What to do when you are overwhelmed at work
It is possible to bring your sense of being overwhelmed at work, by life, by relationships under control.
If you feel like you are drowning in the stress and tension of your life, this will sound like magic, but luckily, it’s possible with critical thinking and project management.
Many of us learn to use these two skills in our professional lives, but not many of us learn to apply them to the thoughts, perceptions, and emotions that drive our behavior.
To manage the overwhelm in the moment, as well as the longer term, you must:
- Create your base – look at the different areas that influence your energy and bring them back into balance to give yourself some immediate stress relief.
- Identify the primary stressor(s) – figure out what’s driving the stress and make an action plan.
- Build in micro moments – add short periods (~2 minutes) into your routine near peak stress points.
The first step relates to project managing your stress level. You are very practically reducing and preventing stress to give yourself stress-free space.
The second step uses that zone of calm to think critically and problem-solve for longer term success.
The third step is about prevention and creating a sustainable system.
Following these three steps will help you reduce your sense of overwhelm and the stress and anxiety that accompany that in order to plan how to handle the stressors in a healthy way.
Let’s look at how you do that.
CREATE YOUR BASE
At the core, you have the energy you need to create your life. However, where that energy is unbalanced, it will be difficult to unlock the energy you need to rise above the overwhelm.
There are six different areas that influence your energy level – mental, emotional, social, physical, environmental, and spiritual.
When one or more of these are out of whack – and many of them are so ingrained in our daily lives that we don’t even notice they are out of alignment – your energy will flag and molehills will become mountains.
So, take a moment and align your energy. Look at the six different areas: where are there gaps?
Are you running negative thought loops in your mind? Have you been stuck inside for the last three days with no change of scene?
Are you stuck in the tunnel of emotion: you log off at night, but the stress doesn’t log out of your shoulders, neck, or lower back? You haven’t exercised or moved regularly in the last few days or weeks.
ACTION: Write down where you are experiencing trouble and use what has worked for you in the past; actively bring those into alignment.
Practically this means if you determine that you’re ruminating on negative things, you set up a plan of action to stop the negative thought cycle. That might look like making a gratitude list and firmly redirecting your mind there twenty times a day!
Or it might look like making an exercise plan that has worked in the past, proactively blocking time, and sticking to it at an hour that you know you’re likely to be freeish.
If you are having trouble even finding the time to begin justifying the time that getting back into alignment will take, think of it as putting on an oxygen mask that will make you more productive.
Most likely right now, when your sense of overwhelm is at its worst, you lose focus.
You have twenty browser pages or five projects open and active. You look at your to-do list ten times but can’t seem to make yourself start anything.
You start five things, work on them each a little bit, finishing none of them. You re-read each paragraph multiple times before it makes sense.
You don’t even realize you are staring out the window or have jumped on social media again – when you do realize it, it’s like you are waking up.
If you aren’t being productive, then everything takes longer, which increases your sense of overwhelm.
So, where your mind tells you that you can’t take the time to align your energy, note that doing so will make you more efficient as well as giving you the strength to keep going.
If you don’t align these areas that influence your energy, how much longer can you continue down this path? And at what cost?
IDENTIFY THE PRIMARY STRESSOR(S)
After practicing self-care to bring the six areas listed above into balance, you are to tackle the stressor(s) from a calmer, stronger, and more focused space.
ACTION: List the most active stressors in your life. Ask yourself: “How could I give this stressor less influence over my well-being? For each, list two ways you could make the stressor 30% less pressing.
This is where it gets tricky.
Naming the stressors is easy. Coming up with ways to reduce their influence less so.
If your boss or your workload features on the list, did you experience irritation at the question around reducing their influence?
“How do I stop my boss from being a micromanaging jerk? What do you want me to do, quit my job?”
Given that you can’t change the behavior of others, the question is really about changing how you react to the stressor.
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First, you must identify when the stressor is most pressing – when does your stress point become most severe?
On the ride to work? In the shower when you are arguing with your boss in your head? Just before your first morning meeting?
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Pinpointing the when gives you an idea of the best time to intervene in the stress cycle.
If it’s in the ride to work, purposefully turn your mind away from the negative rumination loop. Concentrate on relaxing music or a podcast.
If it’s the moment before your first meeting, do a two-to-five-minute breathing cycle just before the meeting.
Essentially this is when you can practice preventative strategies to reduce the impact of the stressor on your system.
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Second, you must identify how you respond to the stress – what is happening to you physically?
Does your heart race? Do you feel a sense of cold dread? Do you dissociate – things feel very distant?
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Becoming aware of how you feel and what you do in that moment helps you know how to treat the stress.
Whether it’s your mind you can’t turn off or that you are feeling disconnected with the present moment, pause and get into your body. Do a body scan and breathing cycle to reduce your stress response.
Take note however, your stress doesn’t stop when the stressor stops. Maybe you left the office for the day. Perhaps you went outside at lunchtime. Notice if your stress goes with you.
Changing venues doesn’t change the stress. If the tension in your neck and shoulders is sleeping with you at night, you need to release the stress. It must exit your body.
Find a way to let the stress go whether that’s exercising until you feel it dissolve or laughing with a friend until you cry.
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Lastly, you must understand why you perceive it as so stressful.
While initially this may seem obvious, there are always multiple layers.
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Taking time to look at the core beliefs underlying your reaction to the stressor, will give you the most insight to transform how you respond to it.
Perhaps the workload and your boss’s inability or unwillingness to do anything about it is stressful. That is the first – and most obvious – layer.
Another layer is attitude.
Where you are resentful and focused on your frustration and sense of being wronged, you will struggle to change how you relate to the stressor.
A third layer in your tangled up emotional response to the stressor is self-concept.
How much do you feel powerless to stop the stressor because you can’t? Or perhaps you don’t deserve to prioritize yourself – it’s selfish? Maybe you don’t have the right to say no at work?
Whatever the case, how you define your value influences how you react to the stressor.
BUILD IN MICRO MOMENTS
ACTION: Look at your day, your week, alongside any stressors you identified. Try to spot where the stress and overwhelm is most likely to increase. Then pre-plan micro moments of 5 to 10 minutes to practice something that works for you to reduce the stress.
Meditating, breathing, stretching, tracking gratitude, exercise, laughter, affection, social contact, are all things you can do, among a multitude of others, to switch off the stress and overwhelm.
Identify these moments, plan for them, and be disciplined about sticking to them. If you use the metaphor of being on a plane, when the ride gets bumpy, you won’t be able to cope without oxygen.
These micro moments help you navigate the turbulence, rather than crashing.
If reading is something that helps you navigate difficult periods in life, the book “Burnout: the secret to solving the stress cycle” gives some practical advice for releasing stress that results from overwhelm.
Ultimately, managing overwhelm is about your life choices: do you want to get better at keeping your head above water in an intolerable space or do you want to swim somewhere else?
As you are able to reduce the overwhelm you feel in the moment, you’ll be able to find space to apply critical thinking to decide how you want to swim. Where you are in it for this moment, give yourself permission to find your balance. You can make it manageable.
If you’d like to learn how you can sustainably find balance or think critically about your life choices, schedule a free discovery call with me!
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With gratitude to Kuwaiti designer Q80 for his illustration “Sinking Ship.” Find this and more here: https://www.deviantart.com/q80designer/art/Sinking-Ship-331125885
