The Mindset Mentor - How To Stop Being Overwhelmed

Starting point is 00:00:00 Welcome to today's episode of the Mindset Mentor Podcast. I am your host, Rob Dial. If you have not yet done so, hit that subscribe button so you never miss another podcast episode. And if you're out there and you love this podcast, please do me a massive favor. Go to your phone, pick it out, go to Spotify or Apple podcasts, however you listen to us and give us a rating and review. The reason why is because when we get positive ratings and reviews, what happens is those platforms actually show this podcast to people who have never listened to it before and recommend it to them. So that allows us to continue to keep helping other people and changing the world. Today, we're going to be talking about five steps to help you stop being overwhelmed.

Starting point is 00:00:46 And I am noticing, I am a perceiver of humans, like I'm always watching humans. Humans are so intriguing to me. And I start to see this time of year with everything that's going on, that it seems like people are getting more overwhelmed than normal. In fact, I would say it seems like to me what I've noticed is that people are more overwhelmed or seem overwhelmed or anxious or stressed since 2020. It seems like people are just getting more overwhelmed and stressed in general. And so there's a lot happening in the world right now. There's a lot happening in the

Starting point is 00:01:20 world everywhere. And I don't know if we're ever gonna get to a point in our lives where there's not a lot happening in the world everywhere. And I don't know if we're ever going to get to a point in our lives where there's not a lot happening in the world. When you have 8 billion people, there's always good. There's always bad. It's just always going to be that way. There's always people fighting. There's always people doing things. There's always countries that hate each other.

Starting point is 00:01:37 There's always people getting elected and other sides yelling at them. There's always stuff happening. their sides yelling at them and there's always stuff happening. But with a lot that's happening right now, what we need to do is to figure out how to emotionally regulate ourselves. I've done episodes in the past on how to self-soothe and how to get good at that, but I want to just give you a really simple five-step process to really start to allow yourself to not be so overwhelmed. Because a lot of times if we are not being conscious of our overwhelmed, it kind of takes over to be so stressed and be so anxious all the time. So I just want to give you a simple five-step process just to really help you out.

Starting point is 00:02:14 The first thing is go to your breath. The first thing that I always do, I am human as much as any other person alive. I get stressed. I get anxious. I am human as much as any other person alive. I get stressed. I get anxious. I get overwhelmed. I just happen to have a couple tools in my tool belt that I can pull out and help to get myself out of that state faster than I used to before. The first thing that I always go to is my breath. I do breath work at least two to three times a day. Sometimes it's for calming down. Sometimes it's for energy. Sometimes it's to calming down. Sometimes it's for energy. Sometimes it's to get into meditation, depending on what it is, just another tool in the tool belt,

Starting point is 00:02:49 right? The quickest way to change your state, you've heard me say it so many times in this podcast, is six deep breaths. The breath is always the first thing to change in any state change that we have as humans. So if our breath is the first thing to change, like if we get overwhelmed, if we get anxious, if we get stressed, our breath gets shorter. And as our breath gets shorter, we get less oxygen. As we get less oxygen, we become more stressed out. And so it perpetuates the thing that we're trying to actually reverse. And so the first thing I always do is now that I'm aware that I feel stressed or anxious or overwhelmed, I go to my breath and I do 60 breaths. It's into the nose, out through the mouth. And when I breathe out through the mouth, it's like breathing

Starting point is 00:03:30 out through a straw. The longer that you can exhale, the more it actually slows your heart rate down. So your breath changes, but your heart rate also changes when you become overwhelmed or stressed as well. So by breath, I can start to regulate my breathing and I can start to regulate my heart rate. That alone is going to make your state change. There was a study that was done years ago. I think it's a Japanese study that found that six deep breaths can change someone's state almost immediately. So as you're doing this breath, think of something that you love. Think of somebody that you love. Think of something that you're grateful for. Start to bring in the positive emotions, right? And you have to understand when our emotion is high, our logic is low. So we don't make good decisions when we're

