Everyone’s lives get a little crazy sometimes. Colliding schedules, long activities, excessive school assignments, and more can make it easy for people to feel overwhelmed. Feeling overwhelmed can cause people to either attempt to conquer all these tasks or situations, or stop and do none. Managing these feelings in relation to one’s environment and personal situations can help people learn how to plan things accordingly, prevent burnout, and put an end to task paralysis.
Feeling overwhelmed triggers a lot of stress. Stress is known to make people prone to a multitude of mental health disorders, underlining the importance of addressing feeling overwhelmed in the first place.
Now that this is clear, the number one thing to do when you are feeling overwhelmed is to find a short moment to de-stress. A good way to do this is to engage in hobbies. The impact of hobbies on mental health and stress levels is further explained in another Mental H2O article:
Overall, a short period spent practicing a hobby can be a good way to regroup and plan out the rest of your day while doing a mindful activity that you enjoy.
Moving forward, listening to music can help bring down stress levels and therefore minimize the effects of feeling overwhelmed throughout the day. In a study published in the National Library of Medicine it was found that listening to music lessened the psychological stress response, and in turn was beneficial to the population observed in the study (Thoma et al., 2013). So whenever you are feeling overwhelmed it is good to take a few moments while you are doing work and listen to a few of your favorite songs.
Lastly, if you are a visual learner and have a lot of tasks to do in one day. A great way to ease your feelings of frustration and being overwhelmed is writing down everything you have to do. Outlining your day can prevent you from procrastinating tasks and increasing feelings of being overwhelmed. Adding scheduled times for each task can also help you see that completing them is achievable and prevent task paralysis at the start of the day. Doing this sets up your day to be successful while also giving you a visual reference that decreases stress as it makes your situation more realistic.
Written By: Carmela Gonzalez, Mental H2O Youth Resource Writer
References:
Thoma, M. V., La Marca, R., Brönnimann, R., Finkel, L., Ehlert, U., & Nater, U. M. (2013). The Effect of Music on the Human Stress Response. PLoS ONE, 8(8), e70156. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0070156
