Then, we crumble.

And too often we end up blaming others for not doing their share.

The problem is that overwhelm causes stress, meaning excess cortisol & adrenaline that prevents us from performing. We need a bit of stress to keep us engaged & driven, but past the sweet point, the sympathetic nervous goes into overdrive. We enter the fight or flight mode: heart rate & blood pressure increase even if we don’t notice it, anxiety replaces excitement, and performance plummets.

But it’s easy to cross the line because, hey, who wants to give up & potentially miss a business opportunity or a great personal experience?

Here are 4 quick tips you can deploy immediately to reduce overwhelm and get more done:

Do a serious audit of your life, record how you spend your time, and find out what’s non-essential. Then eliminate it or at least put it off until you’ve got time for it.

Which probably means never but hey...

In other words, it means reset your priorities, and that implies:

If we don’t get X, Y & Z done, then we’re finished, the business is lost, we won’t have a future & the world will collapse!

This extreme sense of urgency is called ‘catastrophizing’ in cognitive behavioural therapy.

Did you know:

To mitigate this natural bias, we need to get clear on what is - actually - urgent. Find out what’s truly urgent & make it your top priority.

Another consequence of the first point is that, to cut the non-essential, you need to learn to say ‘no’, ‘later’ or ‘never’ to anything else: the point is to say ‘not now’ until your urgent work is done.

It often raises emotional discomfort & anxiety.

Sometimes it’s just too difficult to say ‘no’ because we don’t want to hurt people, we want to please, we want to belong, or we want to be liked.

But here it is: saying ‘no’ doesn’t mean you don’t want to help, it just means you’re doing something else already.

The best way to stand for your ‘no’ is to keep in mind what you’re saying ‘yes to’ by saying ‘no to’ to something else.

Last but not least, if you don’t have some form of daily mindfulness practice it’s worth getting one now.

Mindfulness strengthens the parasympathetic pathway, which is the counter-balances to our sympathetic nervous system: it calms the stress response that can lead to overwhelm.

Meditation is just one form of mindfulness practice. Anything that helps you extend the gap between stimulus and response technically counts as a mindfulness practice. Mindful walking (ideally in nature) will do as well, even mindful running or cycling if that’s your thing. Gratitude journaling is a great one too.

Hope that helps!