You know the scene…
You’ve taken too much on, you’re spinning too many plates, juggling too many balls and it’s all become just a teeny bit too much to handle.
But hey, it ain’t your fault.
Saying yes to everything is alluring.
The idea of saying no and potentially missing an opportunity, experience, or possibility is cringeworthy.
The problem is, saying yes to everything causes overwhelm!
Overwhelm causes stress, which causes excess cortisol and adrenaline, which keep us locked out of flow!
Here are some quick tips you can deploy immediately to reduce your overwhelm and get more flow:
1—Eliminate As Much As Possible:
Do a serious audit of your life. List everything you’re doing.
Find out what’s non-essential.
Then eliminate it… or at least put it off until you’ve got the bandwidth.
Be ruthless here. If something is anything but utterly essential, it has to go.
2—Get Clear On Urgency:
The overwhelm fallacy is the idea that overwhelm is driven by an extreme sense of urgency.
Everything feels insanely urgent.
If we don’t do X, Y and Z right now, we’re toast. Our business will fail, we’ll go bankrupt and the world will melt!
But this is what they call “catastrophizing” in cognitive behavioral therapy.
This sense of extreme urgency is actually a cognitive distortion and an irrational thought pattern, driven by the overwhelm.
To mitigate this, get clear on what is actually urgent.
It all feels urgent, but which of the things that are overwhelming you right now really are urgent?
Determine that. Make a list. Prioritize and then execute.
3—Get Mindful:
If you don’t have some form of mindfulness practice it’s worth getting one immediately.
And it’s worth pointing out; 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.
Some common practices that our clients dig are mindfulness meditation, vipassana meditation, breathwork, gratitude journaling and mindful walking (ideally in nature).
Twenty minutes a day with one of the above should do the trick.
And if you’re already doing some kind of mindfulness then double the amount of time you’re spending on it. Simple as that.
The cognitive benefits of increased mindfulness are nutso.
MRI scans have shown that Gyrification, or cortical folding in the brain increases, which allows the brain to process information faster and is tightly coupled with intelligence.
Meditation has also been shown to improve focus by causing an increase in cortical thickness in regions of the brain responsible for attention.
4—Drop The Challenge Level:
One of the most powerful triggers for flow is what’s known as the challenge skills balance.
A hungarian psychologist, Dr. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, also known as the “godfather of flow” did a lot of the foundational work on this.
It’s the idea that flow exists right at the sweet spot between two states, boredom and anxiety.
If the challenge level of the task you’re doing is too far beyond your current skill level, you’ll be overreaching and pushed into a state of anxiety.
If the task you’re doing is too far below your current skill level you’ll be understimulated and drop into a state of boredom.
So, the sweet spot for flow is when a task is just the right level of difficulty.
The challenge level of the task should just slightly outstrip your current skill level to stimulate you to just the right degree and funnel you into flow.
Not so challenging that it drives you into anxiety. Not so easy that it’s boring.
When we’re overwhelmed, it’s usually a sign that the challenge level is too high.
We can’t cope with the demands that we’re facing and boom—anxiety and overwhelm are what we’re left with.
The solve then is to reduce the demands you’re placing on yourself.
Bring down the challenge level by reducing your expectations, drop into flow and start blazing forward again.
Hope that helps!