If you’re feeling overwhelmed, listen to 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 wanna get some mindset tips, tricks, techniques, inspirational text messages from me throughout the week, text me right now, 512-580-9305. Once again, 512-580-9305. Today, we're gonna be talking about how to stop feeling overwhelmed. And I'm gonna give you a simple five-step process. There's a lot that's happening in the world right now. And there always will be a lot that's happening in the world.

0:45And it can feel very overwhelming if we think of everything that's going on in the world and everything that's going on in our own lives. And, you know, when you look at that, the feeling of overwhelm, it's not a glitch in your system. It's life. That's just kind of how it is. You know, our brains evolved in a world of immediate threats, not endless to-do lists. An immediate threat is like, I've got to fix this. immediately right now or I could die. And so we're wired to try to solve that threat immediately and to react to it immediately. And we're wired to kind of treat an inbox overload like a lion attack.

1:23That's just the jungle that we live in today. And so when we look at overwhelm, before I give you the five-step process, I want to talk about what overwhelm actually is. Because whether you realize it or not, this might trigger you in some sort of way. Overwhelm is not real. Overwhelm does not exist in reality. It only exists within you. You are actually creating that feeling of overwhelm. Overwhelm isn't out there. It's in here. And so overwhelm doesn't exist as an object. You can't pick it up. You can't photograph it. You can't put it on a scale and weigh it. Overwhelm is your nervous system's reaction to perceived demands exceeding your perceived capacity.

2:10Not actual demands, not actual capacity, perceived. And so here's what happens in your brain whenever you feel overwhelmed. Your amygdala, which is your alarm system, senses a threat like too many tasks or too many decisions or too much uncertainty. It sends a distress signal in your prefrontal cortex of your brain, which is your thinking, planning, reactional brain, starts to actually shut down. You can't prioritize. You can't decide. You can't act clearly. And the result of that is overwhelm. You feel frozen, spinning, irritable. You're tired and wired at the same time somehow. And then you feel it inside of your body after that.

2:54So it all starts in your brain, and then it ends up going into your body. You get a tight chest, shallow breath, tension headaches, you get gut issues, you can have restlessness or total shutdown. And while it's a brain state, your whole system gets hijacked. But the brain doesn't distinguish really well between like a real threat that's actually in reality, like a lion charging at you or a perceived one, which is like a boss's email at 6 p.m. Your body just, it reacts the same. Danger, we need to fix something. You know, so when you're thinking, I have too much to do and I'll never get enough done and you're saying that to yourself and that story is creating the overwhelm, your body basically hears we're under attack.

3:42And so it's kind of like, it's kind of like fog. Like you can't touch fog, but you can sure as hell really feel it. And so the empowering part of overwhelm is that since overwhelm is generated inside of you, it also means that you can regulate it, you can shrink the overwhelm, and you can even train your brain to not default to being overwhelmed like many of us have. And so that's what we're gonna dive into today. And we're gonna go through the five-step process to do it, okay? So step number one, you've heard me say this hundreds of times in this podcast. just breathe that's step number one it is the quickest way to change your state whenever you get overwhelmed or you get anxious any of that your heart rate starts pumping your your chest gets tight you start breathing really shallow breath is always the first thing to change in a state so if you want to change your state change your breath first it's the fastest way to retake control of your nervous system.

4:45And so what we're going to do, we're going to breathe. And as you're doing it, think of someone or something that you're grateful for. Just, and then you can think about your husband or your wife or your mom or your son, your daughter. And what you're doing is you're taking re-control of your body and then you're retaking control of your brain. This is how I'm going to feel. This is what I'm going to think about. right? And you do this because you're the one that's now in control. You're saying, I'm retaking control. And this is why it's important. The amygdala, which is your panic button, as I was talking about a minute ago, hijacks your prefrontal cortex, which is your planner, your decision maker, your CEO brain.

