7 Practical Strategies To Release Stress And Overwhelm.

Feeling stressed and overwhelmed happens all year round! Busy people who lead busy lives are a way of life. How do you release stress and overwhelm effectively? Being busy and productive can feel great! Alternatively, doing busy work that fills up time to escape from unfulfilling relationships or admitting that parts of your life simply don’t work, is distracting at best and at worst destructive to you and those around you.

When you’re stressed and overwhelmed do you:

1. Distract yourself by doing easy tasks and put off doing the important hard ones.
2. Drink coffee and keep plugging away even though your concentration is shot.
   

   It’s way more than a BAD hair day!

3. Keep adding things to your to do list indiscriminately.
4. Procrastinate until the very last minute.

Do any of the above really work? If you continually find yourself overwhelmed and stressed, cranky or withdrawn it is time to figure out a strategy that will work best for you.

Here’s a sampling of my clients’ strategies to release stress and overwhelm.

Physical activity: Mary realizes that working out for 40 minutes helps her to reinvigorate her mind and body so she can then refocus. Prioritizing: Joe finds that clearly prioritizing his to do list and sticking to his priorities helps him avoid overwhelm and release stress. Breathe: Sally simply takes five minutes to deeply breathe and also uses some simple quick acupressure point exercises. Mind break: Cara sets a timer for 15 minutes and then surfs the web stimulating her mind. Delegate: Bob analyzes which activities are really important for him to do and which can be delegated. Say NO: Dana experimented with specifically saying no to her co-workers and found she reclaimed at least an hour a day. Setting boundaries is often the key. Stop multi-tasking: Laura committed to doing one activity at a time and was surprised at how much she accomplished. To be effective, there really is no such thing as multi-tasking. As you read the strategies above, I guarantee that certain techniques resonated more than others. Getting out of feeling overwhelmed usually involves a combination of physical, mental, emotional and spiritual activities. Identify your unique strategy or combination of strategies, and you can melt overwhelm into calm.