Starting point is 00:04:16 in an overwhelmed state. When our emotion is high, our logic is low, which means that even when we're more stressed or more overwhelmed, we make worse decisions, which then perpetuate again, the way that we feel. And so the first thing I always go back to 60 breaths in through those out through mouth, when I breathe out through a mouth, I try to make my exhale anywhere between six to 10 seconds. Okay. Then what I like to do personally is what I have found is if I can get a pen and paper and I can just flood that piece of paper with everything that's going on in my head, it helps a lot. I was on vacation last week. I was gone for an entire week. I left my phone in the safe. I didn't do anything business. And then I came back, got back on Sunday night. Sunday night, I fell asleep at about 10 o'clock. I woke up at one

Starting point is 00:05:03 and I could not fall back asleep. And so I had to use this strategy on myself because I immediately went into work mode. I immediately started thinking about all the things I needed to do. And we're in the middle of hiring people. So I started thinking about the hiring process, all of that, right?

Starting point is 00:05:15 So all of this stuff started coming into my head. So all I did was I got myself out into my living room. I did some breathing techniques and I wrote down everything that was going on in my head. I had to get it out of my living room. I did some breathing techniques and I wrote down everything that was going on in my head. I had to get it out of my head. Everything. All the BS that you got to do, everything that's stressing you out, all of your thoughts, all of your feelings, all of your fears, allow the mind to release all of it so that you can just leave it on the page. For me, a lot of questions came up, which was an interesting thing. What are

Starting point is 00:05:45 we going to do about this? What are we going to do about that? What are we going to do about leads? What are we going to do about this? What did we used to do a year ago compared to what we do now? And I started comparing and I was like, there was just so many questions that came through and I had literally two pages straight of just writing. Now, did that make it go away? No. Did it relieve me? A ton. Because I was like, okay, now I've got it. And so this is a tactic that literally I used to myself three days ago. And so it helps. It really does help. And it's something I do all the time.

Starting point is 00:06:16 Then what you do is you look at everything that you put down. You look at your entire to-do list. And you just ask yourself one question. What's the next best action to take? What is the next best action to take? Because a lot of times we get overwhelmed. What we're doing is we're thinking about doing our entire to-do list right now in this moment, right? You've done this before, right? You have a to-do list of 24 things and you're thinking to yourself, I need to get all of them done. And you're getting overwhelmed because you're not thinking about the one thing you need to do now. You're thinking about all of the things you need to do now, but you're thinking about them in this very moment

Starting point is 00:06:52 as if you can do all of them at once. And you can't. Usually when you're feeling overwhelmed, you're thinking about all of the different things that need to be, all the actions that need to be taken, the 12 things that you need to do in your business, the seven things that you need to do for your kids when they get home, the 18 things that are going wrong in your life right now, the 43 things that are going wrong in the world right now, it's too much. Your brain does not have the processing power. The same way that your computer can be overwhelmed and slow down when you have way too many tabs open, your brain does the exact same thing. Your brain as a human can only do one thing at a time. Multitasking is a lie. And so part of why you're so stressed out and so overwhelmed

Starting point is 00:07:32 is because you want everything to be done now and it's not possible. You can only do one thing at a time. So you can't do all things. And so if you're overthinking and you're overwhelmed by these things, a lot of times it's because you're thinking about everything and you can't do everything and you have to be okay with that. And so you've got to look at it and say, what is the next best action I could take? If there's one thing on my to-do list that can relieve me from the most amount of stress, the biggest lever that I can pull right now, what would it be? And then you do that one thing. And it kind of goes back to the book that I've mentioned a few times, children's book, and it's also a children's movie. I think it's on Apple TV, which is called The Boy, The Mole, The Fox, The Horse. And there's a moment where the little boy is starting to feel

