How to Beat Overwhelm in 5 Simple Steps

The pace of life has got faster and faster and we can often feel overwhelmed by the demands on our time, energy and attention.

Overwhelm is not just limited to your working life, although that’s where you tend to feel it the most. You can feel overwhelmed in every aspect of your life, especially when you’re juggling the demands of work, home, and family, not to mention trying to fit in some time for YOU!

How Do You Know When You’re Overwhelmed?

Some people describe it as feeling frazzled. It’s feeling that you have too much to do, not enough time to do it all, and you don’t know where to start.

Your mind is working overtime, with thoughts flying around like a cloud of mosquitoes all buzzing round your head.

It’s overload on the one hand, and scarcity on the other…

Too many tasks and not enough time to do them.

Overall you feel stressed, anxious, frustrated and afraid – afraid that you’ll let someone down, not get everything done, fail in your job, fail as a parent, fail as a partner, fail, fail, fail!

How Overwhelm Affects You

When you get to the stage of being in a state of overwhelm, your effectiveness flies out of the window, which makes the problem even worse.

Your mind is flitting around from one thought to another and that’s reflected in the way you flit between different tasks, doing everything with only half your attention because you’re still thinking about the myriad of other things that you need to do.

Flitting between tasks is the least effective way of working because each time you change tasks you have to refresh your memory about what the task entails, what stage you were at when you last looked at it and what you need to do to complete it.

The more you move from task to task, the more time you spend on reviewing rather than doing.

You get more overwhelmed, not less!

Overwhelm causes you to work at your lowest level of effectiveness and this not only affects your ability to get things done, it also makes a big dent in your self-esteem, and you end up in a downward spiral of self-criticism and failure.

So it’s absolutely essential that you know how to deal with overwhelm when it arises, and ultimately how to prevent it.

How to Overcome Overwhelm

Here are 5 steps to restoring calmness, serenity and control to your life so you become happier, more effective in getting things done and achieve your goals.

1. Slow down! When you feel overwhelmed, you feel like you should do everything faster, but this only makes things worse. Begin by slowing down and focus on ‘slow, calm, breathe’. Go somewhere quiet and spend a few minutes recentering so you’re back in control of your mind and the situation. If you’re struggling to quieten down the busy thoughts buzzing around your head, focus on one thought or mantra and say it s-l-o-w-l-y. Your brain can only think one thought at a time, so doing this will block all other thoughts. Make your mantra something affirming such as “I have plenty of time to do everything I need to do”, or something simple like “calm, calm, calm”.

2. Don’t beat yourself up if you find yourself struggling with negative thoughts or feelings, like “I can’t do this” or “I don’t know how” (that’s the ego at work). Negativity drains your energy and makes you incapable of taking action so it’s important that you shift into a more positive state. The fact that you’re aware of these thoughts and not lost in them is a triumph, so give yourself a pat on the back. Continue to focus on your positive mantra to block out these negative thoughts and shift your energy into a state of positivity.

3. Get back into the present moment. Being in overwhelm means you’re focused on some future time when you have to have everything done (or so you think). Say to yourself “in the present moment everything is under control, everything is perfect”. Repeat this to yourself until you feel yourself relax and your anxiety dissolves.

4. Take inspired action! Remember the Universal Law that consciousness creates, so focus on the solution, not the problem. Review what you have to do and make a list in the order of priority and logical sequence. Then focus on completing each task one at a time, following the list you’ve created.
Block out any thoughts that are not related to the task you’re working on. You can only do one thing at a time and when you give undivided attention to that single task you’ll not only complete it with excellence but you’ll feel a great sense of achievement and satisfaction.

5. Focus on what you’ve achieved, not what you’ve left undone. This builds your self-esteem and confidence in your ability to succeed and reinforces your commitment to develop this new habit of empowered action.

How to Prevent Overwhelm

Now that I’ve covered how to recover from overwhelm, let’s look at 5 steps to avoid getting into overwhelm in the first place.

Get organized. Overwhelm happens when you keep information in your head instead of writing it down. Create clear plans with specific tasks in a logical sequence and in order of priority so you know exactly what to do next.
Manage your time effectively. Make sure that your plans and task lists are actually moving you in the right direction – towards your goals. There’s no point in successfully completing lots of tasks that aren’t contributing to what you want to achieve.
Manage your time efficiently. Keep a diary so you don’t forget appointments, double book appointments or try to fit in more than you can reasonably manage. A common mistake is to overestimate what you can do in a day – something I’ve been guilty of myself – and then you get frustrated when you don’t get everything done. When you see overdue tasks piling up that’s when you’ll start to become overwhelmed. If you do have overdue tasks, review whether they’re still important and if they are, just reschedule them to an achievable date.
Develop a system that supports you in being effective and efficient by keeping you focused on what’s important and reminding you when things need doing. The less you overload your brain trying to remember things, the more your brain can focus on doing the actual tasks effectively.
Don’t take on too much! We often take on more than we’re capable of handling because we like to help people and don’t like saying no. Only take on what you know you can deliver. It’s better to say no to someone than to disappoint them by failing to do what you agreed to. Don’t agree to something because you feel you should, only take on things you are confident you can do and that you really want to do.

Leave a comment to let us know what works for you and if you have any other suggestions for dealing with and preventing overwhelm.

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Jan Shaw

Jan Shaw – The Success Alchemist, is a Spiritual Empowerment and Intuitive Success Coach, Success Strategist, Mindset & Manifestation Mentor. She delivers intuitive guidance, spiritual and metaphysical teaching, plus practical life and business success strategies, to support you in fulfilling your Soul Mission and Life Purpose and achieving your highest potential.