Practices to Calm Your Mind

In our fast-paced, always-on, busy-glorifying society, it’s clear feeling overwhelmed is a universal struggle. So too is the self-inflicted pressure we put on ourselves. Perfectionism, defined as “as a combination of excessively high personal standards and overly critical self-evaluations”, is visibly on the rise. Our growing perfectionist tendencies have also been identified as a key driver of depression and anxiety.  

When we feel overwhelmed from both external and internal pressures, it’s like we’re signaling to our brain that our demands outweigh our resources. Our brain interprets this as danger, and we risk triggering the ‘fight, flight, or freeze’ stress response. If it goes on long enough, we might start experiencing physical symptoms of anxiety, such as breathing difficulties, heart palpitations, headaches and irritable bowel syndrome, as well as increasingly low mood and energy.

All of us experience times when we feel overwhelmed. It is a reality in today’s world as we each travel our life journeys. But it is a CHOICE as to whether we freeze or take control of each moment by becoming mindful and living each moment fully present with the ability to manage our mind rather than allowing our mind to manage us by integrating mindfulness practices which include mental-wellness into our daily lives.

The key to preventing this is to develop our mental wellness skills. Without mental wellness skills, we may find ourselves resorting to our natural instinct to do nothing and withdraw; it’s called the ‘fight, flight, or freeze response. Recognizing our tendency to freeze is the first step in developing our helpful response strategy. Once we recognize we’re in the stress response, we can mindfully choose what we do next.

So how can you deal with those moments of feeling overwhelmed that freeze you right in your tracks. Here are insights from my experience for how to stop feeling overwhelmed. They can be summarized into four key areas:

1.     One-Focus Mindset

• Breathe, focus on one task, drink tea and reflect in solitude.
• Stop for a second to observe what you have to do and then trying to prioritize is the key.
• Focus on being present. Stop what you’re doing and pick one singular task and focus on just that. Examine how you’re feeling in every moment and what your senses are experiencing.

These insights are summarized in the ‘STOP technique’. When we notice ourselves feeling overwhelmed, we can use this technique to help us focus on one thing at a time.

STOP! Interrupt your mental chatter with the command ‘stop!’ and pause whatever you’re doing.

TAKE A BREATH… Notice your breathing for a second. Breathe in slowly through the nose, expanding the belly, and exhale slowly out of your mouth.

OBSERVE… Become the observer of your thoughts, emotions and physical reactions. What thoughts do you notice? What emotions do you feel? What does your body feel like?

PROCEED… Mindfully consider how you’d like to respond. What’s one thing you can focus on right now? What’s your most important and urgent priority?

2.     Can-Control My-Self Mindset

• Writing can help a lot. putting pen to paper can help sort out your thoughts much better.
• Panic comes from the what ifs and the unknown. Focusing on what is right in front of you is the easiest way to eliminate any thoughts of the future.
• Write a huge brain dump of everything you’ve got to do, highlight in different colors to prioritize, then pick three things of high priority to do that day. Half the time with overwhelm the problem is freezing and doing nothing, so this helps you stop panicking and just get three things done which makes you feel so much better!

Studies show that when we adopt a can-control mindset, we see meaningful and lasting differences in our well-being, health, and performance.

3.    Practicing Relaxation

If we experience regular overwhelm and have shifted into a state of auto-stress (experiencing physical symptoms of anxiety such as heart palpitations, breathing difficulties, headaches, and irritable bowl syndrome on an ongoing basis), practicing relaxation is fundamental to feeling calmer. To understand why, we need to delve into the science of what’s happening in our bodies.

The fight, flight or freeze stress response is triggered by a part of our nervous system whose job it is to control our automatic functions (e.g. our breathing, heartbeat, and digestive processes). This part of our nervous system is called the autonomic nervous system. Our autonomic nervous system is split into two branches, the sympathetic branch and the parasympathetic branch. These branches work opposite each other and only one can dominate at a time.

When we’re auto-stressed, our sympathetic nervous system goes into overdrive. This is what gives rise to the distressing physical responses we experience when stressed.

To feel calmer, we need to balance the activity of our autonomic nervous system by activating our parasympathetic nervous system (a.k.a. ‘the relaxation response’). This demonstrates a highly important fact, rest and relaxation are productive and vital to our well-being.

Rest and relaxation help us be our healthiest, most productive selves. I cannot emphasize this enough!

When it comes to relaxation and enhancing our mental wellness in general, different things work at different times for different people.

What we need to do is become the scientists of our own well-being, trying and testing different methods to discover what works best for us.

It’s also important to remember that relaxation is a skill, finding it difficult to relax is extremely common. Practice makes progress. Here are 4 things I’ve discovered work well for activating my relaxation response:

• Deep breathing exercises using the Insight Timer or Calm apps
• Mindfulness meditation
• Listening to the sound of rain or thunderstorms in a forest
• Digital detoxing
• Walking /Hiking in nature
• Play

4.    Expressing Feelings

Finally, expressing our feelings and talking about it with others is another powerful way to stop feeling overwhelmed. So powerful in fact, it’s an in-built biological instinct. Research shows we release a hormone, oxytocin, that encourages us to seek social support during stressful times. This has been called the ‘tend and befriend’ response to stress.

What’s interesting is that women have been shown to reach out to others significantly more than men. What’s even more interesting is the theory that this relates to women’s higher life expectancy; the hypothesis is that the male response to stress (which includes higher levels of social withdrawal, aggression, and substance abuse) puts them at higher risk for adverse health-related consequences. In contrast, the ‘tend and befriend’ response used more by women has been shown to reduce our stress response by lowering heart rate, blood pressure, and cortisol, and thus is protective to health.

If you don’t feel you have anyone you can open to right now, there are ways to do this anonymously. For example, the website and app 7 Cups connects people with volunteer listeners for free. There’s also the app Pacifica that has many great features including supportive community forums, guided meditations and mood tracking.

Research also shows expressing our feelings in a journal can be powerfully therapeutic!

So, there we have it, 4 powerful practices to help you stop feeling overwhelmed:

1. Adopt One-Focus Mindset
2. Adopt Can-Control My-Self Mindset
3. Practice Relaxation
4. Express Feelings 

All of us experience times when we feel overwhelmed. It is a reality in today’s world as we each travel our life journeys.  But it is a CHOICE as to whether we freeze or take control of each moment by becoming mindful and living each moment fully present with the ability to manage our mind rather than allowing our mind to manage us!

Looking to UNLOCK-AWAKEN-DEVELOP YOUR POTENTIAL contact me at tomclark.momentsofchoice@gmail.com.