overwhelm - brilliantlegalmind.com

Cover image from post with lawyer being inundated with things and the title from the blog post "How to Handle Emotions of Overwhelm in Five Mindful Steps"

Overwhelm is one of the emotions that I dislike the most. As someone who struggles with anxiety, I am not talking about being overwhelmed with positive emotions, like love, joy, or gratitude. When those things happen, they are amazing.

More often, I experience the nasty kind of overwhelm. This is when I am confronted with a challenge that is so big, new, or strange that I feel totally unable to handle it. In times like these, I feel defeated, powerless, and usually ashamed.

When Does Overwhelm Arise?

I’m thinking of this phenomenon because I just experienced it when I bought my daughter a new “big girl” bed. Initially, I prided myself for my efficiency when I shipped a Smastad loft-style bed from IKEA. That feeling immediately transformed to regret when I saw a collection of 6 large, heavy boxes and at least 4 other smaller packages filling my garage.

For some backstory, I am historically awful at assembling items. My husband usually jumps in immediately to save me from myself but he’s a CPA dealing with his own variety of overwhelm during tax season. I considered hiring a handy person to help, but the number of boxes suggested that managing the handy person would be more work than doing the project myself.

I stood before the boxes with few good options and had to face the facts. I was overwhelmed.

Mindful Step 1: Don’t Fight the Overwhelm.

Since I am a mindfulness teacher and a lawyer trained to solve problems, I bet you are hoping that I had some magic trick up my sleeve. Nope. Not at all. Even so, life experience has taught me this: it doesn’t help to fight emotions like overwhelm.

You can’t make overwhelm pretty or nice or satisfying. You can’t gloss it with a silver lining or fill it’s cracks with gold. At least, you can’t do it on the front end. With overwhelm, the first best step you can take is to not fight it.

I stood in my garage, staring at the boxes. I let my mind race about how long it would take. I allowed my mind create horror stories about how exhausting and frustrating it would be. I raged at myself for an impulse purchase of this magnitude without considering the consequences.

In other words, I let the overwhelm be there. I didn’t fight it. I felt it. I let it have it’s moment and fully accepted the situation that I had created for myself.

Image of blog post author with the quote "You can't make overwhelm pretty or nice or satisfying. With overwhelm, the first best step you can take is to not fight it."

Mindful Step 2: Honor Your Emotions.

With most big emotions, mindfulness practice has taught me that time and space are the best salves. In this case, that means I left the gigantic boxes sitting in my garage for a week. To put it another way, I didn’t rush in to handle the situation. I just waited until I calmed down and I could stand to look at the boxes again.

Ultimately, the thing that pushed me to move forward was being annoyed with the boxes themselves. I was sick of climbing over them to get to the garage. I wanted my daughter to have the awesome new loft bed. I also started to feel curious about whether I could find a way to get this thing built without driving myself crazy.

By giving myself time and space, I let the overwhelm subside and made room for the feelings that motivated me to act. They helped me refocus on the goals I had originally, so I could get back on track.

Mindful Step 3: Make a Plan Tailored to Your Human Needs.

When my motivation was restored, I decided that there was no way to get started without first assessing the situation clearly. My first job was to unbox everything, locate the instructions, and gather all the pieces.

That was no small feat, so I gave myself time to rest before I began the organization phase. Since I had always struggled putting things together, I decided to take the remaining steps very slowly. I took time to study the instructions and even found some handy YouTube videos about assembling this very item.

I divided the project into three phases and made sure my daughter would still have a bed to sleep in even if gaps occurred. This helped me account for my own frustration and fatigue. It took the pressure off and accounted for the inevitable mistakes I would make in following the instructions.

Mindful Step 4: Execute the Plan Step by Step.

After creating your plan, the next phase is execution. This is when the old adage about eating an elephant comes to mind. How do you do that? Bit by bit. In this case, I subdivided my phases into even smaller microsteps.

I first organized and arranged all the hardware (pro tip: a muffin tin is perfect for this). I gathered all my tools. I lined all the pieces up exactly as illustrated in the instructions and then followed the instructions step by step. Any time where I made what felt like a judgment call, I noted it so I could retrace my steps if needed.

In other words, I did the opposite of what my millennial brain told me to do when I get a new product. I didn’t play around and figure it out. Instead, I moved in super slow motion as if I was an assembly robot. This kept me organized, allowed me to take breaks when needed, and kept my mood and mindset in check.

Image listing the five mindful steps for handling emotions of overwhelm as shared in the blog post

Mindful Step 5: Celebrate the Victory.

Recently, I finished phase 1 of my massive project. This means that I assembled the bookcase/wardrobe that serves as the foundation of the bed mostly on my own. Am I concerned that someone else could have done this faster? Not at all.

I celebrated the crap out this achievement. I showed it to my daughter. I reveled in the feeling of progress and compared it to my feelings of overwhelm just a few weeks before.

