The Practical Reset Routine When Everything Feels Too Much

the practical reset routine

5 Seconds Summary:

When everything feels too much, we will stuck not knowing what to do. Rather than forcing us to function, it’s better to take some time to do reset routine. The routine that help declutter our internal and outer space. Reset to restore. 

It’s nearing the end of March which marks the first quarter of 2022  is about to end.

Time flies, huh?

Let’s see what’s the world is up to:

The covid is ongoing, with the new strand of virus keeps on evolving

The oil price spike at an all-time high

The market is red, all in bearish mode

And the latest news, the Arctic and Antarctic temperature raise 30 and 40 degrees respectively, indicating in certain years some part of the world will submerge in water

yelp.

That’s not fun

And I thought 2020 is bad.

With everything keeps changing in a fast-paced manner, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed with things

That’s life huh?

ever-changing, ever chaotic.

But sometimes it affects us much more than we think

That’s why we need certain reset routines to help us feel more grounded and at peace to prepare for what life will throw at us

The reset routine can be varied but the essence of it is to eliminate the noise and clutter

Reset to restore

Usually, the environment we live represents how we are internally.

My house is in a complete mess, and I bet Marie Kondo get the shock of her life if she comes and visits.

My desktop was filled with files with the same name and screenshot of something I think important at that time

The worst kind of clutter, inside my head.

With the amount of content, I consume daily and the habit of overthinking, my head feel full up to the brim.

(I know it’s illogical but it feels like it)

The first part of the reset routine, clean my space.

All of them

The surrounding, my digital space, and well.. my head

The outer space is the easiest.

The cleaning trick I learned back in my boarding school is to categorize the messy stuff. It helps me clean even when I don’t feel like it.

And Marie Kondo was right though. Most of the time things get messy because they don’t have their designated home. Container and organizer might help with 80% of our clutter problem

clear your environment, it’s like giving the signal to yourself that the resetting process is taking place right now.

the brain dumping journaling

my mental mess this time around is not chill at all

to the extent of suffocating.

It’s crazy

So, what I did is I just wrote down anything that cross my mind.

The thought

The feeling

The uncomfortable sense of resistance

The whatever things that I’m not sure either how to express it in words, get translated in doodle forms

Mel Robbins has this awesome analogy of filling the jug with water up to the brim as the equivalent of the feeling overwhelms.

And the first thing you can do to restore its function is to remove the water from the jug.

It’s the same with us when everything is too much

When the sense of overwhelms overpowered, what we need to do is to pour it out first

Don’t think about the problem or the task or any solution first

Just dump everything on that piece of paper

Take a nap

What do you do when your phone did not respond to anything?

You force shut it down, right?

Same thing when the apps are not responding, you  forced  quit it.

Maybe the internal hardware is too hot whatever the case, but shutting it down definitely helps

You know where I’m going with this.

Take a nap

Turn yourself off for a moment,

It’s the best way to just shut the nagging noise inside your head. The constant worries of having to think about a thing.

Doze it off

90% of the time I feel so much better afterwards

Probably because sleep helps decrease the sympathetic activity, the fight & flight response.

So it allows the body to relax

Do you remember the stress hormone cortisol?

Yeah, that one gets decreased too

That’s probably why we feel so much better after getting good sleep.

We probably wondered, why we freaked out so much over little thing

Sleep my friend, it’s essential for the reset routine

Now you get partially better by cleaning and decluttering your inner and outer space, now it’s probably the best time to reset some of the goals and priorities.

 

Reset some goals and priorities

Maybe the goal and the target are too much that it leads to the feeling of overwhelms

I learn this the hard way, as much as we want to be productive and optimize our day, we are human and tied with emotion, energy, and other thing surrounding us.

Create some room and space to breath

Find the root of feeling overwhelms.

Revisit the plan and maybe relook at our goals and target.

Reset if necessary and make it doable.

Sometimes the problem is we try to prioritize too many things, which leads to the feeling of overwhelms.

It’s sound too simple, but the solution is to just chill with the planning

This brings me to my next point,

Reset the toxic mindset

The problem with me is that I often felt guilt whenever I didn’t achieve something that I had planned.

While completely aware that the target I set is way too high.

That’s the trigger of my sense of overwhelms.

The toxic hustle cultures

and this is the constant battle of finding the right spot of pursuing something I want but not getting trapped too much into it.

So I’m still learning to find the right balance of it.

The toxic mindset of thinking the constant need to hustle is one of the root causes of the feeling of overwhelms.

Deep breathing or at least breath properly

Dr. Andrew Huberman, Stanford Neuroscientist explains the correct way of breathing can help reduce anxious feelings.

Double inhale and prolong exhaled: offload more carbon dioxide

And this can bring down the stress level very fast

The mechanism?

Breathing can affect the heart rate

When we inhaled, the heart gets expands and blood flow more slowly, which send signals to the brain to increase the heart rate

the opposite happen when we exhaled

When exhaled, heart became smaller and blood flow quickly which sends signal to brain  to decrease the heart rate

When you emphasize the exhale (prolonged it), it can help to slow down the heart and calm your system down

Interesting science stuff, huh?

 

Go out, please

Have you ever felt so suffocated with the feeling of overwhelms that you need to get out of the building and be in an open space?

I have.

And being out in nature, under the hot sun sometimes give me the sense of reality that my problem or whatever I’m feeling will be ok

It’s probably serotonin,

Exposure to sunlight can increase the brain’s release serotonin. And it’s associated with boosting mood and helping a person feel calm and focused.

Find your escape

Whenever you in overwhelms people will say, u think too much

And they probably are right

Unsettled things can be like the annoying fly that get stuck inside the car

It keeps hovering around, disturbing your peace

The more we try to remove and eliminate the fly, the more annoyed we feel

It’s the same with our problem.

Sometimes it can’t get settled right away and we probably should not get bothered with it

Find your escape instead

What can you do to take your mind off the thing?

It can be anything you like

Drawing, sketching, writing playing jigsaw puzzles, stretching,

There are a few things that I like to do

Will the problem go away?

No.

But does it help to calm the scattered mind?

Definitely.

 

So there you have it.

I know, when you are in a state of overwhelms you feel like nothing will help you. At least I feel that way.

Sometimes, things will only get better with time

Know that it’s okay to let go,

And it’s okay if you are not okay this time.

Take a moment to just reset everything.

What I shared here is what works for me this time around, and who knows in the future things might change.

And this is not the kind of list of things that you need to do

Just take a moment to do a few of it intentionally.

And see whether it helps you go through your tough time

Just know you are not alone.

Share with us your thoughts.