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How To Deal With Overwhelm
Aug. 20th, 2012 01:17 amYesterday and today I've felt a slight tension in the back of my mind, a little voice whispering, "Stop what you're doing! Something's not right!" And the tenseness of my neck and shoulders spoke of a constant anxiety that would. not. go. away.
Being the internet geek that I am, I went online and googled for a solution. "How to deal with stress" had about 1,110,000 results (with quotes). "How to deal with anxiety" had 453,000.
Then, of course, I spent the past two days implementing various strategies, and here is what I found:
1. If you have a good reason to be anxious, "relaxation" techniques don't help at all.
I had an inkling of why I was anxious. I felt like I wasn't getting anything done. I had to pack for school, I had all these appointments to make, I've been meaning to pack my car for the past three days and haven't done anything but throw some clothes around, and it was driving me crazy. And whenever I tried to tackle these problems, I ended up throwing more clothes around and somehow never got any further than I was, and people were inviting me to lunch and table tennis and I was declining them in order to get nothing done and that was terrible!
When you feel like that, typical advice like "deep breathing" does not work. I mean, maybe it lowers your blood pressure a little bit, but what's really causing your anxiety? That little voice screaming "EFF THIS WHAT AM I DOING?!?!!??!" in your head, and deep breathing doesn't do anything about that.
I understand some people have deep-rooted childhood issues or whatnot that cause them to feel anxious for no reason. For example, it took me years to quell the habit of jumping nervously out of the chair and slamming the screen as soon as someone passed by, if I was playing computer games. Something like that is fixable due to my false assumption that something horrible will happen if I got caught, once true in elementary school and true no longer.
What do you do, then, if your assumption is true? And only becoming truer, as you deep breathe and exercise and go watch comedies and your work gets less and less done in the interim?
2. Tackling the problem head on does not work.
Been there, done that. I went in circles. Like I said, things just did not happen and I could not figure out why.
This might work for some people who are grossly overestimating the problem, so much that they think it's impossible and don't even attempt to tackle it, but IMO if you've tackled this problem a few times and aren't getting anywhere, it's time to take a step back.
3. Picking at your rhetoric does work.
It's not you. It's the way you word it.
No, I'm serious. I found this random piece of advice tacked onto the bottom some flimsy little article in google, and it saved my life! What it basically said was this.
Do not confuse projects with tasks.
I repeat, do not confuse projects with tasks.
It even listed some examples. For instance, if your to-do list is populated with items such as "move into apartment," "write book," or "eat healthy," of course you won't know where to start! This is not your fault. It's because the wording's too vague.
I looked down at my to-do list, and sure enough, I'd written "pack car." Suddenly it all made sense.
This was not a quick hour-long job. Or even a two-, three-hour job. It involved figuring out what I would need, gathering it all together, going out to purchase anything I might be missing, finding boxes and stuff to pack everything in in a semilogical order, and moving everything to my car. No wonder I was feeling panicked and unaccomplished! I would attempt to start "packing the car," and after an hour, have not much more done than a halfhearted effort in "gathering stuff together" because I didn't have enough boxes and things and had no idea where to put everything AND I hadn't properly figured out what I would need. So I was left with a vague sense that I definitely did not have everything I needed and an increasing feeling of powerlessness and frustration.
To be fair, there were a lot of sites that told me to "break it down," which in most respects sounds pretty similar to the rhetoric I mentioned above. However, "breaking it down" or "chunking it" into smaller tasks just didn't cut it for me. Reason? In my mind, I still viewed "packing the car" as one item. I might have broken it down into five steps, but getting to one step took a long time, AND even with the step completely I felt like I was barely 10% of the way there. Barely 10% of the way to completing one task - the most important one! - on my to-do list.
After I shifted my mindset and realized it was silly to categorize this way (after all, I never write "clean house," I write "clean sink area" and "clean bookshelf"), I suddenly felt so much better. I labelled the whole thing as a project and suddenly I had 6-7 extra tasks on my list, some of which were dependent upon each other, but manageable all the same. This just goes to show how powerful perception can be.
