Over the past couple of months, I have planned a wedding, worked full-time, started a full-time MSc programme, continued to write and do research for this blog, tried to maintain a decent social life, and have recently started preparing to move house. Feeling overwhelmed is something I’ve been very familiar with this year. Luckily, I’ve picked up some useful tips along the way for how to get things done when you feel overwhelmed, so I’ve decided to share them here in the hope that they’ll help you as well!
Just to be clear, what I mean by feeling overwhelmed is that feeling when you have so much to do that you don’t know where to start, and you begin to doubt that you can even do it all. I’m generally talking about feeling overwhelmed by work or tasks, rather than emotionally overwhelmed.
How To Get Things Done
In this article, I’m going to give you some very practical tips for how to stop feeling overwhelmed, because feeling this way is neither pleasant nor productive. It tends to just make us feel stuck and unmotivated because we can’t actually see the end of the tunnel.
1. Put Yourself In a Good Mood
One of the best things you can do when you’re feeling stuck or unmotivated is to put yourself in a good mood. This point is based on a well researched theory in positive psychology called ‘broaden and build’ theory. Proposed by Barbra Fredrickson (2001), it suggests that positive emotions are not just pleasant to experience, but they also have a long-lasting effect on our personal growth and development.
Firstly, positive emotions broaden our thought-action repertoires. This means they broaden our attention and thinking, and make us more likely to be creative, see more opportunities, and be more flexible and open minded. In addition to these benefits, positive emotions also make us more resilient and improve our ability to cope with stress, whereas negative emotions do the opposite.
Positive emotions also undo negative emotions, which is beneficial in situations when you’re feeling overwhelmed. It’s hard to experience both negative and positive emotions at once, so if you are able to invoke a positive emotion in yourself, even just mild joy or contentment, you’re likely to override the feelings of stress and anxiety.
Finally, positive emotions build our psychological repertoires. They help us build important physical, intellectual, social, and psychological recourses that can help us overcome obstacles and reach our goals. This in turn leads to more positive emotion, and this creates and upward spiral of ‘broadening and building’ our positive emotional recourses.
So, how do you put yourself in a good mood? Don’t confuse a positive mood for a positive sensation, such as eating chocolate or taking a bath. These things are nice but they won’t have all the positive effects mentioned above. Research has found activities like meditation and exercise to be very effective at producing positive emotional states that are long lasting and can contribute to the broaden and build phenomenon.
However, if you don’t want to engage in an activity, or if it’s simply not working for you. you can also try to start having more positive thoughts about what you are doing. You can make an effort to find positive meaning in your daily activities by reframing them in positive terms.
2. Understand Your Procrastination
I you find yourself procrastinating on your long to-do list by watching TV, scrolling on social media, or even deciding to re-organise your kitchen cupboard, just try to notice this behaviour and consider what might be causing it. Some common reasons for procrastination are;
Lack Of Clarity
Make sure you understand clearly what you need to do and how it needs to be done. When we are missing this clarity about our tasks, we tend to put them off subconsciously because we don’t have a clear vision of how they will be achieved.
Lack Of Motivation
You’re also more likely to put off tasks that you don’t see a clear purpose for completing in the first place. For example, if someone else has asked you to do something that doesn’t seem important to you, or you have an assignment that seem irrelevant when it comes to your actual qualification, then you’re much less likely to want to engage with it. If you can, remove these things from your to-do list, or try to find out more about their purpose.
Resistance
Everyone experiences resistance to doing mentally demanding or tedious work. We anticipate it being too difficult or boring, and then we try to find anything else that we could do instead. Just remember, putting off the thing you need to do is often much harder than just doing the thing itself. You might find that, once you sit down and get started, it will come a lot more easily than you think.
Perfectionism
Finally, the thought that we need to be perfect makes us feel hopeless and causes us to put it off. Since nothing we do can truly be perfect, we will never feel competent enough to even try. The most important thing is to just get started and do something rather than nothing.
3. Organise Your Mind And Your Space
This step is quite obvious and very simple, but it is essential to mention. If you don’t have an organised to-do list or you’re trying to find things you need in a very messy space, you’re probably going to struggle to get things done.
It might be a good idea to organise yourself first by creating a plan, possibly blocking out the time in your day for different tasks, and clearing a desk or a space to sit down and focus. However, make sure you’re not using this step as another form of procrastination. Your whole house doesn’t need to be deep cleaned before you start, and you don’t need to plan out the next 3 months in order to know what you’re going to do today. Be honest with yourself about what really needs to be done here. I’d suggest simply planning what you’ll be focusing on for the next few hours, making sure there’s a reasonably organised space for you to work in, and getting started.
4. Take Action
At the end of the day, the only thing that’s going to help you get through your huge to-do list is actually doing it. As simple as it sounds, this is the only thing standing between you and that feeling of calm satisfaction at the end of long day of hard work.
This is probably the last thing you want to hear, and it’s not always easy to get up and simply do the things you need to do, but you will feel so much better once you have.
Bonus Tip: Visualise Your Success
If you’re still feeling overwhelmed and you’re not sure you can do it, give this exercise a try:
Sit down, close your eyes, and imagine yourself doing the things you need to do today. Try to visualise in as much detail as possible. Where are you? What are you doing? How do you feel? Imagine that everything is going really well, you’re in a state of flow and you’re enjoying the satisfaction of hard work.
Now imagine that it’s the end of the day, everything is done, you can now relax and enjoy the sense of achievement you feel. There are no longer so many things weighing down on you mind, and getting through it all turned out to be so much easier and more enjoyable than you thought it would be! Sit for a few minutes in this visualisation and try as much as possible to really feel like you’re there in that moment.
Visualising the things we want to achieve can actually give us much more confidence and willingness to do them. This is because your mind can imagine things so vividly that it’s as is they’ve already happened. Your subconscious mind now thinks that you’ve successfully done these things before, and will take away much of the anxiety that comes with an uncertain outcome.
Regularly visualising yourself carrying out the positive habits that you want to introduce to your life can make your subconscious mind feel like you actually do these things all the time, and it can give you the confidence and belief of someone that’s been doing these things for years!
Anyway, now that we’ve gone through the simple steps to feeling less overwhelmed, go away and take action!
Recognise your mind’s resistance to doing hard things and do them anyway. You can either chose the difficult emotion of focusing on mentally demanding tasks today, or the negative emotion of waking up tomorrow having made no progress towards your goals. Either way it’s not going to be easy, but the choice is entirely up to you. I know which choice feels easier in this moment, but we both know that’s not the choice you’re going to make today, because you are better than that.
I hope this has been helpful and I hope you have an amazing rest of the day, whatever it is you have to do.
See you next week friend!
By the way, If you’ve found yourself procrastinating because you’re feeling distracted and struggling to focus, you might like this article: