3 Quick Ways To Overcome Overwhelm

It happens to us all, we get hit with bad news, urgent deadlines, too many requests for our time and energy, everyone wants a piece of us to the point where we become overwhelmed in life.

While we can’t stop things from happening around us, we can control and manage how we interpret, manage and respond to overwhelm in our lives, and that has an incredible impact on the impact that we allow these outside circumstances to have on our life.

Think about a person in your life that seems to be able to handle significant demands, challenges with grace, a level head without it seeming to impact other areas of his or her life?

That’s a far cry from those who handle challenging circumstances with anxiety, frustration, overwhelm leading to a downward spiral impacting every corner of his or her life?

Which camp do you fall into?

When you experience stress or overwhelm at work, career or business can you quickly rebound and turn those challenges into opportunities or do you lash out or hide letting the overwhelm from your job impact your family, your personal life and health?

How about overwhelm caused by relationship challenges?

If you are treated poorly, rejected or even verbally abused in a relationship do you have methods of limiting the impact on your mental state and on other areas of your life?

The very word “overwhelm” is a label we put on a state of mind rather than the external incidents that put us into this state.

So, by its very nature, the state of being overwhelmed in life is something we can control…a mindset, set of tools and skills that can be put in place, practiced and learned to perfection in your life just like any other skill you deem important enough to learn.

3 Ways To Erase Overwhelm From Your Life

1. Meditation

For those of you who are about to dismiss this method quickly, don’t!

Meditation is the single most effective, powerful and fastest techniques to use to change the way to overcome overwhelm.

Your mind is programmed today to respond to challenges in a certain way…chances are you have been responding largely the same way for decades, and that won’t change tomorrow unless you intervene with techniques that literally interrupt the programmed response patterns that lead you to be overwhelmed.

Meditation does just that…through meditation you de-program and then re-program your mind to interpret challenge more objectively (without the dread, anxiety and frustration that you use today) – almost as if the challenges are happening to someone else letting you think more rationally and see ways to manage those challenges that you do not see today.   To start with, find a method of meditation (guided, silence, focus on breathing, binaural beats, nature sounds, classical music, etc…) that works for you putting you in a total state of relaxation, give yourself 2X 20-minute sessions each day for the next week and you will begin to notice a marked difference in calmness of mind and less overwhelm.

2. Shift Focus From The Challenge To The Response

Today, our most likely response to challenges leading to overwhelm is to continue to focus on the challenges.

We can’t get the dread, anxiety and images of how challenging a situation is…it takes on a life of its own and continues to replay in our minds each time triggering even more overwhelm.

Instead, commit to quickly changing your focus when you become overwhelmed to your response and how you can turn this into a positive or dismiss it altogether.

Let’s say your first love begins to treat you poorly, won’t talk to you or even tells you they want out of a relationship.  You have a clear choice here, you can spend the next month replaying this over and over again in your head, losing sleep, blaming yourself, blaming that person, OR…you can immediately remind yourself of your own value, your love of self and separate that from what this other person is going through.

You can now put together a game-plan…perhaps schedule a serious talk with that person understanding that no matter what the outcome, you will be fine.  Suddenly the overwhelm is managed by a different interpretation of the events such that you are able to handle the situation in a much healthier and effective way.

3. Re-Instate Your Self Confidence

Overwhelm tends to be higher in those of us who have more self doubt, a lower self confidence.

When we lack confidence we put more emphasis on the opinions of others around us, we underestimate our ability to handle challenges in life and give control to outside situations – a surefire catalyst for higher levels of overwhelm.

By boosting our self confidence, we take back control, regain the faith in our own inner power, and rekindle our ability to respond to the most negative external challenges with grace and limited impact on other areas of our lives.

Overwhelm is a state of mind that many of us are automatically programmed to elevate putting us in a very negative emotional, physical and social place in life.  By using techniques like meditation, focusing on the response and boosting our self confidence we resist overwhelm making us more likeable, powerful, influential and happy in life.

Are you going through a period of overwhelm?