Having A Rest Is Not Always Your Best Option.
In these days of self-care and mental health awareness, we are told when things become overwhelming and we feel out of control, we should stop and take a break. Get some rest and allow ourselves to regain our composure and be calm.
The trouble I’ve found with this advice is it doesn’t work. We cannot decide to turn off our brains and go into a kind of hibernation and forget about everything that was causing us to feel overwhelmed and stressed out. Walking away from our troubles is alien to our fundamental human nature. We are natural problem solvers. Being stressed out and overwhelmed is caused by feeling threatened and our fight or flight instincts are in overdrive — it’s not possible to turn them off as if there was a switch we could pull.
This means we either fight it — making us more stressed — or we run away — leaving us feeling worried about it coming back.
Running away from our work is not a viable option for most people, either. People need to earn a living, and running away often leads to losing jobs, which causes more stress and worry.
A more viable option is to address the cause, not the effect. What caused you to feel stressed out and overwhelmed? More often than not, it’s a confusion about what is important, and that has deeper roots than just the work we face each day.
The things we do each day are not created equal, yet we often prioritise the wrong things. We mistakenly think the loudest demanding task is the priority — email, Slack or Teams messages, for instance — when in reality, these are likely to be the least important. Your boss might get upset because you did not respond to her Slack message for thirty minutes, but how much more upset will she be if you consistently miss your targets and deadlines?
Our brains are astonishing; they regulate our essential life support systems, they allow us to learn, grow, develop and make decisions. Unfortunately, they can also be our worst enemy because our brains do not know the difference between something important and something not important. If you think something needs to be done, your brain will keep reminding you it needs doing until you either do it or decide you don’t need to do it. What your brain wants you to do is decide about something.
That decision could be when you will do it, whether you delegate it to someone else or decide not to do it.
Learning to make decisions is not a science; it is an art. The more you practice making decisions about what needs to be done and when the faster and more effectively you will make decisions.
You can’t do everything all at once
I recently read an interview with Foo Fighters’ singer Dave Grohl where he was talking about a challenging period in his life:
“I was ready to snap. I had these journals; I would list each of these problems individually. I’d look at this list and think if I think of all of these things at the same time, I will have a nervous breakdown. If I focus on one at a time, maybe I could solve these problems. Maybe I can make it through. So I try not to get overwhelmed by everything that’s going on. I hit things one at a time.”
And therein lies the secret, knowing you cannot solve all your problems at once. You have to deal with each one at a time. It’s the only way. You will solve nothing if you try to deal with all your worries and stresses all at once. You will find yourself spinning round in circles. The trick is to open a journal or get a piece of paper and write out everything on your mind. Just get it out of your head and then step back and look at the list.
The first thing you will notice is, things are not as bad as you thought. Often you will see immediately what needs to happen first. Pick that one and do what needs to be done. Send an email, make a phone call, complete the form.
Our priorities do not usually come from our employed work. Our priorities come from our values and our wants. What do you value? What do you want? When you know the answer to those questions, you will find prioritising a much easier task. For example, if one of your values is security, whenever you are faced with a problem, you ask yourself: will this enhance or diminish my security? If adventure is a value, then asking whether a situation or problem will lead to an adventure or not will assist you in making the right decisions.
Running away from things rarely ever solves anything. But, stopping, taking a breath and looking at the cause of your stress and then tackling things one at a time is the simplest and best way to release those stressful feelings and put you back in control of your time and your life. And then if you decide you need a rest, you’ll find yourself more relaxed and able to enjoy the break.
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