Feeling Overwhelmed? Try These 4 Easy Steps!

4 steps to take control when you're feeling overwhelmed. Now, this is a video that I just watched by Mel Robbins. If you don't know who Mel Robbins is, I encourage you to check her out. Her video, The Let Them Theory, has changed my life. It's changed my wife's life. It doesn't matter what stage of life you're in. Mel Robbins has great advice, and The Let Them Theory book is something that I highly, highly recommend. So she dropped the video, and it's 4 steps to take control when you're feeling overwhelmed. So let's go through the steps. So step number 1, what Mel says is that you need to decide whether this is stress or this is overwhelm. Are you feeling stressed or are you overwhelmed? Are you— you can be stressed about dinner, stressed about traffic, stressed about bills. But are you feeling overwhelmed about the amount of stuff coming at you? So the first step that she recommends is label it. Is it more stress or is it more overwhelm? That's step number 1. Step number 2, breathing. Now this shouldn't come as a shock to any one of us. All of us know that there's breathing that we should be doing to calm our nervous systems down. But there's so many different types. There's box breathing, there's 4-7-8, there's all these different types of breathing. So what type of breathing does she recommend? She recommends two sharp inhales and an exhale. And what this reminds me of is, for those of you who have ugly cried, raise your hand, that's exactly what you do when you ugly cry. You do those two sharp in— inhales and that exhale. And she goes into the science of why this is effective. But that's a great technique, and you can do it any, any time, and it doesn't take long. The third thing that she talks about is a brain dump. And a little humble brag on my part, but when my daughter was freshman year in college, she had a roommate who— she thought everything was fine, and then all of a sudden it wasn't, and the roommate just left. There was no meeting with the RA. There was no goodbyes. There was no resolution at all. And so my daughter had all these thoughts of like, what did I do? What did I say? You know, she had all these feelings that she needed to process and the exams were coming up. So what I told her to do was exactly this: write down all your feelings. Don't worry about grammar. Don't worry about punctuation. Don't worry about any of it. Just write down your feelings, stream of consciousness, until you feel better. It can take one page, it can take, you know, 5 minutes, it can take 10 minutes, it could take an hour until your body starts to calm down. That's when you know that you're done. Now, Mel Robbins, in her video, she says to do it for 10 minutes. I think that's great too. I don't have a problem with that. Do it for as long as you can. If you only have 1 or 2 minutes, do it for that. If you only have 5 minutes, do it for that. Ideally 10 minutes, but in my humble opinion, I would even go further. I would go for as long as it takes to make you feel better. So that's number 3. Number 4. Number 4 is really interesting because we all know this. When we get overwhelmed, it's because too much is coming at us that we don't have control over. When we don't have control over, we don't feel in charge of our lives. And so her recommendation is to do one thing that makes you feel like you're making forward progress. What's one thing that you can do to make you feel like you have some momentum in your life? It can be, you know, not drinking. It can be going for a walk. It can be, you know, starting to play an instrument or signing up for a class that you've always wanted. Something like that where you feel like you're making progress is huge. So those are the 4 steps that she talks about. I think these are great steps. I would highly recommend them. I would love to know what you all think. Now, is this stuff that you knew before? Or is this kind of, I knew this, but this has some tweaks on it, or did you not know this before? Or is there something you'd like to add? So put a note in the comments and I'll see you in the next video. Thanks.