Feeling Overwhelmed? Try This…

0:07Welcome to today's episode of the Mindset Mentor podcast. I'm your host, Rob Dial. If you have not yet done so, hit that subscribe button so you never miss another podcast episode. And if you're out there and you love this podcast, do me a favor, share it with someone that you know and love. Send it to them in a text message right now. I would greatly, greatly appreciate it. Let's talk about overwhelm. Have you ever felt overwhelmed before? Of course you have. It's not just in your head. Overwhelm floods your entire body with stress hormones that can literally shave years off of your life if you don't control it.

0:38And we live in a world of constant notifications, endless to-do lists, zero downtime. But your brain and your body were not designed for this world that we've created. And the truth is, overwhelm almost never comes from what you're doing. It comes from what you're thinking about what you're doing. And so today, I'm going to show you seven powerful ways to stop overwhelm in its tracks so you can finally feel like you're in control of your life again. Let's be real. It's really, really easy to get overwhelmed nowadays. Life moves faster than it ever has before. We have constant notifications. We have work demands.

1:19We have social pressures. And we rarely get to unplug. With all of the technology and the phones and the computers and your ring notifications going off and your TV and people and children and work, It's just everything, everywhere, all at once, right? Overwhelm is really, really terrible for your body as well. Overwhelm activates your body stress response, which is your body reacting to your world and what you're thinking about your world as if there's actual danger in front of you. And it floods your body with cortisol and floods your body with adrenaline, which is really fine in the short term.

1:57If you need adrenaline, you need cortisol, and your body rushes you with it, it's good because then you can run away from a tiger. But if you're getting cortisol and cortisol and cortisol multiple times a day throughout the day, it can lead to a lot of long-term health issues. Chronic stress leads to a ton of issues from inflammation to weak immune systems to disease. There was a study that was done in 1991 by the Whitehall is what it's called. And they found that people with higher stress levels had a greater risk of developing heart disease and mental health problems from those who did not have higher stress levels.

2:31So it's not just mental to think, oh my God, I'm just overwhelmed in my head. No, no, it's in your head, but it's also very physical. And this research highlights that it's not just in your head. It's physical and it's damaging to your body. It affects everything, your blood pressure, your digestive system, everything. And when it's left kind of unchecked like most of us do, you get a lot of wear and tear in your body and it becomes real and dangerous. And so it's very easy to be doing something in this world that we live in every single second of the day. But our brains and bodies, like I said, we're not meant for this world that we've created.

3:06Like we're better suited. Our brains, our bodies are better suited for living in the forest or out on the plains, hunting and gathering, not constant stimulation, go, go, go, go, go. And so, you know, in our hunter gather days, yeah, we had moments of intense cortisol and adrenaline followed by intense rest, right? So it was like, maybe you're running away from an animal, you need adrenaline, you need cortisol, and then you burn it off. Or maybe you have an animal that you see that you've been hunting for a day and you see it and you got to run it down. Adrenaline, cortisol, but it's not all day long.

3:45Now it's just like the pace never stops with social media, 24 seven work culture, notifications, all of this stuff. And so our natural rhythms within our body have been hijacked. And so when you're looking at being overwhelmed with all the stuff that's going on, what does it actually mean to be overwhelmed? Basically what it is is this, is it is your body trying to send you a message. It is your body saying, hey, slow down, dude, I ain't got much more left. That's basically what your body's saying. When you feel overwhelmed, it's like your body's warning light turning on. Like it's like it's saying to you, you're asking too much of me.

4:23And the answer in those moments of overwhelm is not to push harder. It's to listen to these signals. The brain and the body are swamped by the demands that you are placing on them. Demands that you're placing on them that can be cognitive. They can be emotional. They can be physical. And so, you know, there's cognitive load, which is thinking too much. There's emotional load, which is too much worrying. There's physical demands, which is too much doing. And all of those contribute to overwhelm. Think about wearing a backpack and each thing that you're constantly ruminating on or having to do and the physical demands are just like adding a weight to the backpack that you're carrying.

5:06Eventually, you're going to get to a point where that weight is unsustainable. And now here's the thing. It could be, it could be that your body is overworked, physical movements, whatever it might be, but let's be real. For most of us, most people work on computers. They don't do a whole lot. They go into an office. Most of the time, the overwhelm is not from physical. It's usually the mind is overworked. You know, chess players can burn 6 ,000 calories in a day by barely moving and them sitting down and staying in their seats. Their body's barely moved, but it's their brains that are just constantly playing things.

5:45And because your mind is part of your body, it's making your body overworked as well. You know, the brain uses 20 % of your body's energy on average throughout the day, even though it only weighs about 2 % of your body's weight. It is the most energy consuming organ in your body. So if you're overthinking and overthinking and overthinking and waking up and checking your phone, you're checking your texts and your emails, your Instagram and TikTok and Twitter before you get out of bed and then you wake up and you chug a coffee, your mind has not even had any chance to ease into the day. Like imagine if you woke up and you just sprinted immediately.

