Stress Reducer Tip – Stop!
February 17th, 2009Okay, here’s another counterintuitive technique.
Stress and overwhelm are inextricably linked. Our natural inclination is to struggle to get out of the overwhelm by ramping up our activity. Somehow if we move fast enough the thinking goes, we’ll get out of it. If we could only finish everything that needs to be done…
It’s something like trying to swim out of a rip current*. It’s not possible. You can’t swim to shore when you’re caught in a rip current and you can’t outrun your overwhelm.
When feeling overwhelmed, the only thing you can do is STOP.
Stop what you’re doing. Take a deep breath. Take the day off. Go for a walk. Go on vacation. It doesn’t really matter. It doesn’t really matter how long you stop as long as you put on the brakes and come to a complete stop.
Overwhelm feeds on itself and unless you break the cycle, you’ll drown in it. The worst part is that for all that effort and struggle, you become less and less effective until it feels like you’re trying to win a race by running backwards.
I understand this goes against all your instincts, mine too, but I have learned from hard experience that the most effective way to deal with overwhelm and the stress it creates is to stop and rest. Then I can return to whatever needs doing feeling refreshed and renewed. You can too.
When you do this, something very interesting happens…many of the things you were feeling pressured by, no longer feel urgent or even important. In fact you’ll probably look at your to-do list (more on that later) and start crossing things off because they really don’t need doing. Now that really does lighten the load.
* For those of you who don’t live near the ocean, a rip current is a strong ocean current that pulls you away from shore, and it is impossible to swim back to shore no matter how strong a swimmer you are. The only way out is to swim parallel to the shore until you are out of the current, then swim in.
