When Life Gets Tough, Slow Down and Evaluate

The three-step process to get you back on track.

Woman taking time to slow down and think by the ocean.Nicholas Demetriades/Pixabay

Do you ever feel like you’re on a Merry-Go-Round that’s going too fast? Too often, things come at you faster than you can process them. It may even feel like you’re living in a different time continuum than the rest of the world.

Lately, bipolar blur has commandeered my life again. The world is spinning around me in a hazy gray. All the things needing my attention at work, at home, and on my blog summon a hurricane in my mind full of destructive winds.

This storm is no stranger. We’ve danced the spinning tango many times. Fortunately, I’ve learned a few tricks along the way.

What can you do when things spin too fast? How can you find relief when your to-do list is of mammoth proportions? Can you stop the overwhelm? Here’s a there-step process to calm the storm.

Cleanse

Journaling is a vital tool for maintaining mental health. Practiced daily, it helps you get all the noise out of your head. Keeping a journal is a great way to track your overall health, but not always the best device for dealing with overwhelm.

With journaling, you typically write about topics and events. Instead, this process attacks overwhelm from a unique direction. It’s called a brain cleanse or brain dump, and the primary way it differs from journaling is in content.

How do you perform a brain dump? Set a timer for 15 minutes and write out every thought that comes into your head. Single words, phrases, song lyrics, whatever. Write it down. Get every thought out of your head and onto the paper.

If you don’t like using paper and pen, there are some great apps that you can do this with as well. I like to use the Google Keep app because I can access it anywhere and it’s a lot like an old-style bulletin board. It’s a place to store all your virtual sticky notes and easily organize them.

It’s amazing how therapeutic a brain cleanse can be. As you push all the noise out of your mind, you’ll notice your overwhelm subsides. There’s something about turning thoughts into tangible words that decreases their power.

You should be able to clear your mind in 15 minutes, but it’s okay to stop earlier if the words stop coming.

The next step is to decide what’s important.

Prioritize

Take the next 5–10 minutes to look over the results of your brain cleanse. Ask yourself these questions. Which things are important? What needs to be done? What items are out of your control? Which words are unnecessary noise?

Circle or highlight the things that are most important. Cross out everything else. Be merciless in removing items from your page.

Were you worried about tomorrow’s weather? You can’t change it. Cross it out.

Are the lyrics to Ed Sheeran’s Bad Habits stuck in your head? He’s the best, but delete them anyway. They’re stealing valuable mind space.

The beauty of this part of the process is letting go of all the things crowding your mind that aren’t worthy of your mental attention. Seeing those thoughts outside your head makes it much easier to evaluate them.

When everything from your brain cleanse is either crossed out or circled, look at the items remaining. If there’s over five, choose the five most important items. If you have less than five, congratulations! Doesn’t it feel a lot better to just think about five things instead of all the noise that was just in your head?

Next, you’re going to organize your final five items.

List with items crossed out.Steven Weirather/Pixabay

Focus

Look at your final five and rank them in order of importance. Which item is most important? What thing requires immediate attention?

You’ll now have reduced the raging tsunami in your head to a manageable five items, but we’re going to break it down even further.

Look at your number one item. That’s the only thing you need to think about right now. How can you break it down into three smaller steps?

For example, your number one item may be to wash the mountains of dishes now decorating your kitchen, and let’s be honest, probably also accenting the family room. Your three steps could be:

1. Gather all the dirty dishes in one place
2. Wash and dry the dishes
3. Put the dishes away

Consciously think solely about step one until it’s complete. Nothing else matters until all the dishes are in one place. That task should be your single thought.

Repeat this process with each step until your number one item from your final five is complete. Then move on to item two and complete the same steps.

Start Fresh

This is a powerful activity to do on Sunday nights. It allows you to get all the leftover chaos from last week out of your head so you can focus on what’s important for the days ahead.

If you complete this process on paper, it’s interesting to look back to see which things felt crucial last week but didn’t even make it into the brain dump this week. Seeing this change helps you concentrate on what’s most important.

Taking the time to clear your head, prioritize your tasks, and focus on one step at a time will help you experience less overwhelm. Choosing to concentrate on only five things breaks that mental hurricane into tiny rain showers. Now go dance in the rain.

If you try this process, please come back and share your results by commenting on this post.

Until next time, keep fighting.