Starting point is 00:08:20 he's walking through the forest and he's all stressed out. There's a storm that's going through. And the boy says, I can't see through the forest. There's just so many things. I can't see through the forest. And the horse goes, can you see your next step? And he says, yes. And he says, just take that. That's exactly what overwhelm is. That's just a great little story from a child to make children understand it, which is we're seeing the entire forest. We're seeing the storm that's hitting us in the face. We're seeing all of that at once. When in reality, we just need to look down and can we see our next step? Can we identify the next step? Yes. Okay. Just take that. It's one freaking step at a time. We think that we have to do 10 things at once. You could do one

Starting point is 00:09:05 at once. Okay. So those things will start to allow your, your mind to calm down a little bit. God, it's not so crazy. All right. So that's number three. What's the next action I could take? What's the best action I could take? What's the biggest lever I can pull? Okay. Number four is to get your physical body moving, whatever it might be. Do jumping jacks, go for a run, go for a walk. A lot of times when we're feeling overwhelmed, we're thinking about all the things that need to be done, but we're not doing any of them. So we're literally sitting on the couch, stressing the hell out and doing nothing. Whatever it needs to happen, you just need to get your physical body moving. You know,

Starting point is 00:09:45 it's usually when you're sitting on the couch doing nothing that the overwhelm hits you, right? It's usually when you're in the action of moving, like Tony Robbins always says, progress equals happiness. When we're progressing and have that forward motion, if we actually feel like we're progressing and we're checking things off of our to-do list and we're, you know, we're not done with the to-do list, we're actually not done with the first action of the to-do list, but we can see the light at the end of the tunnel for that first action, we start to feel better.

Starting point is 00:10:11 So what is the action that needs to be taken and then start to move towards whatever it is? Like don't do the action yet, just get your physical body moving, right? If we're sitting on the couch and we're overwhelmed, just get up, do something, get your heart rate going, right? Now we're sitting on the couch and we're overwhelmed, just get up, do something, get your heart rate going, right? Now that we've, we've regulated our body, we've regulated our mind a little bit. Now it's time to actually get the physical body moving because action creates more

Starting point is 00:10:35 action. Inaction creates more inaction. And so what we need to do is get up and get our physical body moving. We don't need to check anything off of the list yet. Nothing yet. That's what we're going to do in the next step. We just got to get up and get our physical body moving. We don't need to check anything off of the list yet. Nothing yet. That's what we're going to do in the next step. We just got to get up and get our physical body moving. Whatever it is that you need to do, you need to become, you need to have some sort of practice that you have when you find yourself getting overwhelmed. And so you can go through these steps, but what is your one step? Is it, I'm going to get up. Once I've identified, once I figured all this out, I'm going to do a hundred jumping jacks. I'm going to, I'm going to go for a, a 10 minute walk. Maybe I'll go run on my treadmill for five minutes, whatever it is to get your body

Starting point is 00:11:12 physically moving. So we know action creates more action. So if I'm going to take a little bit action, it's going to turn into more action. And then the last thing, number five, very simple. Take action on the one thing. Now that you have everything cleared out, it's all out of your head. Now that you've got a little bit of a plan, now you know what the best action to take is. Now that you've gotten your physical body moving and you have some body movement, ride that momentum to the most important thing, which is to now take action, to do one thing and one thing only, and to set your timer.

Starting point is 00:11:52 And I have episodes on this in the past. If you want to go listen to it, it's called the Pomodoro Technique. Set your timer for 25 minutes and make a mental contract with yourself that you're not going to do anything in this world except for that one thing for the next 25 minutes. That's it. You set a timer. You don't look at your phone again. You don't write things down. You say, this is the thing that needs to be done. I'm going to do this one thing. And you have to be the person that starts getting really good at doing the one thing, just doing one thing. Become like a sniper rifle, not a shotgun, right? A shotgun just blasts little pellets all over the place.

