’re short on time, separate the list into items that you can complete quickly vs. those that require the most amount of time, energy, and focus.
When deciding how to conquer your list, start by choosing one of the most difficult tasks first. Likely, this is weighing the most on your mind and by starting the list off strong, you’ll be able to use that momentum as you go forward towards smaller tasks.
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Use the 5-4-3-2-1 Coping Technique
A popular technique to help those who feel anxious to maintain a sense of calm and promote mindfulness, the technique is as follows:
List 5 things you can see
List 4 things you can feel
List 3 things that you can hear
List 2 things that you can smell
List 1 thing that you can taste
By bringing greater awareness into your surroundings, you can center yourself and interrupt stressful or unhealthy thoughts from creeping in.
Ask a Friend for Help
If you feel that you are struggling with a crushing weight, reach out to a friend for help. If possible, ask for help to remove minor tasks from your list to alleviate the burden that you are facing. Simply talking with a friend can help. Opening up to a friend helps promote “psychological intimacy,” making it easier for your to share stress, anxiety, worries, and emotions, while allowing them to do the same.
Go for a Walk
In Japan, a short walk through the forest is called “Shinrinyoku,” meaning, ‘forest bathing trip.’ This study suggests that those who are able to spend time in nature showed a decrease in the production of stress hormones.
While we may not all have access to local wooded or forest spaces, taking a break from your desk or office and taking a walk can have a profound impact on your day. Make a point to step away from your desk and leave the distractions behind (this includes your cell phone). Frequent exercise (approximately 30 minutes per day) is ideal for not only a healthy immune system, but stress relief as well. If breaking a sweat helps to alleviate stress, break away for a short 30-minute workout during your day to get your heart rate up and increase those endorphins!
Turn off your phone
Constant alerts and push notifications can unknowingly cause anxiety in your daily tasks. If you find yourself unconsciously reaching for your phone to check for the latest updates, consider turning it off or placing it on Do Not Disturb. When you take away the ability for your phone to ring, you may find that you check it less often, while also increasing your focus and your productivity.
Take an Epsom Salt Bath
Epsom salt is actually comprised of magnesium sulfate, an essential mineral to help regulate many of the body’s functions. Magnesium has frequently been used to holistically treat many ailments, such as: headaches, anxiety, insomnia, and muscle aches. There has also been some research to show that magnesium can be beneficial in the treatment of depression and increasing mood by boosting serotonin production in the brain.
Adding a cup of Epsom salt into a bath and reading a good book can be the perfect way to decompress from the day.
What are some of your favorite ways to calm your mind?