5:30And breath activates what's called the parasympathetic nervous system. This is your calm, rest, digest, chill mode. The breath activates the chill mode. so you can think again. You can take control of your brain again. And this isn't like woo-woo, this is neuroscience. Six deep breaths, specifically in through the nose and out through the mouth can significantly drop your cortisol levels, which is your stress hormone in your body. You want to think of your breath as like a reboot to the system. Before you do anything else, like let's reboot the system. It's like when you call, you know, it's like the old things where you'd see and it was like SNL and it was like, you know, whatever genius bar, whatever it is.

6:18And they would answer the phone. Hello, have you tried turning it off and turning it back on? Like, that's exactly what you're doing. If you've ever had a problem with your computer, try turning off and turning it back on first. If you have a problem with the system that's going on in your body, reboot it, turn it off and turn it back on. And you do that through your breath work. So that's the first thing. The second thing that I really recommend is to get a pen and paper and write everything that's on your mind down on a piece of paper. Get it all out of your head. Everything. Like all of this BS that's just bouncing around inside of your brain, it's got to go.

6:52That's the everything that's stressing you out. All of your thoughts, all of your feelings, all of your to-do list. And you just allow your mind to release it. and now it doesn't have to be in your brain because it can live on that page. And this is more than just like venting. You're not venting to the piece of paper. It's called externalizing your cognitive load. And when your brain tries to hold on to too many open loops, which is like unfinished tasks and ideas and worries, your brain starts to burn out. And so writing converts this swirling chaos that's inside of your head into concrete data.

7:33okay, it's right here, I can see it. And there's a thing that's called the Ziegernick effect. And what it means is that our brains will fixate on unfinished business until it is acknowledged or until it is closed. And so the fact that you can just acknowledge it allows your brain to just go, okay, if it's on that piece of paper, I don't need to have it bouncing around my head for the next five hours. And we will be right back. And now back to the show. So you basically can give your brain closure by taking it, putting it on a piece of paper. Super, super important to do. And I've said this before, but you really have to think about it.

8:12Like if I said, what's five times seven, most people can figure that out. But if I said, you know, what's 342 times 47, you might be able to figure out in your head if you're really good. But if I said, you know, here's pen and paper, most people can figure it out. You can go and try to figure that out on paper. But if you have your entire life and everything that's happening and all of your to-do lists and all of your feelings and all of the different relationships that you have in your life swirling around your head, it's way more complex than that math problem is. So if you wouldn't solve a math problem in your head, but you'd ask for a pen and paper and figure it out, why don't you do the exact same thing with the stuff that's going on in your head?

8:51Really? It just makes it so much easier. Okay? So that's number two. Put it all on paper. Number three is to ask yourself the question, what is the next best action to take? Identify what the next best action is for you. Usually when you're feeling overwhelmed, what's actually going on is you're not thinking about one thing. You're thinking about 75 different actions that need to be taken in your life. There's 17 things that need to be done in your business. There's 12 things that need to be done for your kids before they get home. There's 16 things that are wrong in your life right now. And you're just thinking about all of them at one time and trying to figure out, well, what am I supposed to do?

9:32It's honestly too much. You know, like our brains weren't meant to do and think about as much as we have to today. You know, if it was 200 ,000 years ago, it was like, tribe is hungry. Maybe we should try to go hunt something down. That's basically it. So a human can only do one thing at a time. If you think multitasking is something, multitasking is a lie. There's many studies and I've done episodes on it. On multitasking is not even possible. You're just single tasking. You're doing two things. You're switching from one to the other and you cannot do that well. And so part of why you're so stressed out is because you want to do all of the 75 things that are going on in your head right now.

10:13And you can't. It's impossible. You can only do one thing at a time. You cannot do all of the things. So there's a cognitive term for this. It's called choice overload. The more options that you're juggling, the more paralyzed your decision-making becomes. And so one decision, you figure out what it is, it clears the bandwidth for execution. And a good question to ask yourself is this, right? If I only had 10 minutes of energy left today, what would I spend it on? What would I do if I only had 10 minutes of energy? That right there is a target that you wanna focus on. So that's number three. Number four, now we're going to go back to the body.