Starting point is 00:12:31 A sniper rifle, you can see something, you can hit it from 300 yards away and you can hit that thing. That's what you need to start doing. You start to start becoming very surgical on what is the next action that I can take that is going to make me feel like I'm progressing. That's going to relieve my stress. That's going to relieve my overwhelm. I'm going to put on a timer. I'm going to put on my headphones. I'm going to give myself 25 minutes and I'm going to do nothing else except for this thing. Then after that,

Starting point is 00:13:00 I'm going to take a five minute break. And then I say to myself, is that thing finished? Like if you did finish the task, well, then go to the next task. If you didn't finish the task in those 25 minutes, but you made really good headway. All right, well, let's go for another 25 minutes. You know, it's hard to get overwhelmed when you're only thinking about one thing. It's hard to get overwhelmed. And you're literally just thinking about one thing and one thing only. You're not putting the extra stress on yourself, the extra overwhelm, the extra overthinking. You're going, okay, I've got this one thing I got to do.

Starting point is 00:13:33 I'm going to focus on this one thing. And that's simply it. I want you to understand, though, that if you feel overwhelmed, that is a natural thing. Humans, we feel overwhelmed a lot. If you're feeling overwhelmed too often, well, then you Humans, we feel overwhelmed a lot. If you're feeling overwhelmed too often, well, then you need to have a process like this of doing some breathing, of putting your thoughts down a piece of paper, identifying the most important thing, getting your body moving, and just taking the right action. And what it really comes down to is a

Starting point is 00:14:00 retraining process. A lot of us, what we have done, I noticed this when I was younger, and I wasn't really a person that was like, I would say a high performance person, is I had patterns within myself. And when I would find myself getting stressed or overwhelmed, my pattern was to disconnect, was to do something else, was to procrastinate. It was to not do the thing because thinking of the thing brought in too much stress and overwhelm in the first place. So me actually, the feeling of, oh my God, now I got to dive into this thing made me think I was going to get more stressed and overwhelmed. But as I started actually taking the action, started doing the things that need to be done, I realized it relieved my stress and overwhelm. And as I started to notice that it relieved it, I started to work to develop new

Starting point is 00:14:44 patterns within myself to take action on the things that need to be done, to not be overwhelmed. And as I started to notice that it relieved it, I started to work to develop new patterns within myself to take action on the things that need to be done, to not be overwhelmed. And now it gets to the point where do I have stress and overwhelm? Yeah, of course, everybody does. Anxiety, of course, everybody does. But when I notice them, when I become aware of them, I can't change anything that I'm not aware of. But when I become aware of it, I can change it.

Starting point is 00:15:03 So when I become aware of, okay, I feel like I feel a little bit tight in my chest. I feel a little bit like, you know, like I'm, I'm shortness of breath. I feel like my heart's just pumping like crazy. Okay. I'm not going to let this take control because I'm, it's taking control of me right now. I'm going to take a step back and I'm going to be in control of this. I'm going to do my breathing. I'm going to follow the five-step process. And what you'll realize, if you have this actual process, this practice that you use, you will be able to remove your stress, your anxiety, your overwhelm, your overthinking much, much faster than you have been able to in the past. And that is the simple, simple five-step process to stop being so overwhelmed. So if you guys liked this episode,

Starting point is 00:15:46 if this helped you in any sort of way, please do me a massive favor. Please share it on Instagram and tag me in it. RobDialJr, R-O-B-D-I-A-L-J-R. The reason why is because we only grow when you guys share it. And I want to continue to keep impacting people, keep helping people around the world. And there's people who follow you that are completely unaware this podcast exists. And so if you would share it, maybe they can find it. Maybe we can help more people and I would greatly appreciate your help. And with that, I'm going to leave the same way I leave you every single episode. Make it your mission to make someone else's day better. I appreciate you and I hope that you have an amazing day.

The Mindset Mentor - How To Stop Being Overwhelmed

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