How to Deal With Overwhelm: 2 Exercises For Your Busiest, Most Stressful Days
To cut right to it, here are two exercises you can use when you’re feeling overwhelmed. You don’t have to do both, you can pick the one that works best for you in the situation.
ABCDE Model
This is a reflective approach that helps you shift your emotions and actions. It does this by helping you identify the beliefs that are contributing to your overwhelm and swapping them with more rational thoughts.
A: Adversity or Activating Event. Identify the event causing the overwhelm.
B: Recognize the Irrational Belief. For example, you might be telling yourself that you “suck” are “stupid” “always messing up” “fat” “ugly” “lazy” “stressed out all the time” or that “nothing ever goes right”.
C: Recognize the Consequence. What happens as a result of you telling yourself these things?
For example, you stop hanging out with other people. Or you don’t push for a promotion at work.
D: Dispute the Irrational Belief and Transform It Into a Rational Belief. Ask yourself if these statements are always true. When were these not true?
For example, you got positive feedback on a work presentation or your friend told you how pretty you looked in an outfit or in a picture you posted. You went for a walk yesterday and that’s not what lazy people do.
Now, You got positive feedback on a work presentation, so obviously, you aren’t stupid. You just haven’t mastered some of the other material yet.
You went for a walk yesterday and clearly aren’t lazy. You just don’t do it as often as you’d like. So that’s a simple change you can make.
E: Recognize the Effect of the Rational Belief. Now that you realize you aren’t “stupid” “lazy” etc., how does that make you feel? What actions will you take now that you are thinking more rationally?
5-4-3–2-1 Exercise
This is a grounding technique that you can use to help calm moments when you are feeling stressed, anxious, overwhelmed. It incorporates the five senses to bring you back into the present moment.
Start by paying attention to your breathing. Inhale slowly, deeply. Once you settle into that breathing:
5) Identify 5 things you can see around you.
4) Identify 4 things you can touch around you.
3) Identify 3 things you can hear.
2) Identify 2 thing you can smell.
1) Identify 1 thing you can taste. If you can’t taste anything, simply observe the experience of no taste.
Why Bother?
It probably goes without saying but since some might like to nerd out a bit, and Google likes longer blog articles, I’ll share a bit of the science behind these and how they help. ;).
You know life feels harder when you’re overwhelmed. You know you don’t sleep as well, you’re prone to headaches, and muscle aches, you’re moodier, you might eat or drink more, or be so stressed you lose your appetite, and it’s harder to get a good night’s sleep. It’s hard to focus and the quality of your work goes down.
If those aren’t reasons enough to break out of the chronic stress and overwhelm cycle, then maybe remembering the long-term health effects of chronic stress will do it. These include heart disease, high blood pressure and stroke, digestive problems, autoimmune syndromes, depression and anxiety. There’s even research showing that chronic stress can lead to some cancers and diabetes (Mariotti, 2015).
Setting aside all the negative, bottom line, don’t you just want to feel your absolute best? Even if you feel good right now, why settle for good when it’s possible to feel freakin’ amazing?!
Managing moments of overwhelm will help you not only go from -5 to 0 but go from 0 to 10. Who wouldn’t want that?
More Tips
There are additional exercises you can try. So if those don’t work, let me know and we can chat. If those work, let me know that too!
I created a little cheat sheet for you to use with the 5-4-3-2-1 Grounding Exercise. Download it here.
Reference
Mariotti A. (2015). The effects of chronic stress on health: new insights into the molecular mechanisms of brain-body communication. Future science OA, 1(3), FSO23. https://doi.org/10.4155/fso.15.21