10:52We're going to get your body moving in some sort of way. Do jumping jacks, do pushups, go for a walk. A lot of times when we have these feelings of overwhelm, it's we're thinking of all of the things that need to be done, but we're not doing any of them. And what we're usually doing is we're usually sitting in a chair or sitting on the couch, doing nothing, and then the overwhelm will hit you. Like very rarely do I hear of somebody who's on a long distance run in the morning and they start getting overwhelmed by their to-do list. Very rarely do I hear about people that are, you know, at the gym and then they get overwhelmed by their to-do list.

11:31It's usually one word stagnant that overwhelm usually comes in and barges through the door. So you need some form of physical and mental forward motion, some form of progress. Action creates more action. Inaction creates more inaction. So if you're getting overwhelmed and you're sitting in your chair in your office, move your body in some sort of way because movement regulates your mood. When you move, your body releases endorphins, which are feel-good hormones, so you start to feel better. It also releases brain-derived neurotrophic factor, which boosts your focus. And so this is why even like a five-minute brisk walk can feel really good.

12:16and like a mindset reset. Think of movement as like a manual override for your anxiety. It breaks this freeze response that we get stuck in. We're like, I don't know what to do next. There's so many different things. It's like, I'm moving, my body's moving, forward motion cues your nervous system to think to itself, I'm not stuck, I'm safe. What's the next thing? Let's go. And so that's number four. You wanna get your physical body moving in some sort of way. And then number five, the last thing, that thing that you wrote down, the thing that you said was the most important thing, take action on the first thing.

12:52Now that you have some movement in your body, now that you have some forward momentum, now that you have some progress, you want to ride that momentum into the most important action for you to take right now. It's one thing and one thing only. You want to think of it as like a sniper rifle versus a shotgun. If you shoot a shotgun, it kind of sprays the pellets all over the place. A sniper rifle is just one bullet. Shoot is, you know, try to get to the target, that one part of the target that you need to. That's what you want to think. Like, I want to be a sniper rifle at this point. And so it's hard to get overwhelmed when you're only thinking about one thing.

13:30And so you basically are thinking to yourself, OK, I wrote everything down on the piece of paper that I need to get done. I'm going to pull one thing off this piece of paper and focus on this one thing. And if your brain goes, well, hold on, but I've also got this to do. Go, no, no, no, brain. hey, that thing is on the piece of paper that we put down together. Like everything that was going through my head. I'll come back to that later. I'm only focused on this thing. And you can say something that one of my coaches years ago told me. I had a coach years ago and he was like, whenever your brain just feels like it's taking over, just say not right now.

14:03And I was like, that's stupid. That doesn't seem like it would work. And then I woke up one morning and my brain was like racing, racing, racing. And I said, not right now. And my brain was like, okay. And I was like, hold on, did that just actually work? And then the thing kind of came back up a little bit. I was like, no, no, no, no, brain. I said not right now. My brain's like, all right, cool. We'll do it within the morning. So it's the same thing. I'm focusing on this one thing, this one thing only. If anything else comes up, I go, hey, not right now. And so the idea of like getting to this one thing and only doing one thing is what psychologists call the implementation intention.

14:38And progress, just a little bit of progress produces dopamine. and dopamine is the chemical of motivation and dopamine creates momentum. So small wins are not just nice, they neurologically make you want to keep going and start actually doing stuff. And so this is what's really important about is that you have full control over this overwhelm that you've been feeling. You're actually creating the overwhelm and if you're creating the overwhelm, it means that you're also the person that can help you get rid of it. And if you follow the five-step process, it makes it a lot easier as well. So that's what I got for you for today on this super short episode.

15:16If you love this episode, please share it on your Instagram stories. Tag me in it, Rob Dial Jr., R-O-B-D-I-A-L-J-R. And if you want to do some actual coaching with me, live, some Zoom sessions and a group session, we do that every single week. So you can join us. If you want to learn more about it, go to mindsetmentor.com. Once again, mindsetmentor.com. And with that, I'm going to leave you the same way I leave you every single episode. Make it your mission, make somebody else's day better. I appreciate you and I hope that you have an amazing day.