Overwhelm is paralyzing. We can’t think logically or make decisions or take action.
I’m telling you, my friend, you want to fight this overwhelm. If you allow yourself to stay in the state of being overwhelmed by the amount of things that you have to do, that pressure and that uncertainty combined with this feeling that you can’t get anything done, is going to create anxiety in your life. It’s going to impact not only your wellbeing but, it’s also going to severely limit your ability to focus and get things done.
The two most important things to understand about overwhelm is first, what it is, and second, a simple tool you can use to get rid of it.
In order to do your best thinking, you need to make sure you’ve got the full capacity of your brain leveraged and pointed at the things that are important to you.
Here’s the problem. When you go through life, as you go through life, what happens is your brain starts to fill up with information and that’s what creates a state of feeling overwhelmed.
Being overwhelmed is nothing more than having a full brain.
As you go through your day to day life and…
start checking email and
looking at texts and
looking at Facebook and
sitting in meetings and
going to class and
flipping through television channels and
sending emails and
writing excel spreadsheets and
running and picking up the kids and
getting another text and
looking at Instagram and
looking at Twitter and
checking out the news,
…your brain gets pretty full doesn’t it? And now you feel overwhelmed because your brain is full of a bunch of garbage.
In order to fight overwhelm, you need to do a brain dump. You have to get rid of all that stuff so that you’ve got an empty brain so you can focus again.
You are literally going to dump out everything that’s in your head onto a piece of paper; every concern, every worry, every to do, everything that’s bothering you that you’re thinking about, you’re going to write it down.
When you’re done writing down everything that’s in your head and there’s absolutely nothing left, pull out a highlighter. Take a look. You could do everything that’s on that list, you could. But what should you do?
What are three things, just three, that you need to do in order to advance the things that matter to you most? Highlight these three things.
See all that garbage that is NOT highlighted? That is the garbage causing your overwhelm. It’s other people’s stuff. It’s the email stuff. It’s the meeting stuff. It’s the stuff that’s not all that important. By dumping all that garbage out, you’ve gotten clear on the three most important things you need to do. You’ve got a clear head so you can get it done.
It works. So, go do it and get back in action!