6:17Your body would not respond well. This is what your mind's doing when it's constantly on. You know, I was on a group call a couple weeks ago that I was running for Mindset University and a lady said, it's making me overwhelmed is the exact phrase. It's making me overwhelmed. And so when I'm listening to somebody talk, I'm listening on two levels, what they're saying and then what's behind what they're saying. And when someone says it's making me overwhelmed, It's often not the situation that's overwhelming to them. It's their internal response to the situation. And so this perspective shift, before we go through the seven different things, it's really powerful.

6:53This perspective shift is powerful. It's not usually the situation that's making you overwhelmed. It is your internal response to the situation. And if you can shift this perspective, we can change our response. And if we can change our response, then we can easily start to change the situation. And so I'm less concerned about what you do and I'm more concerned about the story that you're telling yourself in your head. The stories that you tell yourself shape your reality. I can't handle this in saying something like that. It's a way different story than I'm learning to manage this. You know, the words that we use describe what's going on in our life and our stress will raise or lower based off of how we decide that we want to experience this life.

7:34And so don't say I'm overwhelmed. Say it's making me feel overwhelmed. Now that might not seem like a huge difference to you. That is a huge difference to your brain in the way that you're processing it. I'm not, it's not I'm overwhelmed. It's that this is making me feel overwhelmed. Work is making me feel overwhelmed. My relationship, my schedule, any of those types of things. Now the thing that I want you to understand is that when we look at those things, your relationship is actually not making you overwhelmed. Your schedule is not making you overwhelmed. Your work is not actually making you overwhelmed.

8:06You are making yourself feel overwhelmed. You can't play the victim card here. I'm not going to let you. Well, your circumstances, I get it. They can be challenging in your life. You have to take responsibility for what's going on. And if you take responsibility, that's actually going to be what changed your life. If overwhelm is always just happening to us, then we're stuck and there's nothing we can do about it. But if we're creating the overwhelm, then we can figure out how to uncreate the overwhelm. Like, listen to the words. It's making me overwhelmed, external blame. I'm making myself overwhelmed, internal blame.

8:42You see the difference between the two of those? It puts you in a place of power. When it's external, you cannot change it. When it is you, you can change it. It also changes the way that you look at every single thing in your life. It puts you in the driver's seat of everything. And, you know, like I said, overwhelm really comes from what you're doing. It almost always comes from how you're thinking about what you're doing. You know, overwhelm is when you have 40 things on your to-do list. Why are you overwhelmed with those 40 things on your to-do list? Because you're thinking about doing all of them at one time.

9:12And you're thinking about thinking about doing them. You think about planning them. And you're thinking about trying to get them all done. That's what's making you overwhelmed. But you can only do one thing at a time. And so let's talk about the seven steps to actually get you out of overwhelm. The first one, if you've been listening to the podcast for a while, you could probably guess it. It's to breathe. Give your mind and give your body a break for a little bit. Like just chill the fuck out already, right? Like just breathe. You don't have to be back to back to back every single second. It can be three minutes of deep, intentional breathing.

9:47If you don't have three minutes in your life to close your eyes and to breathe, you need three hours to close your eyes and breathe. Because if you don't, it will eventually catch up to you. If you don't slow down, it will catch up, I promise you. You were not meant to be go, go, go, go, go. And so when you do a deep breath, your deep breathing activates what's called the parasympathetic nervous system, which calms the fight or flight response, which most people don't realize they're running through their entire day with their body on fight or flight the entire day. So even if it's just a few minutes of just slow, deep breathing, it can shift your entire state inside of your body to a state of relaxation.

10:31So that's the first thing. Please get better at breathing. Second thing, focus on one thing at a time. That's it. Imagine, like think about this for a second. Imagine that I cook you a dinner, big old steak and salad and baked potato. Would you look at that and look at the plate and be like, oh my God, I'm so overwhelmed. No, you wouldn't get overwhelmed by looking at a plate of food. Why? Because you look at that food and go, oh yeah, I don't have to eat all of it at one time. I take one bite at a time. And so when you're looking at your to-do list and you're like, oh my God, I'm so overwhelmed.

11:07It's because you're thinking about all of it at once. One bite at a time. Look at the entire to-do list, prioritize it, and then figure out how to fit into your schedule. Focus on breaking down tasks, not doing everything at once. If you have a big thing like, hey, I need to create a presentation, right? That presentation might seem like a giant mountain you got to cover, right? Well, then let me just take the few different parts of, okay, first off, I got to do market research. Okay, so market research, the first part of it. Then I've got to actually type out what I want in a Google Doc to say.

11:40Then I've got to create the slides. And you take these large tasks and you break them down into smaller tasks so that you don't have to focus on the entire thing, like trying to fit the entire steak into your mouth. And then what you do is you look at the entire thing and you say, okay, I'm going to work on one thing at a time until this is done. Slow down. And then it brings us to our next thing, which is actually to start to use a to-do list more. And so you might say, oh my God, but Rob, you don't understand. To-do lists stress me out. No, it's not your to-do list stressing you out. It's you thinking about your to-do list that's stressing you out.

