How to Get Rid of Overwhelm

Don’t Be a Donkey Hack – Derek Sivers

Owner of CD Baby – How to deal with being overwhelmed – this has to do with the parable in the bible! It involves a donkey stuck in the desert, and after going a long time without any food or water, he reached a place where he has water on one side and food on the other! So, he keeps debating whether he should eat first or quench his thirst with the water. He keeps thinking and thinking which one he should start with. But he couldn’t decide on which one to do sequentially, so he ended up dying of thirst! So, what’s the morale to the story? You can do a lot of things, but you can’t do them all at one time. You got to do it one at a time! So, don’t be a donkey! Make a written list of everything you want to do and reverse engineer it to the first task. Then you can take one step at a time to get there!

10 Deep Breaths Hack – How to deal with feeling overwhelmed in middle of the day

When you get really overwhelmed in the middle of the day and I, like you, feel like you can’t take any action, you may not have enough time to meditate and not be mindful enough to feel grateful. So just focus on taking 10 deep breaths – deep breath in and deep breath out! Just focus on the breath and you’ll notice it will calm you down and be able to think rationally there after! That’s the five-minute hack… If you have 15 minutes, almost every successful person says the best way to be able to get a new frame of mind of thinking is to take a long walk! Get the body into motion! To take a break and you’ll be able to see whatever was overwhelming you from a different perspective by the time you’re done as well! It will also help you to come up with some great ideas you may not have been able to think about when you were feeling overwhelmed!

Facil (Spanish for Easy) Hack – Robert Rodriguez

How to avoid feeling overwhelmed when you have a team and lots of what seems like impossible tasks – We would put a lot of tasks together for my team and at the end of it I say it’s facil, and the worry and overwhelm would come off their face. I actually had no idea if it could all get done, but I know worrying about it wasn’t going to help at all. And when we did get it done, I would say “See, Wasn’t that facil?”

Basically, we’re capable of doing a lot more than we think. Our brains, our fear, our sense of what’s possible and the reality of “only” 24 hours in a day” gives us preconceived notions of what is humanly possible!

I like the idea of setting what seems like impossible challenges and, in one word, making it sound doable, because it suddenly is! So, I choose facil, which is easy in Spanish. It’s a good reminder that anything can be done with relative ease and less stress, if you have the right mindset!