Heather Aardema teaches three quick ways to lower cortisol when decluttering feels overwhelming: go barefoot in the sun, do slow horizontal eye movements, or fold forward like a rag doll. She also leads a two-minute hand-focused grounding exercise to shift from reactive to intentional thinking.
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Feeling overwhelmed. When it comes to your clutter and when it comes to decluttering, the good news is this is optional. You don't have to feel this way. There is both a physiology and a psychology to overwhelm. The physiology simply means that when you are feeling overwhelmed, your stress hormone cortisol is probably going through the roof. And there's something you can do about that. One of my favorite things to do when I can feel that overwhelm buildup inside of me is to change my state, meaning I go outside. So if I've been inside, I go outside. I love going outside barefoot in the spring, summer, or fall. And I love putting my face up towards the sun and closing my eyes. It feels so good. Another thing you can do when you're feeling overwhelmed, and this might look a little funny, is you can keep your face perfectly straight, and then you can look to the right and left over and over until you yawn. And you use your eyes to calm you down. So I'm going to show you what it looks like. The face stays straight, and you look back and forth horizontally, almost as if you're scanning the horizon. And you can do it with your eyes open or closed until you yawn. Okay, I feel the yawn. Not gonna yawn. Try that and see what it does for you. It should really calm your body in just a moment or two. What else can you do? You can stand up, stand up, and then bend over in a position called rag doll. When you stand up and then beg, bend over. You just kind of allow your arms and your torso to move back and forth until you feel a sense of calm. All of these ideas will help you lower the cortisol and help you move forward from a state of overwhelm. So there's also a psychology to overwhelm. And what I mean by that is that our thoughts can create overwhelm in our bodies as well. And so often these thoughts are subconscious. We're not even aware that we're thinking them. And so if you're wondering, what do you do? Here's what you do. The minute you feel that overwhelm, you pause. You ask yourself, what am I thinking that is creating this sensation in my body? And am I able to pivot? Am I able to reframe or think about something else? And if you're not able to, I want you to try this exercise and then ask yourself again how you can reframe. So what is the exercise? This is something that I learned from Shirzad Shamin. He wrote the book Positive Intelligence. It's fantastic. And I did one of his courses and learned so much. And in this exercise, what you do is you get hyper present for about two minutes, and you do it by bringing your hands together. So we're going to do it right now. And so if you can sit back, get comfortable, maybe put both legs on the ground, bring those hands together so that you can feel the heat from one hand to the other. Yep. Close those eyes, take in a nice grounding breath. And then you're going to separate the hands just a tiny little bit. And you're going to put your focus on the right fingers. And you're going to slowly bring them down the left front face of that left hand. So the front face of that left hand slowly bring them down, barely touching the fingers, just so lightly, so gently, and just be aware. And what do you notice? Maybe you notice a ring, maybe not. And then move to the the palm of the hand. Are there some areas that are a little more ticklish than others? Do you notice some hills, some valleys? You explore the palm. You take in some nice slow inhales and exhales. And then you bring those right fingers back up to the top to meet the top of the left fingers. And a nice grounding inhale and exhale again. And then we're going to do the exercise again with the opposite hand. So you bring those left fingers down till they get to the palm of.
The hand.
And then explore that palm. And if some other thoughts come in, that's okay. Just let them come in and let them go. No judgment. Then bring those fingers back to the top, allow your hands to come together in prayer. And ask yourself, how do you feel? Was that experience grounding for you? Do you feel lighter? And when it comes to decluttering, what new thoughts, what new ideas are coming your way? If before the overwhelm was because you felt like you didn't know where to start or that even starting would not ever make a difference, do you have new, more empowering thoughts that are telling you that it doesn't matter where you start, that are telling you that any little action you take counts? I mentioned Shirza Chamin a few moments ago, and he did some research where they put probes onto people's brains and they actually looked at where our thoughts are coming from? And thoughts that create overwhelm come from the brainstem and parts of the left brain where thoughts that are coming or thoughts that are empowering and encouraging and full of possibility actually come from parts of the right brain. And your prefrontal cortex and so what Shirazad learned was that all it takes is two minutes of hyper presence to move your thoughts from that primitive brain to that more intentional sage brain where the thoughts are always going to have your back and so try that exercise. If you don't want to do the hand exercise you don't have to do that. Try any exercise where you get hyper present and see how much lighter that helps you feel and notice your stress.
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