12:15And so what I always recommend with the prioritization that I was talking about in the last tip is this. You write your to-do list out. And then what you do is you circle your most important thing. You circle your second most important thing. You circle your third most important thing. And then you take out an index card, a little three by five index card. And you write number one down, number two down, number three down. And you take your to-do list and you throw it inside of the drawer. And you just focus on number one, number two, and number three. I will be honest with you. I am really into high performance and productivity.

12:48I don't know if I've ever finished a to-do list in my entire life. I don't. I don't think that I ever have. But what I have focused on is prioritizing the most important tasks and getting them done. So you write down number one, number two, number three, you put in your back pocket, and that's all that you focus on today. And you focus on number one, and you don't worry about anything else until number one is done. You go to number two, you don't worry about anything else until number two is done. If you don't get to number three, then maybe number three is your number one for tomorrow. That's what you do.

13:16You do your to-do list and put your top three things into an index card. That's number three. Number four, stop doing so many things. There's a lot of people that I know listen to this podcast that are people pleasers and you say yes to too many things, right? Do less things, but do them better. Don't say yes to everybody. Don't try to learn as many things you possibly can. Do less things, but do them better. Don't be a jack of all trades. Find something that you love, try to master it, and realize that the way I like to think about it is this. I would rather my skillset and my knowledge be an inch wide, but a mile deep, like just niche down as much as I possibly can versus an inch deep and a mile wide.

14:02You see, that's the way that I really think about life is I wanna master one thing, maybe two things in my entire lifetime. Most people are going, I want to learn, you know, a little bit of French. And then you can speak like four words in French. You're like, I want to learn a little bit of guitar. Like whatever it is, stop doing so many things. Do less things, but do those things better. Which comes down to number four. Number five, try to do more things that you love. If you're overwhelmed, you might just be mentally resisting things that you don't want to do. That might be the truth. If you're burned out, you might not be doing too much.

14:38you might be doing too little of what you love. So make a list of the things that you actually love to do, things that make you happy, and then look at it in the morning and plan out how you can put as many of those things into your day-to-day. And when you incorporate activities that you enjoy, the cool thing about it is that your brain releases dopamine and dopamine actually counteracts the stress hormones and buffers them. So like, for instance, if you're really stressed out and you get dopamine, so you're really stressed out and maybe you watch some comedy, Comedy will release dopamine. You're really stressed out.

15:10You watch some comedy. It actually buffers. It lowers your stress hormones. And so if you start doing things throughout your day when you're normally stressed throughout your day, but you start doing things that you love, it will actually make your stress lower by just adding a couple of things in every single day. You won't be as overwhelmed. So that's number five. Number six, I want you to try stress training for tolerance, like actually try to stress yourself out, not in your mind, but through different activities. So like working out, right? What you want to do is train your body for stress, de-stress, stress, de-stress, stress, de-stress.

15:44You work out really hard for a set and then you close your eyes. You set your timer for 60 seconds instead of going on your phone and looking for 60 seconds on Instagram. You work out really hard. You know, you put yourself into a position of stress and then for 60 seconds, you close your eyes and you just breathe. And then your timer goes off and you go back into doing something stressful. So what you're trying to do is you're trying to train your body and your brain and especially your nervous system to stress and then learn how to de-stress, to stress and learn how to de-stress. This is also really the reason why ice baths are really good is because your body is freaking out and it's saying, we're going to die.

16:23And you're saying, we're going to calm down. And you learn how to calm your body down in an extremely stressful environment. Saunas, exactly the same. When you're in a sauna and your heart's racing, try to calm and regulate your heart race. So when you're practicing controlled stress, like hardcore exercise and cold exposure, all of these things build resistance. And you teach your body how to handle stress in small manageable doses so that real life stress doesn't feel so overwhelming. A lot of times people that are extremely overwhelmed in their life don't have this practice of actual intentional controlled stress.

17:01So that's number six. And then number seven will really help you out. Have a stress journal. Sounds weird. Sounds like it will make you more stressed. It will make you less stressed. Whenever you stress out, put it on a piece of paper. There's a couple benefits to this. Number one, you start becoming more aware of yourself. And number two, you get it out of your brain. Journaling externalizes your thoughts, which reduces your mental load. And then once it's written down, it can be more objectively assessed of like, hey, is this really something that's worth worrying about or am I just catastrophizing?

17:33And you can actually start, I always say once it's on paper, it can be planned. In the end, I just want you to remember that overwhelm is a message. It's not a permanent state. It's your body and your mind asking for just some adjustments. Change this around a little bit, please. Rest a little bit. We need a little bit more balance. So if you just listen to it and make small changes over time, these shifts will transform how you experience stress, how you experience life, and it'll put you in control instead of the mercy of just whatever happens to you, especially not being at the mercy of your to-do list.

18:05So that's what I got for you for today's episode. If you love this episode, please share it on Instagram stories, tag me in at RobDialJr, R-O-B-D-I-A-L-J-R. And if you wanna learn more about coaching with me outside of the podcast, you can learn more at coachwithrob.com. Once again, coachwithrob.com. And with that, I'm gonna leave you the same way I leave you every single episode. Make it your mission to make someone else's day better. I appreciate you and I hope that you have an amazing day.