The point here, of course, is that celebration is a critical component to any big project. Sure, it’s only phase one. Yes, two arguably more challenging phases remain for me to complete. The difference, though, is that now I have a renewed sense of confidence. I have evidence that I can find a way to work my way through the rest of the steps to accomplish my goal.

Because a big project involves so much effort and patience, it is smart to offset it with a healthy amount of celebration at each milestone. You better believe that I am going to celebrate fully when this bed is finally assembled.

Conclusion: Overwhelm Is Hard but You Can Manage It Step by Step.

Whether it is caused by a major work project or an imposing box from IKEA that is gathering dust, overwhelm happens to us all. It is an emotion that can sap our motivation and cause us to want to run and hide. With mindfulness and self-compassion, though, we can work through overwhelm just like we go step by step through any big project. In this post, I offered you a brief instruction manual with 5 steps to help you navigate if overwhelm happens to you.

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Want to learn more about mindfulness and compassion? Check out my new book, How to Be a Badass Lawyer, for a simple guide to creating a meditation practice of your own in 30 days. And to share mindfulness with your little one, check out my new children’s book, Mommy Needs a Minute.

Founder’s Note: This is the blog’s 150th post and somehow I managed to publish it on World Mindfulness Day and have a new meditation to share too. Sometimes little ideas you have grow and sometimes things work out. Thanks to all of the blog’s readers, followers, contributors, and friends.

If you try meditation practice long enough, you are bound to encounter the practice of “noting.” With this practice, you pick a focal point (most commonly the breath though any focal point would do). Then when a distraction arises, you simply note it and and return to the focal point.

In many cases, the instruction to note generally means to briefly identify the distraction and let it go. For example, you might be instructed to categorize the experience as either a thought, emotion, sensation, sound, or mental scene. Though many of us may be familiar with this practice, we may not always know why it’s a good one to do. That’s what this blog post will address.

What Is Noting Practice?

Noting is a mindfulness practice. Like breath practice, noting will help you cultivate awareness and focus. It can also help you cultivate self-compassion as you manage the inevitable frustration that may arise with meditation. Noting, however, offers something more too.

With noting, the act of categorizing mental experiences may help you recognize mental experiences for what they are. For example, anyone who has meditated even once knows that it is not always easy to differentiate awareness of your breathing from thinking about your breathing.

Similarly, it can be hard to realize that you are experiencing a memory or fantasy about the future when you are in it. Once you can get outside of the mental images or thoughts, it can be easy to acknowledge their unreality or challenge their logic. But, when you are absorbed by the thought or scene or sensation or emotion, your ability to manage the situation is much harder.

Noting Practice Can Help You Manage Thoughts.

Noting practices the skill of recognizing when you are having an inner experience and zooming out from it. By looking for and categorizing inner experiences, you can note them without getting sucked into the details. In other words, noting helps you practice seeing a trap for your attention and stepping around it.

In this way, noting is different from self-analysis. It is not seeing a thought and applying more thought to ask why the thought pattern occurs. Instead, the practice is simply note it as a “thought” and then let it go. You avoid the juicy details of the story underlying the thought and you focus instead on the reality that the story is one totally of your mind’s own making.

This is not to say that all of your thoughts are bad or wrong. Thinking and thoughts aren’t inherently bad. The problem that many of us encounter, however, is that we aren’t usually aware when we are thinking. As such, we often assume that our thoughts are correct and helpful. When we look at thoughts critically, though, we are bound to see that some are based on incomplete information, affected by our emotions, or infused with biases.

Any lawyer reading this probably knows why this is an essential skill. We think so much in our jobs that it can be a challenge to stop thinking. If, like me, you have ever struggled with overthinking, learning to just see that you are thinking can be a benefit in and of itself.

Noting Practice Can Help Manage Overwhelm.

The other thing that is helpful about noting practice is that it can separate aspects of our inner experience. Life does not send us experiences in neatly labeled and clearly delineated boxes. To the contrary, we can be inundated with thoughts, emotions, and sensory information all at once.

The cool thing about attention, though, is that it can really only focus on one thing at a time. So, even if you are inundated with a slew of inner experiences at once, your mind can focus on just one. In daily life, this may be hard to see because things may happen so rapidly. With meditation, though, we can slow things down and take experiences one by one.

Over time, this can help us build inner resources for dealing with difficult situations. We may notice a challenging sensation caused by emotion and then see that our thoughts are starting to spiral. We can internally “note” the situation and choose to use an inner resource to maintain steadiness.

Conclusion

Am I saying that noting practice should become a mainstay of your practice? Probably not, but it is one to try because noting is a good skill to keep sharp. I recommend trying the practice out a few times to learn and implement the strategy. Once the skill of noting is developed, you can do it occasionally to keep the skill sharp.

Even if you don’t practice noting regularly, you can use the strategy of noting in your life to catch yourself in rumination or bring nonjudgmental awareness to physical sensations. This is where the benefits of noting practice can really pay off.

If you want to give noting practice a try, check out our new Noting Practice Guided Meditation here: