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
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
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.