If you are anything like me, try writing down what you've been trying to do exactly the way it sounds in your head. Then look at it, and see if it makes sense proportionally to time. If what you're wanting to do is actually going to take upwards of a couple of hours, perhaps you're overgeneralizing, like me. :)
Being the internet geek that I am, I went online and googled for a solution. "How to deal with stress" had about 1,110,000 results (with quotes). "How to deal with anxiety" had 453,000.
Then, of course, I spent the past two days implementing various strategies, and here is what I found:
1. If you have a good reason to be anxious, "relaxation" techniques don't help at all.
I had an inkling of why I was anxious. I felt like I wasn't getting anything done. I had to pack for school, I had all these appointments to make, I've been meaning to pack my car for the past three days and haven't done anything but throw some clothes around, and it was driving me crazy. And whenever I tried to tackle these problems, I ended up throwing more clothes around and somehow never got any further than I was, and people were inviting me to lunch and table tennis and I was declining them in order to get nothing done and that was terrible!
When you feel like that, typical advice like "deep breathing" does not work. I mean, maybe it lowers your blood pressure a little bit, but what's really causing your anxiety? That little voice screaming "EFF THIS WHAT AM I DOING?!?!!??!" in your head, and deep breathing doesn't do anything about that.
I understand some people have deep-rooted childhood issues or whatnot that cause them to feel anxious for no reason. For example, it took me years to quell the habit of jumping nervously out of the chair and slamming the screen as soon as someone passed by, if I was playing computer games. Something like that is fixable due to my false assumption that something horrible will happen if I got caught, once true in elementary school and true no longer.
What do you do, then, if your assumption is true? And only becoming truer, as you deep breathe and exercise and go watch comedies and your work gets less and less done in the interim?
2. Tackling the problem head on does not work.
Been there, done that. I went in circles. Like I said, things just did not happen and I could not figure out why.
This might work for some people who are grossly overestimating the problem, so much that they think it's impossible and don't even attempt to tackle it, but IMO if you've tackled this problem a few times and aren't getting anywhere, it's time to take a step back.
3. Picking at your rhetoric does work.
It's not you. It's the way you word it.
No, I'm serious. I found this random piece of advice tacked onto the bottom some flimsy little article in google, and it saved my life! What it basically said was this.
Do not confuse projects with tasks.
I repeat, do not confuse projects with tasks.
It even listed some examples. For instance, if your to-do list is populated with items such as "move into apartment," "write book," or "eat healthy," of course you won't know where to start! This is not your fault. It's because the wording's too vague.
I looked down at my to-do list, and sure enough, I'd written "pack car." Suddenly it all made sense.
This was not a quick hour-long job. Or even a two-, three-hour job. It involved figuring out what I would need, gathering it all together, going out to purchase anything I might be missing, finding boxes and stuff to pack everything in in a semilogical order, and moving everything to my car. No wonder I was feeling panicked and unaccomplished! I would attempt to start "packing the car," and after an hour, have not much more done than a halfhearted effort in "gathering stuff together" because I didn't have enough boxes and things and had no idea where to put everything AND I hadn't properly figured out what I would need. So I was left with a vague sense that I definitely did not have everything I needed and an increasing feeling of powerlessness and frustration.
To be fair, there were a lot of sites that told me to "break it down," which in most respects sounds pretty similar to the rhetoric I mentioned above. However, "breaking it down" or "chunking it" into smaller tasks just didn't cut it for me. Reason? In my mind, I still viewed "packing the car" as one item. I might have broken it down into five steps, but getting to one step took a long time, AND even with the step completely I felt like I was barely 10% of the way there. Barely 10% of the way to completing one task - the most important one! - on my to-do list.
After I shifted my mindset and realized it was silly to categorize this way (after all, I never write "clean house," I write "clean sink area" and "clean bookshelf"), I suddenly felt so much better. I labelled the whole thing as a project and suddenly I had 6-7 extra tasks on my list, some of which were dependent upon each other, but manageable all the same. This just goes to show how powerful perception can be.
If you are anything like me, try writing down what you've been trying to do exactly the way it sounds in your head. Then look at it, and see if it makes sense proportionally to time. If what you're wanting to do is actually going to take upwards of a couple of hours, perhaps you're overgeneralizing, like me. :)
